Guerrilla History - The Egyptian Revolution & Nasser's Era w/ Ahmad Shokr (AR&D Ep. 7)

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

With this episode of Guerrilla History, we roll into our next case study in our series African Revolutions and Decolonization.  Here, we turn our focus to Egypt, and particularly the 23 July Revolution in 1952 and the rise of Nasser.  However, to tell this story, we turn back to the pre-colonial era, discuss the British colonial period, and the post-independence monarchy before getting to the Free Officers Movement.  A LOT of history covered here, and a really fascinating conversation with the terrific Prof. Ahmad Shokr!  We're sure you'll learn a lot here, and be sure to stay tuned for the next episode of our AR&D series, which is a deep examination of Nasserism both domestically and regionally!   Also subscribe to our Substack (free!) to keep up to date with what we are doing.  With so many episodes coming in this series (and beyond), you won't want to miss anything, so get the updates straight to your inbox.  guerrillahistory.substack.com   Ahmad Shokr is a professor at Swarthmore College, and is a historian of the modern Middle East who researches (among other things) the history of capitalism, empire, and decolonization.  He is author of the soon-to-be-released  Harvests of Liberation: Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt (out in May).  Follow him on twitter to keep up with his work @ahmadshokr Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Dinn-Bin-Bin-Bin-Bu? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history. History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who, of course, is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henan. It's great to be with you. Yeah, nice to see you as well. Really looking forward to the conversation that we have planned. And it's a really fascinating conversation coming up. It was a lot of fun doing the research to prepare for this episode. And we have a terrific guest. But before I introduce the guest, I would like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that we're doing by going and following us on social media. We're on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod. Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. And we're also on Substack. You can sign up to our free newsletter to keep up to date with some of the things we're doing by going to GorillaHistory.

Dot substack.com. And I remember, Gorilla is spelled with two R's. Now, one last thing before I introduce the guest, and that is to say that this is a case study in our ongoing African revolutions and decolonization series. So if you have not been tuning in to the previous installments of African revolutions and decolonization, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to those, if not before this episode, then after. Because, again, we're taking a very wide swath of history and a wide swath geographically and many different movements that took place across the continent.

And so you'll want to not miss anything. Today we're going to be taking a case study of the Egyptian Revolution. and we have our guest, Professor Ahmed Shokh, on today to talk with us. Professor, it's nice to have you on the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Thank you, Henry. Absolutely.

So the professor is a professor of history at Swarthmore College and is author of the upcoming book, Harvests of Liberation, Cotton, Capitalism, and the End of Empire in Egypt. Now, as I said, this is a case study. And so we will be talking about the Egyptian revolution, but like all of our case study discussions, it makes much more sense to go far before the revolution itself took place to understand that pre-revolutionary history and understand the material conditions in those different changing phases of history in the colonial period as well. So, Professor, I know that you want to periodize this early modern Egyptian history into three phases. Can you talk a little bit about what those three phases are and then take us a little bit into that first phase, discuss what the movements were at the time, what the material conditions were like at the time. And I'm sure that we'll have things to bring up as we get through that discussion. Sure, absolutely.

So if we want to understand the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, I think there's three periods of time that come before it that we want to have some sense of. So the first is in the early to late 19th century, when Egypt is effectively ruled by a man named Mehmet Ali and his descendants who turn Egypt into a kind of autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. It's in this period that they embark on a project of state reform and centralization, and it's also in this period that Egypt becomes gradually more and more incorporated into the world capitalist economy. And then the second period is the period of the British occupation that lasts from the early 1880s well into the 20th century. But for our purposes, the period from 1882 until the end of the First World War is really the period that we want to focus on when the British begin to have a physical presence in Egypt and continue the process of turning Egypt into kind of cotton plantation. and set in motion a whole set of processes that eventually give rise to a nationalist movement that opposes a British rule in Egypt by the end of the 19th century. And then the third period we want to think about is the period from 1919 until the free officer's revolt in 1952. And that's a period when abutting Egyptian nationalist movement begins to gradually take control of the state in bits and pieces.

That's a very plumpy, gradual process. But this is the period in which the basic structures of post-colonial life and politics begin to be created in Egypt. So if we go to that first phase of Mehmet Ali's rule and the rule of his descendants, you know, the 19th century was the peak of Western colonial expansion around the world. And in response, many states in Asia began to take projects of defensive modernization, right? in the face of growing Western power and Western encroachment. This was happening in the Middle East, in the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajad Empire that ruled over modern-day Iran. This was happening in China, in Japan. And these mid-19th century reformist projects, you know, they had a variety of intended and unintended consequences.

But what they had in common was their attempt to centralize state power and to strengthen these states in the face of Western expansion. Now, a man named Mehmet Ali embarked on the first attempt of this kind of defense of modernization in the Middle East. At the time, Egypt was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Mahmette Ali was an ethnic Albanian soldier, sent on an Ottoman military expedition after the Napoleonic invasion of 1798. And within a few years, he gained Ottoman recognition of his rule over Egypt. And a couple of decades later, or a few decades later, he secured hereditary. rule for his family that would go on to govern Egypt as Khadibs until 1952. Now, when Mehmet Ali came to power, one of his first goals was to create a modern

standing arm, right, on the French and Prussian models so that Egypt could face up to foreign powers. And so how did Mehmet Ali finance this project, right? Well, for revenue, he did a couple of things. Number one, he restructured the fiscal system in Egypt and created a centralized tax bureaucracy that could seize agricultural surpluses and spend it on state building. And then number two, he encouraged the production of a cash crop, right, long staple cotton that he believed could earn Egypt quick revenues on international markets. And this brought about a very rapid transformation

in Egypt, right? In 1800, Egypt conducted more than half of its trade with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. If we fast forward a century later, in 1900, nearly 80 to 90% of Egyptian exports consisted of raw cotton, mainly for Britain. And so Egypt's regional trade networks in the Mediterranean were slowly displaced by relationships of trade and dependency with Western Europe. Now, the transformation of the Egyptian countryside into a cash crop plantation by Mehmet Ali and his descendants gave rise to two very important social classes. First, the government began to grant land grants to rural notables and members of Mehmet Ali's family.

