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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2022
This article addresses the Anglo-Egyptian dispute over Sudan following the Ottoman defeat in World War One and Cairo’s nominal independence in 1922. Drawing from Foreign Office documents, League of Nations archives, Egyptian parliamentary records and contemporary academic jurisprudence, it traces the failed Egyptian attempt to activate the settlement mechanisms of the Covenant after the assassination of the British governor of Sudan. In parallel, the article investigates the British preparations to face international arbitration, including the hypothetical request for a League mandate over Sudan. Through Cairo’s and London’s perceptions, we can grasp the global reach of the Geneva organization beyond its limited membership and agency. Although the League undertook no measures, the possibility of its intervention triggered competing legal arguments, as well as rival discourses of Egyptian and Sudanese self-determination. Thus, this essay sheds light on a recolonization process pre-dating World War Two. The clash of British and Egyptian imperial projects in the Nile Valley warns historians against forcing a teleology of the end of empire on the interwar roots of decolonization.
The editors of the Journal of Global History, the anonymous reviewers, and the other authors of this special issue prompted dramatic improvements of the early drafts of the present article with their critical remarks. Federico Romero, Simon Jackson, Romain Bonnet, and James White also read the manuscript, and suggested revisions of both language and content. I wish to thank them all. I am equally indebted to Will Hanley for directing me to the digitalized records of the Egyptian parliament, and to Nader Alfakehal for translating them. Finally, I acknowledge the financial and logistical support by the German Historical Institute in Rome and by the American University of Rome, above all in the persons of Martin Baumeister and Irene Caratelli, respectively.
1 Jayne Gifford, ‘Extracting the Best Deal for Britain: The Assassination of Sir Lee Stack in November 1924 and the Revision of Britain’s Nile Valley Policy’, Canadian Journal of History 48, no.1 (2013): 87–114.
2 Hasan Abdin, Early Sudanese Nationalism, 1919–1925 (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, 1985); Heather J. Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003); Eve Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 266–312; James Whidden, Egypt: British Colony, Imperial Capital (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
3 Elena Vezzadini, ‘Transnationalism from Below after the First World War: The Case of the 1924 Revolution in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, in The First World War from Tripoli to Addis Ababa (1911–1924), eds. S. Bekele et al. (Addis Ababa: Centre français des études éthiopiennes, 2018), https://books.openedition.org/cfee/1149, retrieved on 6 September 2021).
4 Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 135–40; Richard Drayton and David Motadel, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’, Journal of Global History 13, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.
5 Daniel Hedinger and Nadin Heé, ‘Transimperial History: Connectivity, Cooperation and Competition’, Journal of Modern European History 16, no. 4 (2018): 429–52.
6 Stephen Legg, ‘Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 2 (2009): 234–53, and ‘Imperial Internationalism: The Round Table Conference and the Making of India in London, 1930–1932’, Humanity 11, no. 1 (2020), 32–53.
7 A similar analytical perspective can be found in Clifford Rosenberg, ‘The International Politics of Vaccine Testing in Interwar Algiers’, American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 671–97.
8 W. M. Roger Louis and Donald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22, no. 3 (1994): 462–511.
9 Madābit Majlis al-Nuwwāb and al-Shuyūkh [Parliamentary Records in Monarchical Egypt], 1924–1952 at the Institute of Oriental Culture of the University of Tokyo, transcripts of the Chamber of Deputies (from now on, PRME/Dep), http://ricasdb2.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/egypt/doc/etc/Main%20Files/3.%20Daily%20Sessions%20(database)/TheChamberOfDeputies.html, retrieved on 6 September 2021.
10 The National Archives of the United Kingdom, Records Created or Inherited by the Foreign Office, Political Departments: General Correspondence from 1906–1966 (FO 371). (Hereafter, TNA, FO 371).
11 Archives of the League of Nations, Geneva, Fonds du Secretariat, Section politique. (From now on, LNA, Secretariat).
12 Will Haley, ‘International Lawyers without Public International Law: The Case of Late Ottoman Egypt’, Journal of the History of International Law 18 (2016): 98–119. By private international law, we mean international law questions concerning private individuals and organizations (for example, nationality issues or the legal status of foreigners), while official state actors and international institutions are the subjects of public international law. The traditional Western understanding of international law coincides almost exclusively with the latter.
13 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Introduction’ in International Law and Empire: Historical Explorations, eds. Id., Walter Reich, and Manuel Jiménez Fonseca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–18.
14 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), footnote 6 on 99–100.
15 Turan Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
16 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–95.
17 Rose Parfitt, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Reistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
18 Lauren Benton, ‘From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi-Sovereignty, 1870–1900’, Law and History Review 26, no. 3 (2008): 595–619.
