Violence in Defence of Empire: The British Armyand the 1919 Egyptian Revolution

Abstract

Violence in Defence of Empire: The British Army and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution The Egyptian revolution of spring 1919 posed a serious challenge to British imperial rule in the wake of the First World War, and has traditionally been examined solely through political, diplomatic and economic lenses. Within these approaches the counter-revolutionary response of the British colonial state, principally involving the use of military force, has been ignored. The British military campaign to suppress the 1919 Egyptian revolution was one of the most significant and violent operations launched to contain anti-colonial nationalist unrest during the 1919–1922 «crisis of empire» period. This article addresses the general development of the campaign to end the revolutionary upheaval and focuses in on two case studies to examine how British army units, often isolated from assistance, dealt with unrest. The violent nature of the campaign to suppress the revolution highlights the flexible and context specific nature of British imperial policing as it developed after 1918, and challenges assumptions on the «minimum necessary force» approach that has come to characterise Britain's small colonial wars of the twentieth century.

Visualizing the Egyptian 1919 Revolution: Unveiling Some Hidden Aspects of the British Policy in Egypt through Photo Analysis

“…Presumably, it was a way of objection in the hope to draw attention to their fair cause. However, Bulfin, the British military leader, believed that these attacks were systematic ones meant to isolate the capital and cut off the food supplies to cause artificial scarcity, and invite food riots as the population faced hunger (Kitchen 2015). This was likely a far-fetched possibility that did not cross the minds of the revolutionaries who were overridden with bottled anger.…”

Sexual assault and fatal violence against women during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921: Kate Maher’s murder in context

“…Military cognisance of such crimes is explained partly by the need to control the conduct of the military in contact with the general civilian population, but also because of issues arising with soldiers’ families living in military quarters, both in the UK and overseas. We might note that allegations of rape against British troops reacting to nationalist disturbances in an Egyptian village in 1919 caused greater parliamentary outrage than did the action of a commander who unilaterally ordered the execution of five (male) village elders without any due process, forewarning or proper burial ( Kitchen 2015, 262 ). Sexual assault was scarcely too delicate a subject for publicity and propaganda by the contending forces in Ireland: the Irish and international public were already well accustomed to the ‘gendered representation’ of atrocities arising from German treatment of Belgian civilians in the early months of the First World War during what was proclaimed ‘the rape of Belgium’ ( Gullace 1997, 716 ; Kramer 2007 ).…”