And over time, they became the core of a large landholding class that dominated Egyptian politics until the 50s. And then second, the government also allowed foreign merchants and bankers to finance and trade cotton. And this gave rise to a powerful mercantile bourgeoisie that was composed of Greek and Levantine and Jewish immigrants to Egypt. but very soon this project revealed its tremendous costs. So first, turning Egypt into a cash crop producer made the country more vulnerable to global economic shocks. Because life in the countryside was now oriented towards the production of raw materials for Western Europe,

Egyptians were suddenly vulnerable to the impact of forces and events far away from where they lived. A civil war in the American South or a stock exchange collapsed in New York could now impact the day. daily life of an Egyptian peasant. And as they continued to produce for distant markets, many peasants became an exploited class that got into large amounts of debt in order to continue growing cotton. And then second, the Egyptian government needed to borrow money for its

program of defensive modernization, right? They needed money for irrigation, public works, urban development. And by the mid-19th century, the Egyptian state was relying very heavily on loans from Europe, which grew to the point where in 1876, Egypt was facing bankruptcy. So these are some of the broad contours of what was happening in Egypt during that first period. Oh, that's fascinating. I mean, it seems like all these modernization, defensive modernization projects, you know, that happened, tended to focus first on reform of the military, you know, building a strong, standing army that, you know, could be supported, but that's also extremely costly to do so, which is, you know, part of what you were talking about, the fiscal changes that happened

and as a result, economic changes. I mean, Egypt, of course, was known for growing high-quality cotton for a long period of time before. But what I wonder is, did it change also the, you know, relative proportion of agriculture related to food production? And did the cash crop transformation that starts to happen in the middle 19th, into the later 19th? century, make it also food dependent, or was it still able to be self-sustaining? I'm just thinking in terms of whether or not this affected its position, you know, at how many levels did it affect its position in the globalizing kind of market economy and whether there were any consequences of this, you know, like famine and, you know, other kinds of dislocations that may have also

produced political discontent, social discontent and political discontent. over the course of the, of the era. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the production of cotton is something that all kinds of Egyptian cultivators, large and small, became engaged in. Like I said, by the late 19th century, cotton came to constitute about 80 or 90% of Egyptian exports. And, you know, it had many different effects. So, yes, this left less land and time and effort.

on the part of peasants to grow their own crops, to grow their own food for sustenance. I mean, many continue to do so, but not on the same level as they would have prior to this transformation. Like I said, this transformation also exposed peasants to new kinds of vulnerabilities, right? Fluctuations and prices, fluctuations in global markets. It had, you know, all kinds of ecological consequences for the Egyptian countryside in terms of soil degradation and ecological damage done to the soil, which Egyptians, including Egyptian nationalists, began to observe in the early 19th, sorry, in the early 20th century. And over time, yes, you can say that Egypt started to become more food dependent.

And this is a story that actually becomes really important by the 50s and 60s when Egypt is more fully incorporated into the American food aid regime of the post-war period. There's a colleague of mine, Samantha Ayer, who teaches at Fordham University, who's writing a fantastic book telling this story about both Egypt and India that we can all look out for soon. So just another question kind of related to this period and the transition to British colonial occupation and direct rule. I'm wondering if this reorientation, of the economy was taking place even before the British end up being able to have direct colonial rule over Egypt and whether that helps facilitate it. I'm also wondering and thinking

about projects for integrating the Mediterranean, basically cutting off the Suez Canal. I mean, I know that some of these start fairly early and in this period in the middle of the 19th century building the Suez Canal. But that's before the actual British control. And I'm not sure if I remember exactly, but I think originally the first project was not actually directed by a British concern. It was, you know, other groups. But so maybe you could talk a little bit about some of these changes that are taking place even before and what role they may have played in increasing the intervention in various ways in the economy and through investment and infrastructure projects and how that politically may have led to the direct British colonial

occupation. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, once upon a time, there was a generation of political historians that understood British colonialism in Egypt to have begun with the occupation of 1882, right? The moment that British troops set foot in Egypt and British administrators and so on. But in the 1970s and the 1980s, and even a little earlier, there were new generations of both Egyptian and non-Egyptian historians that were influenced by world systems analysis, that were influenced by Marxism, and that began to argue that the story of colonialism in Egypt actually begins much earlier. It begins with Egypt's gradual integration into the world capitalist economy, right, as a producer of raw materials for

European industries. And that's a story that begins well before the British occupation of 1882, right? That's a story that starts in the 1830s and 1840s and then really accelerates in the 1860s, again, before the British occupation, because of the impact of the American Civil War. The blockade of ports during the Civil War resulted in a massive shortfall of resulted in a massive shortfall of American cotton exports to Britain, and this caused Britain to eventually pivot towards Egypt and India as new sources of cotton production. And so, you know, the story of colonialism, when told, as a story of Egypt's incorporation into the world capitalist economy begins well before 1882.