19 Umut Özsu, ‘Ottoman Empire’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, eds. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 429–48; Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
20 Oliver Diggelmann, ‘The Periodization of the History of International Law’, in Fassbender and Peters, 997–1011.
21 On the British imprinting see, besides Pedersen’s work, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); for a Habsburg genealogy of the League’s minorities regime, Natasha Wheatley, ‘Making Nations into Legal Persons between Imperial and International Law: Scenes from a Central European History of Group Rights’, Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 28, no. 481 (2018): 481–94; for an Ottoman genealogy of the mandates system, Aimee M. Genell, ‘Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882–1923’, (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013).
22 Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League of Nations: A Retreat from International Law?’, Journal of Global History 7, no. 2 (2012): 210–32.
23 Simon Jackson, ‘Diaspora Politics and Developmental Empire: The Syro-Lebanese at the League of Nations’, Arab Studies Journal 21, no. 1 (2013): 166–90; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Natasha Wheatley, ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations’, Past and Present 227, no. 1 (2015): 205–48.
24 Nadine Méouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds., The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives/Les mandats français et anglais dans une perspective comparative (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015).
25 Sally Marks, The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World, 1919–1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), 81–99, 317–73; Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 349–601, 707–99, and The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 100–80.
26 Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 349–86.
27 George W. Baer, ‘Leticia and Ethiopia Before the League’, in The League of Nations in Retrospect (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 285–87; Yannick Wehrli, ‘La multiplicité des intervenants dans la résolution pacifique du conflit du Chaco (1932–1935): Un obstacle à la paix?’, in Préventions, gestion et sorties des conflits, eds. Vincent Chetail et al. (Genève: IEUG, 2006), 181–200; Fabián Herrera Leó, ‘Mexico and Its “Defense” of Ethiopia at the League of Nations’, in Beyond Geopolitics: New Histories of Latin America and the League of Nations, eds. Alan McPherson and Yannick Wehrli (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 49–62; Yannick Wehrli, ‘La Comisión administrativa de la Sociedad de las Naciones en Leticia: Vanguardia involuntaria de la colonización colombiana’, in Expulsados, desterrados, desplazados: Migraciones forzadas en América Latina y en África, ed. Martin Lienhard (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2011), 183–93.
28 Parfitt, 223–372 (emphasis in the original).
29 Pablo La Porte, ‘“Rien à ajouter”: The League of Nations and the Rif War (1921–1926)’, European History Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2011): 66–87.
30 Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Arthur Asseraf, ‘Making Their Own Internationalism: Algerian Media and a Few Others the League of Nations Ignored, 1919–1943’, in International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Exorbitant Expectations, eds. Jonas Brendebach, Martin Herzer, and Heidi Tworek (London: Routledge, 2018), 117–37.
31 Pierre Crabitès, ‘Egypt, Sudan, the Nile’, Foreign Affairs 3, no. 2 (1924): 320–30.
32 For an assessment of the strategic relevance of the region from a British perspective, see the report of the Milner mission, 22 December 1920, TNA, FO 371, box 4982, document no. 15962.
33 Troutt Powell, 26–63.
34 On the administrative organization of Egyptian Sudan, see Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 172.
35 Juan R. I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lidwein Kapteijns, ‘Mahdist Faith and the Legitimation of Popular Revolt in Western Sudan’, Journal of the International African Institute 55, no. 4 (1985): 390–9.
36 John Pollock, Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman (London: Constable, 1998); Edward M. Spiers, ed., Sudan: The Conquest Reappraised (London: Cass, 1998).
37 For example, Georges Blanchard, ‘Le Problème de la souveraineté au Soudan nilotique’, Revue générale de droit international public 10 (1903): 169–201 admitted both options; D. Gwyther Moore, ‘Notes on the Legislation of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 6, no. 1 (1924): 131–4 argued for the second.
38 Roland Gaignerot, La question d'Égypte: Le bassin du Nil en droit international (Albie: Nouguiès, 1901), 259–82.
39 Genell, 92–143.
40 Jordan Sand, ‘Subaltern Imperialists: The New Historiography of the Japanese Empire’, Past and Present 251, no. 1 (2014): 273–88; Troutt Powell, 1–25.
41 Saliha Belmessous, ‘The Paradox of an Empire by Treaty’, in Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600–1900, ed. Id. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–18.
42 M. W. Daly, ‘The British Occupation, 1882–1922’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt, volume 2, ed. Id., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239–251; Ellis Goldberg, ‘Peasants in Revolt – Egypt 1919’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 2 (1992): 261–80; Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 134–66; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the Internaitonal Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63–76 and 141–58.
