Reading time: 8 minutes

Despite British troops not leaving Egypt until the 1950s, the first Egyptian Revolution actually happened in 1919. Dr John Slight digs into the tensions that united the Egyptian people after the First World War…

By John Slight, The Open University

In 2011, millions tuned in to watch extraordinary scenes of enormous demonstrations in the centre of Cairo against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, who was forced to relinquish power. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 was one of the largest components of the wider ‘Arab Spring’, which toppled regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. Modern Egypt is no stranger to revolutions. In 1952, a secret group in the Egyptian Army called the Free Officers launched a takeover of power that heralded the end of royal rule in Egypt, with the banishment into exile of King Farouk, and hastened the departure of British troops from the country after a ‘temporary’ occupation that began in 1882. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the army officer who emerged as President of Egypt and made the country a global symbol of defiance to Western imperialism and a leading power in the Middle East. Yet the first revolution in Egypt in the twentieth century occurred in 1919, when the stresses of the First World War on Egyptian society combined with widespread local hatred of British imperialism in an event that united the Egyptian people.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, Egypt had been under British occupation since 1882. Britain had occupied the country mainly in order to secure the Suez Canal (opened in 1869) a vital strategic artery that was part of the key route between Britain and its vast empire in the East. The occupation was supposed to be temporary, although it lasted until the early 1950s. Egypt formally remained a part of the Ottoman Empire. However, when the Ottomans joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in November 1914, the British felt it necessary to change the status of their occupation. On December 18, 1914, Britain declared Egypt a protectorate of the British empire, deposed the pro-Ottoman Khedive Abbas Hilmi, and replaced him with a relative.

Egyptian nationalists demonstrating in Cairo, March 1919

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The text of this article is republished from The Open University and is is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.