But if I could just say a few words about the British occupation, you know, so these defensive modernization programs in the 19th century, including the one led by Mehmet Ali and his descendants, gave rise to new and upwardly mobile groups, right? We talked about large landowners and merchants, but the process of military reform and stage centralization also produced other kinds of groups, including professional bureaucrats, military officers, and these groups began to seek greater participation in the political order and wanted to more effectively oppose Western domination, and they would often express themselves by making demands for constitutional rule, right? So this was the case in the Ottoman Empire as a whole.

It was the case in Iran, and it was the case in Egypt as well, right? Egypt from 1879 to 1882 witnessed an event known as the Urabi revolt. This was a revolt led by Colonel Ahmed Urabi to oppose legal discrimination against Egyptians in the military to end foreign control over Egyptian finances, which foreign powers had implemented after 1876, and to place constitutional limits on the Khadiv's authorities. But the revolt instead prompted a British military invasion of Egypt. Arabi would be captured and exiled, and the British would then begin what would become a 70-year occupation of Egypt until 1952, that only accelerated the processes of economic peripheralization, the transformation of Egypt into a cash crop economy,

but also introduced new dynamics like the massive influx of European finance into Egypt, right, to fund things like, of course, European finance had already been funding, you know, railway and infrastructural development. But under the British and especially under the First Consul General Lord Cromer, there was a significant effort to direct metropolitan capital into the finance of agricultural banking, right? And that became one of his big projects. You know, there's a colleague of mine, Aaron Jakes, who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago, you know, which he argued that, you know, British administrators in Egypt governed the country on the basis of a philosophy or a worldview that he calls colonial economism, right? And in this view,

Egyptians sort of lacked the political rationality that was necessary for self-rule, because the British understood them to be religiously and racially and culturally deficient, but at the same time, Egyptians still possessed an economic rationality that could serve as the basis for their consent of foreign occupation. And so to legitimize the rule in the eyes of Egyptians, the British, you know, didn't have to promote constitutionalism and representative elections and that sort of thing. They only had to generate material prosperity by providing water for irrigation, financing cotton growers, building rural transport networks, et cetera, right?

Now, this, of course, was happening in a period when the growth of finance had become an unmistakable feature of global capitalism, right? the second half of the 19th century, and the colonies quickly attracted European finance capital that sought to make profits that it could otherwise not make in Europe. And of course, many prominent theorists in the Marxist tradition have written about this, right? Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, and others. And Egypt became seen as this kind of attractive destination for metropolitan capital, especially if it were channeled into agricultural banking. And so this is, you know, part of what the British were doing in the 1890s, early 20th century.

which appeared as though it was successful. You know, especially in the 1890s, cotton production continued to expand. Capital continued to come in. But, you know, it soon created a huge financial bubble, as often happens in these situations, which ended in a crisis in 1907. And this crisis actually came one year after a group of Egyptian villagers were executed or punished harshly after the killing of a British officer in what became known as the Dinchway incident. And this sequence of events then gave an impetus to a budding Egyptian

nationalist movement that began to emerge in the 20th century. Fascinating. I mean, what your remarks made me think of was first, of course, the global perspective on cotton as a commodity and how important it has been historically and thinking of Sven Beckert's, you know, important book. And I know you've written our writing about cotton. So maybe when we have you back on to talk about your book, I'll ask you more about how you situate, you know, vis-a-vis his perspective with your study on it, but it's been, you know, it's clearly so, so important in this story. But the second point is just how, you know, significant colonial rule has been for derailing popular sovereignty movements, democratic, you know, you mentioned the Uribe Revolt and the various

kinds of demands that were, you know, articulated as popular and democratic kinds of concerns about governance and about, you know, national sovereignty, budding, you know, kind of ideas and how colonial rules just seems to so crucially short-circuit these movements. I'm sure that's going to become more important in the rest of the story. But I'm wondering if you had other, you've already started talking about what, you know, happened under, you know, direct British colonial rule. But I'm wondering if there are other features that you think are very significant in that period for the story of the future revolution that we should appreciate about, you know, what happened under British colonialism in Egypt. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, the acceleration of Egypt's transformation, right, into a cash craw plantation was one important dynamic.

And the incorporation of Egypt into kind of circuits of metropolitan finance capital. was another really important dynamic. And critics later understood this link, right? This link between metropolitan finance on the one hand and, you know, Egyptian landowners and especially large Egyptian landowners. And they understood it to be a kind of core feature of capitalism in Egypt during the British occupation, right?

