Kingdom of Egypt

Overview

The Kingdom of Egypt (Arabic: al-Mamlaka al-Miṣriyya) was the Egyptian state under the Muhammad Ali dynasty from Britain's recognition of independence on 28 February 1922 until the monarchy's abolition on 18 June 1953. Centered on Cairo and nominally sovereign over the Sudan (the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, in practice British-run), the kingdom proper covered 994,000 km², with a population rising from about 14 million (1927) to 19 million (1947).

History

The kingdom emerged from the upheavals following World War I, when the British protectorate Sultanate of Egypt (1914) faced Saad Zaghlul's Wafd party and the nationwide 1919 Revolution. After the Milner Mission failed to settle terms, High Commissioner Allenby pushed London to issue a unilateral declaration of independence in February 1922, reserving to Britain control of the Suez Canal Zone, Sudan, defense, communications, and foreign minorities. Sultan Fuad restyled himself King Fuad I of "Egypt and Sudan" (15 March 1922), and a liberal constitution followed in April 1923, creating a parliamentary monarchy.

Politics was a three-way struggle among the palace, the popular nationalist Wafd, and the British. Zaghlul's 1924 premiership collapsed after the Cairo assassination of Sudan's governor-general Sir Lee Stack; new forces—the Muslim Brotherhood (founded 1928) and communists—emerged. Fuad died in 1936, succeeded by his 16-year-old son Farouk, whose accession coincided with the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which confined British troops to the Canal Zone. The era, remembered as Egypt's "liberal experiment," saw a cosmopolitan, cotton-financed society with large Greek, Jewish, Italian, and Levantine (Mutamassirun) communities, a flourishing press, cinema, and cultural renaissance in Cairo and Alexandria.

Decline and legacy

In World War II Egypt was nominally neutral but served as Britain's main Middle East base; battles from Sidi Barrani to El Alamein were fought on its soil, and in February 1942 British tanks surrounded Abdeen Palace to force Farouk to appoint a Wafd government—a humiliation that destroyed the monarchy's legitimacy. Postwar discontent, the disastrous 1948 Palestine war, and the Suez emergency (the 1951 abrogation of the 1936 treaty, guerrilla attacks, the Ismailia clash, and Cairo's "Black Saturday" fire of 26 January 1952) set the stage for the Free Officers' coup of 23 July 1952. Farouk abdicated for the infant Fuad II, and in June 1953 Naguib and Nasser proclaimed the republic. The kingdom's fall ended 148 years of Muhammad Ali dynasty rule and opened the Nasserist era that reshaped Egypt and the Arab world.