43 Declaration to the sultan, 16 February 1922, TNA, FO 371/7731/1816.
44 Treaty of Lausanne, 24 July 1923, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/lausanne-peace-treaty.en.mfa. Previous peace treaties had forced the Central Powers to recognize the British protectorate in Egypt (see, for example, article 147 of the Versailles Treaty, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/versailles_menu.asp, retrieved on 6 September 2021).
45 Memorandum by Headlam-Morley on the Egyptian claims, 17 January 1923, TNA, FO 371/8959/789.
46 Covenant of the League of Nations, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, retrieved on 6 September 2021.
47 Note by William Malkin on the Sudanese question, 17 September 1924, TNA, FO 371/10053/8028.
48 Memorandum by Colonel Schuster, 23 September 1924, TNA, FO 371/10053/8186.
49 See, for example, the parliamentary question of Joseph Kenworthy in the House of Commons of 7 July 1924, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1924/jul/07/sudan, retrieved on 6 September 2021.
50 Speech by Thomas Johnston in the House of Commons, 10 July 1924, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1924/jul/10/foreign-office#S5CV0175P0_19240710_HOC_344, retrieved on 6 September 2021.
51 Schuster memorandum of 23 September 1924.
52 Manela.
53 A good example of this is the definition of the relative borders of British Mandate Iraq, French Mandate Syria and the Turkish Republic. See Sarah Shields, ‘Mosul, the Ottoman Legacy and the League of Nations’, Internaitonal Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3, no. 2 (2009): 217–230.
54 Troutt Powell, 168–216; Vezzadini.
55 On the British infrastructure for collecting and monitoring Sudanese opinion, see Mark Fathi Massoud, Sudan’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51–67.
56 Memorandum by the Sudan government, 1 August 1924, TNA, FO 371/10050/6600.
57 Petition by sheikhs and notables from the White Nile, Blue Nile, Berber, Kassala and Dongola Provinces, 17 January 1922, TNA, FO 371/10049/5239.
58 Ibidem, petition by various tribal leaders of the Red Sea provinces, July 1921.
59 Ibidem, petition by sheikhs and notables of Kamlin and the Blue Nile Province, 15 June 1922.
60 Ibidem, Stack memorandum of 25 May 1924.
61 Sudan government memorandum of 1 August 1924.
62 See the reply of Ramsay MacDonald to Kenworthy’s question of 7 July 1924.
63 Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, first legislature [hay’a], yearly session [dawr] no. 1, volume 1 (from now on, ECD, 1/1/1), daily session [jalsa] no. 58, 28 June 1924, pp. 713–32, PRME/Dep.
64 Jacob M. Lindau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt (London and New York: Routledge, 1953), 59–70.
65 ECD, 1/1/1/54, 23 June 1924, 659–68, PRME/Dep.
66 ECD, 1/1/1/55, 24 June 1924, 669–78, and 1/1/1/56, 25 June 1924, 679–91, PRME/Dep.
67 See the interventions of Abdul Latif al-Soufani, Mahmud Allam Afandi, and Ahmed Ramzi in ECD, 1/1/1/55.
68 Yoav Di-Capua, ‘“Jabarti of the 20th Century”: The National Epic of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i and Other Egyptian Histories’, Internaitonal Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 3 (2004): 429–50.
69 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankovski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–54.
70 Hussein Omar, ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Cage’, in Islam after Liberalism, eds. Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (London: Hurst, 2017), 17–45.
71 Di-Capua.
72 ECD, 1/1/1/54.
73 ECD, 1/1/1/55.
74 Crabitès. The Sennar Dam was completed in 1925.
75 ‘Egypt and Lancashire’, The Near East, 12 June 1924.
76 Empire Cotton Growing Corporation, ‘Note on the Present Situation in the Sudan for Submission to the Prime Minister’, 19 June 1924, TNA FO 371/10049/5307.
77 Drummond to Tufton, 9 November 1922; Tufton to Drummond, 21 November 1922, LNA, Secretariat, box 619, dossier 39825.
78 Ibidem, van Hamel to Drummond, 27 November 1922.
79 Natasha Wheatley, ‘Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law: On New Ways of not Being a State’, Law and History Review 35, no. 3 (2017): 753–87.
80 Matthew Craven and Rose Parfitt, ‘Statehood, Self-Determination and Recognition’, in International Law, ed. Malcolm D. Evans (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 177–226.
81 Robert Ruzé, ‘La situation international de l’Égypte, 1914–1922’, Revue de droit international et de legislation comparée 49, no. 3 (1922): 385–423 [part 1], and 50, no. 4 (1923): 66–95 [part 2].