So in 1942, for instance, the Egyptian Marxist, Ahmed Rushdie Salah, published what was probably the first materialist history of Egypt to ever be written in Arabic. And he argued that British imperialism had both transformed the country's feudal character by integrating it into global capitalism, yet it simultaneously impeded the country's industrial development, right? And so the result was a kind of deformed or colonial capitalism, right, that had taken hold in the country and in which landed aristocrats and Western financiers sort of reigned supreme rather than an industrial bourgeoisie, you know, like what existed.

in the West. And so, you know, this history, of course, of the British occupation became rediscovered by a generation of radical thinkers and activists in Egypt that I'll talk about a little later in the 1940s and became very important for how they understood the country's trajectory towards independence and what they consider to be a more genuine form of independence. But, you know, for the time being, if we're talking about that, earliest generation of nationalist in the 1900s, the 1910s. I mean, one of their main gripes with the British was very simply the fact that the British claimed to be ushering in an era of material prosperity. The British claimed to be delivering all these material gains

to Egyptians, but in reality, what was happening was that they were also fostering very deep forms of inequality, especially in the Egyptian country side, as well as forms of instability, right, by turning Egypt into this place where, you know, flows, massive flows of capital from Europe could just come in and out and, you know, create speculative bubbles that then crash, et cetera. You know, this became a very important part of the nationalist critique of British colonial rule in the early 20th century. Yeah, I want to hop in here and talking about these structures and these systems that are put in place under colonial rule, these then persist as you come out of colonial rule, not just in the case of Egypt,

but in many post-colonial projects. When you have the process of formal or legal decolonization, you still often have a maintenance of the structures of colonialismality for numerous reasons. And there have been projects that have been taken out in various contexts to explicitly attack those very structures, but then you often will see a backlash from the former colonial rulers to maintain the colonial systems that had been set up in the colonial period. Egypt is no exception of that. So I want to turn us to 1922 if we can. If somebody is just looking at the timeline of modern Egyptian history,

they'll see this unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence, and they'll think to themselves, well, okay, now British colonialism is over, British occupation is over, you know, now it's a monarchy. Maybe that's not great, but the British are out. However, and this is something that I think is very telling in terms of those structures, the British recognized Egypt as independent and sovereign. However, they decided that they were going to control still from this independent and sovereign nation, defense, foreign affairs, Sudan, and protection of foreign interests within Egypt, thereby maintaining some of the key pillars of the colonial apparatus, not to mention the, the, economic situation, which had been so reliant on this cash crop of cotton. So I'm wondering with that kind of preamble out of the way, can you take us to that period of 1922, what led to this

declaration of independence of Egypt? Can you talk about what prompted that? Can you talk about how that was viewed at the time? Talk about a little bit of this maintenance of the colonial system, because as you're going to explain in this answer, formal colonialism may have ended, but colonialism certainly did not. And what was the political economy situation at that time going into this independent phase? Sure, absolutely.

So after World War I, Egypt was one of a few major sites of anti-colonial mobilization against the British Empire. Same with India, same with Ireland. In 1918, a group of Egyptian politicians met with the British High Commissioner and requested that they be permitted to attend the Paris Peace Conference in order to present their case for independence. And the delegation, known in Arabic as Weft, Weft is the Arabic word for delegation. This delegation was led by a former Egyptian minister named Saad Zakhlul.

The British government refused the delegation's request. And meanwhile, Zerloud had started to become very popular with the Egyptian. Egyptian public. In March 19, Zellul was arrested and exiled by the British, and a countrywide uprising broke out. That was unlike anything the British had seen before. There were weeks of demonstrations and strikes and, you know, all kinds of different actions. And the uprising was violently subdued by the British, and they went on to impose martial law. But the events demonstrated that the British had to do something, right, to alter their relationship to Egypt because the status quo was simply not working anymore. So what did they do? Well, later that year,

the British sent a special mission to Egypt known as the Milner mission to investigate the causes of the uprising. And based on the mission's recommendations, the British decided to unilaterally grant independence to Egypt in 1922. But this was only a partial victory for Egyptian nationals, On the one hand, they did gain some measure of control over the government at a time when much of Asia and Africa were still colonized, right, and where decolonization would only gather pace in the 40s, 50s and 60s. But on the other hand, Egyptian independence and sovereignty was still constrained in very fundamental ways, right, as you began to point to, Henry. So first, the British maintained considerable involvement in Egyptian affairs. The unilateral declaration of independence was conditional on four so-called reserved areas. So the British would maintain control over important transportation and communication networks like the Suez Canal,

matters of defense and foreign policy, the Sudan, minority communities, Egypt, right? So all of these areas of policies were kept outside the purview of, the national government. Second, the political system, you know, was a constitutional monarchy that was ostensibly based on the principle of popular sovereignty, but public participation was still heavily limited, right, even though this period is sometimes referred to as Egypt's liberal age. So, for example, the political elites and landowners who sat down and wrote the first Egyptian constitution in 1923, they made no secrets about their desire to protect Egypt from the alleged backwardness of its people. They adopted a two-stage electoral

system in which voters would choose electors, and those electors would then select parliamentary representatives. And they adopted this system on the basis that the country was not yet mature enough for everyone to be able to vote. And of course, there was no universal suffrage in Egypt at the time. And in the history of liberalism, we often find that liberals are uncomfortable with the full realization of popular sovereignty, right, even if they're liberal nationalists who are operating in a colonial context and fighting against colonial powers, right, they're often uncomfortable with the full implications of popular sovereignty and, and therefore try to limit the participation of different groups in different ways, right,

poor women, deleterate, right? So that was another issue. And then third, you know, there existed very deep social and economic inequalities that continued to persist throughout that period in the 1920s and 1930s, right? In the first half of the 20th century, landownership had become heavily concentrated in Egypt, around 1% of the landowning population, right, who are considered the large landowners. Well, they possessed more than 40% of landed property across the country, those who own the largest estates, right, of 200 Fadden's or more, Fadden is almost equivalent to an acre.

