Great Britain in Egypt

Great Britain in Egypt is a historical and political study by Herbert Adams Gibbons, the American journalist and historian who lived from 1880 to 1934. Gibbons produced a substantial body of writing on European and Middle Eastern political and historical subjects during the first decades of the twentieth century, much of it informed by his extensive personal travel and residence in the regions he wrote about.

The book examines the history of British involvement in Egypt from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Britain had taken effective control of Egypt in 1882 through the military intervention that followed the Urabi revolt against the Egyptian government of the period, and had maintained a complicated form of indirect rule across the subsequent decades that combined nominal Egyptian sovereignty with substantial British military, financial, and administrative control. The arrangement was one of the most studied and most controversial of late nineteenth and early twentieth century imperial relationships, with substantial debate in Britain and in Egypt about its proper nature and its eventual disposition.

Gibbons approaches the subject as a serious journalist and historian rather than as a partisan of any particular position. The book covers the major events of the British period in Egypt including the original intervention, the establishment of the administrative system under Lord Cromer, the development of Egyptian nationalist opposition, the various crises and reform efforts across the decades, and the situation as it stood at the time of his writing. The treatment is reasonably balanced for a Western writer of the period, with Gibbons acknowledging both the practical achievements of the British administration and the legitimate grievances of the Egyptian nationalist movement that was developing in opposition to it.

Gibbons had lived in the eastern Mediterranean region for substantial periods and brought to his writing the kind of personal knowledge of the places and the people he was discussing that gave his work more authority than the more purely library based political writing of the period. He was particularly interested in the broader question of how Western powers should relate to the various non Western societies that the late nineteenth century imperial expansion had brought under their control, and his various books on subjects like the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the European colonial enterprises generally took up this question from different angles.

The book runs about three hundred pages and reads well as a sustained piece of early twentieth century American political and historical writing on Middle Eastern subjects. It pairs naturally with Gibbons’s other works on the region.