82 Mazloum to the Secretariat-General of the League of Nations, 25 November 1924, LNA, Secretariat, 619/40641.
83 Ibidem, comments by Paul Mantoux on the Mazloum telegram, 26 November 1924.
84 Ibidem, Drummond to Mazloum, 27 November 1924; Drummond to Hymans, 27 November 1924.
85 Ibidem. For example, letter by Emmy Freundlich and A. Honora Enfield of the International Cooperative Women’s Guild, 11 December 1924.
86 Ibidem, Abdel Fettah Hebeisha to Drummond, 26 November 1924.
87 Ibidem, Fanous to Drummond, 10 December 1924 (capitalizations in the original).
88 Ibidem, Petition by the students of four Syrian graduate schools to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 30 December 1924; petition by six ulemas, six lawyers, six journalists and four physicians from Syria to the Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 30 December 1924.
89 Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, 11–97; Ignacio de la Rasilla, ‘A Very Short History of International Law Journals (1869–2018)’, European Journal of International Law 29, no. 1 (2018): 137–68.
90 De Visscher to Drummond, 22 February 1925; Drummond to de Visscher, 23 February 1925, LNA, Secretariat, 619/40641.
91 Charles E. de Visscher, ‘Le conflit Anglo-Égyptien et la Societé des Nations’, Revue de droit international et de legislation comparée 51, no. 5 (1924): 564–89. Emphasis in the original.
92 John Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894), 178.
93 Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Conclusion: Vocabularies of Sovereignty – Powers of a Paradox’, in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, eds. Quentin Skinner and Hent Kalmo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 222–42.
94 ‘Memorandum on the Anglo-Egyptian Conflict’ attached to Fanous’s letter of 10 December 1924, LNA, Secretariat, 619/40641.
95 For a survey of Sanhuri’s jurisprudence and legal thought, see the classical Enid Hill, ‘Al-Sanhuri and Islamic Law: The Place and Significance of Islamic Law in the Life and Work of ‘Abd al-Razzaq Ahmad al-Sanhuri, Egyptian Jurist and Scholar, 1895-1971’, Arab Law Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1988): 33–64 [part 1], and 3, no. 2 (1988): 182–218 [part 2].
96 ‘Abd al-Razzaq Ahmad al-Sanhuri, Le Califat: Son evolution vers une Société des Nations Orientale (Paris: Geithner, 1926), 455–64.
97 For a general background on the caliphate concept and traditions, Bawar Bammarny, ‘The Caliphate State in Theory and Practice’, Arab Law Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2017): 163–86. For a contextualization of Sanhuri’s project within the caliphate debates of the interwar years, Mona Hassan, Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Trans-Regional History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 184–217.
98 Sanhuri, 586–96.
99 Ibidem, 600–7.
100 Ibidem, 596–600.
101 Amr Shalakany, ‘Between Identity and Redistribution: Sanhuri, Genealogy and the Will to Islamise’, Islamic Law and Society 8, no. 2 (2001): 201–44.
102 Sanhuri, 337–39.
103 Pärtel Piirimäe, ‘The Westphalian Myth and the Idea of External Sovereignty’, in Kalmo and Skinner, 64–80.
104 Anthony Carty, ‘Doctrine versus State Practice’, in Fassbender and Peters, 972–96.
105 Parfitt, 351–368.
106 Arnulf Becker Lorca, ‘Sovereignty beyond the West: The End of Classical International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011): 7–73; Umut Özsu, ‘Organizing Internationally: Georges Abi-Saab, the Congo Crisis, and the Decolonization of the United Nations’, European Journal of International Law 31, no. 2 (2020): 601–19.
107 Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1091–117.
108 Sanhuri, 461–4.
109 Sarah Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alexander Balistreri, ‘A Provisional Republic in the Southwest Caucasus: Discourses of Self-Determination on the Ottoman-Caucasian Frontier, 1918–1919’, in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, eds. Ali Sipahi, Dzovinar Derderian, and Yasar Tolga Cora (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 62–90; Cait Storr, ‘“Imperium in Imperio”: Sub-imperialism and the Formation of Australia as a Subject of International Law’, Melbourne Journal of International Law 19, no. 1 (2018): 335–68.
110 Memorandum by Cecil Hurst on the international relations of Sudan, 22 January 1925, TNA, FO 371/10883/189.
111 Hervé Bleuchot, ‘Le Soudan anglo-égyptien’, in Le Soudan contemporain: De l’invasion turco-égyptienne à la rébellion africaine (1821–1989), ed. Marc Lavergne (Paris: Karthala, 1989), 171–224; Anne-Claire de Gayffier-Bonneville, ‘La rivalité anglo-égyptienne au Soudan: Les enjeux de la décolonisation’, Relations internationales 133, no. 1 (2008): 71–89.
112 Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonisation, Economic Development, and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 34–38.
113 Massoud, 51–81.
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