They constituted only a fraction of the population, right? And meanwhile, the majority of rural producers, you know, lived in poverty and destitution. So these problems and others left many Egyptians, dissatisfied with what was essentially quasi-independence, right? It was an independence, a form of independence in which the social and economic aspirations of ordinary Egyptians for the most part were not being met and where the political aspirations of many Egyptians, right, including members of the upper

classes, were not being met because the British continued to have this kind of involvement in Egyptian politics and in Egyptian affairs. Well, can you talk a little bit more about what the roots of discontent within Egyptian society during that monarch monarchic period were because obviously the revolution comes from somewhere and there are very definite causes in terms of what people were mobilizing around specific things that people were mobilizing around so can you talk about what the roots of the popular discontent were during the monarchic period and how you know kind of tying it in with that last question how some of those are are tied in with

with the vestiges of the formal colonial apparatuses, but then also how the monarchy itself has some specificities as well that would have led to that discontent that then gets us to the 1950s. So if we're talking about the potential factors that led to the pre-officer's revolt in 1952, I'd say there's at least four, right? So first is the impact of the Great Depression and World War II in Egypt, right? You know, the Depression had an important impact on Egyptian society and politics. You know, remember Egypt is a society that's deeply incorporated into the world capitalist system.

And so by the 1930s, anything that was happening, you know, anywhere in that system could very easily impact everyday life for Egyptian peasants. In 1930, the price of Egyptian cotton collapsed, right? and with it, so did the incomes of cultivators across the country. The weft was forced out of government, and a new premier was appointed, who dissolved parliament, postponed elections, abolished the 1923 constitution. And more importantly, the government in the 1930s began to adopt a program of rural reconstruction. The Depression brought to light the extent of rural misery in Egypt. the government began to promote the rehabilitation of Egyptian peasants

through things like cooperative societies, agricultural banks, health and sanitation facilities, rural social centers. New ideas about social reform began to spread among prominent Egyptian writers and nationalists, and they began to link these ideas to notions of political legitimacy. Meanwhile, many of the thinkers and groups, at least in the 1930s, that were embracing this discourse of social reform were not yet talking about the redistribution of landed property. That would happen in 1940s, which I'll get to in a minute. You know, the Depression also changed the predominant patterns of capital accumulation in Egypt. So on the one

hand, it transformed the behaviors of large landowners. Large landowners coming out of depression and through the 40s began to rely a lot more on leasing their land than on producing on it directly. You know, and this was for a number of different reasons. I mean, large mortgage banks that finance the activities of these wealthy growers had fallen into decline. British authorities placed restrictions on cotton acreage in the 1940s, you know, wages for agricultural labor increased significantly. And the result was that landowners in the 40s began to appear as this kind of parasitic class, right, who live in the cities and just lease out their land in the countryside and don't invest in it productively.

On the other hand, urban industries began to grow, especially during the war, to offset the disruption in overseas trade that was caused by the war and to serve the increased demand for manufactured goods by allied troops in the country. And as a result, activists and intellectuals in the 1940s began to increasingly believe that a viable model of development required both industrialization and more socialization. welfare and what they saw around them in Egypt at the time wasn't providing either of these two things, right? So that's sort of the first and a big factor. The second factor is the revitalization of political and intellectual life in the 1940s, right? Who were these activists and intellectuals

that I'm talking about? Well, in the 1940s, new political groups and parties and thinkers began to emerge in Egypt. You know, many of them did not come from the landed elite and they harbored suspicions of liberal parliamentarism, which they associated with corruption and failure and elite factionalism, many of them came from middle and lower middle class groups who began to pursue political agendas that were more radical than those that were adopted by older members of the landed ruling class and the liberal nationalists of the 1910s and 20s. And, you know, in this context, thinkers and activists began to develop ideas about social reform, ideas about, you know, Egyptian history that drew on a mix of Fabian socialism,

Marxism, the new field of development economics in the 1940s. The works of Marx and Engels and Lenin were translated into Arabic for the first time in the 1940s. You know, the decade saw the growth of Marxist thinkers and parties and what historians call the second wave of Egyptian communism. And, you know, the principal theorist, in these different groups began to introduce a framework for class analysis into Egyptian history and politics that didn't really exist with previous nationalist groups, right? These new parties and thinkers understood imperialism not only did be a force that threatens the Egyptian nation as a whole, but one that also had different class effects, right,

and that produced a kind of society that looked different from capitalist societies in the West, right? It introduced capitalist social relations into Egypt, but did not lead to the kind of industrial transformation that happened in the West. Rather, it stratified Egyptian society. It created divisions between those who benefited from colonial capitalism and those who didn't. And, you know, these thinkers really began to make Egyptian history and Egyptian politics intelligible through the categories of class, of, you know, mode of production, and others that began to travel through socialist circles and parties around the world. And it was, you know, through these groups and others that land reform and industrialization became a prominent theme, right?

In all of the platforms of virtually every, you know, major opposition party in the 1940s, right? The first land reform proposals were made before the Egyptian Senate in 1944. over the next few years, several major treatises on land reform were written. And, you know, a new generation of intellectuals and activists began to reconceptualize national liberation as a process that also involved national development. And national development to them was a process that was oriented towards industrialization, oriented towards a kind of transition from one form of society or one mode of production into another. Now, very quickly, a couple of other factors that led to the revolt.

Number three, a new generation of military officers emerged in Egypt in the late 1930s. So in 1936, the Egyptian and British government signed a treaty that reduced Britain's influence over Egypt, and that required it to withdraw troops except for a few thousand, I think 10,000 or so, that would remain in the Suez Canal. and Britain committed to training Egypt's army. Now, most of the officers who took part in what happened in 1952 entered the military academy after the treaty. Many of them were from the same graduating class. Many of them were friends.

