Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism: 1840–1927

The archive comprises an assembly of materials, otherwise scattered across a variety of record classes and files, whose documents capture and reflect an era spanning from the first appearance of a nationalist sensibility to its gradual entrenchment in public life through protests, journalistic agitprop, lobbying activities, sporadic violence, and then – almost as a denouement – through an ordered political process, in the context and perspective of Britain’s evolving policy regarding Egypt. The nature and length of the British presence in Egypt, in terms of the military occupation and all that entails and implies, inevitably reflects the ebb and flow of nationalist thinking and activities in its records of events during the forty years covered herein.

Thus, Britain’s actions towards Egypt during the period in question were never magnanimous, but pragmatic with regards to her policies and interests, including the safeguarding of the Suez Canal and thereby the route to India. Inevitably, both sincere and ardent nationalist beliefs and antiBritish sentiment and agitation had to be evaluated by British officials and politicians of the time in the specific context of these broader policy considerations, including regional and international relations, not on their intrinsic merit as a socio-political progression.

The documents included in the archive almost all derive from government records held in The National Archives UK, and range in scope from records of casual conversations, formal meetings, correspondence with individuals and groups, monitoring of the nationalist press, internal British evaluations and debates on objectives and status of the leaders and individual campaigners, and forceful responses to insurgencies involving nationalist activists. This collection focuses on developments connected to figures prominent in nationalist activities and pays special attention to interactions between them and British authorities, typically at flashpoints. As such, some years in which no specific events occurred may be omitted, while documents relating to particularly eventful years figure more prominently in the record. Each document in this collection is richly tagged, full-text searchable, and dynamically discoverable. Users can browse by people, places, and topics (as identified by the collection’s editors), as well as document types (e.g., despatch, map, telegram, letter, etc.). Each object is also georeferenced in a map view, both by geographic origin of the document and by locations associated with items in the collection.

Al-Ahram

Al-Ahram has long featured contributions from many of the Arab world’s most important literary figures and intellectuals: Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said, Yusuf Idris, Taha Hussein, Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, and Azmi Bishara among them, as well as nationalist leaders such as Mustafa Kamil and Saad Zaghlul. Influential forward-leaning contemporary writers such as Sabah Hamamou are also affiliated with the paper.

The Archive contains all obtainable published issues from 1876 on, with an additional year’s worth of content added on an annual basis. It offers scholars the most comprehensive collection available for this title, and features full page-level digitization, complete original graphics, and searchable text.