And many of them had joined different political groups in the 1940s, right? Those same groups that I was describing, right? Groups like the Democratic Movement for National Liberation or Hadithu, right, which was the largest communist organization in Egypt at the time. Some of them joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of them joined a kind of ultra-nationalist group called Young Egypt, right? And so the officers who came to seize power in 1952 were a very politically aware and highly politicized group of officers that had all kinds of connections with this very active political scene in the 1940s that's, you know, beginning to articulate and promote radical ideas. And then finally,

the fourth factor that's important, if we're talking about the lead up to 1952, is the role of Palestine, right, and the war in 1948 in shaping the consciousness of the free officers, right? So Palestine was an important issue for all Egyptian political groups in this period, including the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists who wrote and spoke extensive. extensively about it. Of course, Egypt participated in the war after the establishment of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinians began, what Palestinians call the Nakhba, which continues until today. And officers came back from Palestine feeling very disgruntled. And they came back with a lot of animosity towards the Egyptian king over the loss of Palestine.

And when they returned a group of officers formed, you know, a secret group called the Free Officers. And these officers, you know, they came from new social groups that had, like I said, begun to enter the military in the 1930s and rise through its ranks. They included children of middle class peasants and lower great professionals and bureaucrats from the countryside and the small towns. And the first class included a man named Gamal Abdu Nassar, who became a leader in. the free officers and would eventually become the president of Egypt in the 1950s. Wow, that was a wonderful account, and I think in some ways it anticipates some of the queries that I had about the immediate conditions ahead of the free officers, you know, taking over. And I guess in some ways, given what you described as some of that political

consciousness that was developing in new constituencies and groups over the course of the, you know, monarchical period post-independence in the, you know, 30s and 40s, made me wonder in some ways, you know, why some of these other kinds of mobilizations and constituencies were not, you know, capable of overturning or. dramatically rearranging the social and political conditions of Egypt and that it did take, you know, and obviously I'm concerned and interested in what the consequences of the actual form in which this revolutionary change took place. But, you know, other kinds of popular mobilizations, you know, were, seems prevented from really being able to change the government

dramatically. And it took this group that you're, you know, talking about. cadre of organized free officers from within the military to actually be successful. And I'm wondering if there were other kinds of, you know, just in addition to the factors, but were there political attempts and groupings, how would you characterize the political environment on the cusp or in the preceding years before the successful 1952 revolution in Egypt? In other words, why did it take the free officers and not some other, you know, given the shared kind of grievances and, you know, the widening of discontent and constituencies for expressing their political discontent that it started to emerge over that period?

That's a good question. That's difficult to answer, right? I mean, it's a bit hypothetical because that's not what happens. Yeah, because it's hypothetical. I mean, it is a case that in the lead up to 1952, you know, Egypt was a place with, it was very politically restive, right? And there was a lot of political activity in different groups and different organizations and, you know, labor movements and communists and Islamists and so on. You know, the two largest political organizations at the time were probably the Weft Party, which was still around and came back to power in 1935. 50 and the Muslim Brotherhood, which we haven't talked about too much.

So, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood is a group that was established in 1928. It traced its intellectual roots to the tradition of Islamic modernism that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. So important figures at the time like Jamal al-Ine al-Avani and Muhammad Abdu. they began to argue that Islam was compatible with modernity, and that because Muslims abandoned the true principles of their faith, it impeded their ability to advance in the modern world. And this was kind of an intellectual, cultural response to the failures of defense of modernization in the 19th century.

Now, by the end of the 1920s, the Muslim Brotherhood was established and embraced this set of ideas and began to create a mass-based social movement that promoted the bottom-up religious reform of the individual and community as a pathway to wider political and social change. There's a wonderful book by Beth Barron that shows how the Muslim Brotherhood even developed in reaction to the Christian missionary presence in Egypt at the time and how the Muslim Brotherhood even mimics some of their methods like their emphasis on charity, social welfare, etc. But the Muslim Brotherhood was also one of the groups that was, you know, involved in many of the different forms of protest and actions that were happening in the late 1940s,

early 1950s, just before the revolution of 52. Though in 1951, for example, the Egyptian government abrogated its 1936 treaty with the British and young Egyptians began to carry out guerrilla attacks on British military bases in the canal zone. And political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and others were very much involved in this, right? You know, the British had lost their military base in Palestine and wanted to maintain their presence in the canal. And then on January 25th, 1952, British army units surrounded a police station in one of the canal cities called Ismaila, and they demanded the surrender of police officers that they

believed were supporting the guerrillas. When they refused British soldiers then killed, tens of Egyptian policemen before the rest gave in. And this sparked immediate protests and riots in the capital city, right, in Cairo, in which shops and restaurants and cinemas were burned and damaged. The event became known as the Cairo fire. There's a lot of speculation about who was behind it. What role did the Muslim Brotherhood play? What role did young Egypt play? But, you know, this was the political landscape of Egypt before the revolution. And then, of course, like I said, the Brotherhood, sorry, the free officers had very close ties to a lot of these political organizations and were influenced by them, right? You know, the free officers were influenced by members of the Hadithu, the largest communist party at the time,

who actually helped them write their program, right, in the early 1950s and shaped a lot of the ideas and the discourse of the free officers. Now, after the Cairo fire for the next six months, you know, various ineffective governments were appointed and reappointed until 1952. And it was at that moment that the free officers decided to act. They seized the broadcasting station in Cairo and announced that they had taken power and went on to abolish the monarchy and then eventually end the British presence in Egypt. Now, could things have turned out differently? I'm sure. I mean, there's, you know, when, you know, the possibilities are always endless

when you situate yourself in the moment and kind of look forward, it's only when you look back at history and hindsight that you can begin to see that, okay, this sequence of events or this chain of causality made sense, you know, as a reason for this particular thing to happen. But I think what I want to emphasize is that the free officers were very much part of the vibrant political landscape that I'm describing and were very much influenced by it rather than being some,

you know, group or some faction that was removed from it, that was external to it, and then came and seized power, right? Now, that's not to say that they didn't have a very contentious relationship with many of these groups, which I'd be happy to talk about once we get into the early 1950s. Yeah, no, that's very helpful. And I think your conclusion that you just mentioned is sort of what I would have maybe concluded myself from your account of that, is that It was built upon these social and political changes and movements that were taking place. It wasn't something completely, you know, it was a vehicle through which some of those, you know, political ideals and social aspirations ended up being expressed rather than it just being some kind of coup that had no basis in those political ferment that was taking place beforehand. So that was very, very helpful.

But maybe you can take us, you know, I did also just want when you mentioned the, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood is that one of the other thinkers that, you know, would be interesting in to see his regional impact and influence, of course, somebody like Rashid Redda, you know, who as we know was pretty involved with, you know, kind of parallel attempts, you know, in other places and, you know, was an advisor, maybe even you could say the drafter of that constitution. you know, in the Damascus kind of convention that Elizabeth Thompson wrote that wonderful book, how, you know, the West stole democracy from the Arabs, you know, that we had an episode and an interview with her on it. And it's interesting to see that, you know, at the same time, there's, you know, political organizing and establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood and so on taking place in Egypt. And so there were, you know, lots of possibilities. I mean, you know, happening, you know, in terms of how the future frameworks. But a lot of those were, of course, you know, derailed by some of those forces. But maybe you can get us into, you know, talking a little bit

about what happened in the revolution. I'm sure Henry will want to come in and ask about the revolution and its consequences as well. Yeah. And just to get a little bit more specific on that question that Adnan led into in terms of the revolution itself, not only is it going to be interesting to talk about how the revolution happened and how quickly it happened and how the seizure of certain buildings essentially made it happen like that, but also thinking about the consolidation of the revolution is always a really important thing to consider because there has been numerous examples through history of revolutionary movements, coups, etc., that for a moment may appear successful but then are rolled back almost immediately afterwards or

face constant assault, leads to protracted struggle, etc. This is a very interesting example. of the consolidation of the revolution as well. So as you're discussing the revolution itself and how that happened, also keeping an eye on how the consolidation of the revolution was then also carried out simultaneously as the revolution essentially was happening. Yeah, absolutely. I think the question of consolidation is really key, right? Because it's in the consolidation of power after any revolutionary upheaval that the, the shape or form of whatever new regime, you know, begins to emerge and to take a clearer shape. So, and, you know, in that vein, it's important to remember that the

events of July 1952 were not called a revolution at the time, right? They were initially referred to as the Blessed Movement, right? The Blessed Movement led by the Free Officers, but they would soon be renamed the July revolution by the officers regime and its supporters. Now, if we think of the first few years, right, especially the period from 1952 to 1954, we could say that in these years, the officers really focused on consolidating their power and not even the officers as a whole, even, you know, different factions within the free officers. So on the one hand, they went after any potential opponents that could undermine them, But on the other hand, they also had internal struggles in which Nasser eventually won out by 1954.

So let me talk about both of those dimensions in turn. So let's start with their opponents, right? So the officers came to power in July, 1952, and they immediately abolished the constitutional monarchy and began the process of turning Egypt into a republic. They ended the British occupation of the country by 1954, although British troops didn't finally leave until June 1956. And the officers began to embrace some of those proposals for social reform redistribution that had gained traction among the opposition in the 1940s. they adopted land reforms that redistributed large properties to small holding and landless peasants. And, you know, doing this not only allowed them to confront an unequal landholding system

and to give credence to their promise to be delivering social justice to Egyptians, it also disempowered the largest landholders in the country, right, who could have otherwise organized against the officers. Now, it's important to note that the reforms pursued by the officers were actually less radical than those proposed by Egyptian Marxists in the 1940s, or even those that were carried out by the American military in Japan and Taiwan after World War II, right? In fact, the early land reforms were endorsed by the U.S. State Department as an effective tool, right, to combat the potential spread of communism around the world. But they also helped to anchor the political legitimacy of the country's new leaders in the eyes of many Egyptians. And so we shouldn't, of course, discount that. Now, the officers also restricted political life.

They banned political parties, including the left party in 1953. The following year, they proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood after an assassination attempt on Nasser that was alleged to have been planned by the Muslim Brotherhood. And meanwhile, the officers maintained a pretty tenuous relationship with the communist movement in those early years, right? So all the Egyptian communists denounce the free officer's revolt, except for a major faction of Hadithu. You know, one of the smaller communist groups even called the officers take over a fascist crime. You know, they were following the line of the Orthodox Communist Party in France. Now, because Hadithu believed that Egypt had to undergo a national democratic revolution before reaching socialism. It supported the free officers on the basis that they would

usher in that kind of national democratic revolution. But within a year, they became critical of the officers after the officers began to repress communists and independent trade unionists. Shortly after they took power, the officers executed two labor activists in a town called Kaffir Dawar. And communists then united in opposing the officers until the mid-50s when that relationship once again changed, which I'd be happy to talk about in a minute. Now, in terms of the internal struggle within the free officers, right? By 1954, the officers were engaged in an internal power struggle that kind of spilled out onto the streets and divided Egyptian political groups. So on one side, there was the Muslim Brotherhood and

students and some former leftists, even some communists and trade unionists. who supported calls by the leader of the free officers, a man named Major General Muhammad Nagyib, he was calling for a return to parliamentary democracy and the legalization of political parties, right? And he had his supporters. But on the other side, there were those who supported Nasser's preference for prolonged military rule,

and the second group ultimately won out. Those who allied with Nasser felt deeply resentful towards parliamentary democracy for reasons that I described earlier. You know, because politicians in the interwar period fail to end British colonial rule or to undertake any meaningful social reforms, Egypt's parliamentary system came to be viewed with suspicion by a lot of people. You know, for some parliamentary democracy just became associated with growing social inequality and, you know, the narrow interests of wealthy elites.

And in March 1954, amidst this kind of internal crisis, what became known as the March crisis, crowds poured onto the streets of Cairo and chanted, you know, no parties, no democracy. And it was actually a transport worker's strike that gave Nasser critical support during this standoff with his opponents among the officers. And Nosser eventually emerged victorious in this internal struggle and became, you know, the leader of Egypt by 1954. and by 1956 became the president. So this early phase is really when the free officers consolidated their power. And then moving into the 1950s, they began to encounter a new set of challenges that had to do with the persistence of colonialism into the post-war period and the polarizing dynamics of the Cold War and the kinds of neo-imperial rivalries

that had unleashed. And so, you know, Nassar and the free officers would take another kind of big reorientation in the mid-50s in relation to those sets of issues, which I'd be happy to talk about. Well, one of the things I want to turn to just briefly is Nassar domestically at this point. So the reason that I'm bringing this up is and letting the listeners in on something. The next supplemental episode that we have is with a friend of yours, Professor Tikriti, talking about Nassar's. more broadly speaking. Now, I bring this up specifically because as we had a small conversation before we hit record, analyzing Nassar and Nazarism domestically within Egypt and more regionally

leads to two different analyses. And knowing that we're going to be thinking more broadly and regionally with Professor Tikriti in the next episode of this series, it might be useful for us to get into the the domestic side of Nasser and Nassarism at this time in the, particularly in the early phase of his time and power in Egypt. And then, of course, we'll have some other things to say in that later phase as well, both domestically and internationally, kind of the end of this phase of Egyptian history. But domestically, can you talk a little bit about Nassar and Nazan, Nazism and that early stage of that revolutionary period? Yeah, absolutely.

So, Nasserism is hard to define because it's a very eclectic set of ideas. But in general, we can say that under the free officers, the pursuit of national liberation became equated with the pursuit of national development. This was a kind of core idea driving a lot of the policies of the free officers. Nasser himself wrote that the arrival of the officers would usher in a political revolution, a revolution against colonial and monarchical rule in Egypt, but it would also usher in a social revolution, right, a revolution against what the officers and many at the time understood to be a condition of social and economic backwardness. Now, the first revolution would be achieved by the abolition of the abolition of the,

the monarchy, and the end of the British presence in Egypt. And the second would be achieved through policies of land reform, industrialization, central planning, and other kinds of developmental or redistributive policies. Now, like I said, the first major policy that the officers in which they anchored their political legitimacy was land reform. And this was an idea that had been around in the 1940s. When they first took power, they even summoned some of the people who had been writing a lot about land reform and the countryside in the 1940s. And they passed a law in September for 1952 to restrict the ownership of properties to 200 feds per individual or 300

feds per family. And like I said, this allowed the free officers to go after their opponents among the large landholding class. But it also allowed them to, you know, convince many Egyptians that they were fulfilling this promise for social justice, right? Other things that the land reform did were, you know, they established ceilings for rents, right? They established minimum wages. And it was through these and other kinds of redistributive policies that I think the pre-officers were really able to begin gaining a lot of support among Egyptians and especially among the peasantry, right? You know, in the 1950s and 60s, Egypt witnessed, you know, relatively decent rates of economic growth. You know, the countries per capita growth rate grew, I think, moderately over that whole period by about 2% or so.

Like other parts of the Arab world, like expectancy at birth, you know, grew by rates that was comparable to sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America. the number of students enrolled in higher education rose significantly under Nosser. And then in a later phase of the project, many of those graduates of Egyptian universities were then guaranteed government jobs. And so it was a system that created a lot of social mobility for different groups of Egyptians

who previously didn't have it. And this was a big part of the reason and why many Egyptians rallied around Nasser and rallied around the new regime. Now, in addition to that, the free officers, also by the mid-1950s, began to position themselves as an anti-imperialist force amidst the kind of polarizing landscape of the Cold War. One of the ways that the United States, which had rose to the status of global superpower after 1945, one of the ways that they sought to expand American influence around the world was by creating military alliances in the 1950s. And, you know, 1953, John Foster Dulles came to Cairo and tried to court Nosser into joining a military alliance that became known as the Baghdad Pact, right? That was eventually founded in 1955, and that included Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

And Nasser refused, right? He refused in 1955, and this kind of prompted him to begin turning towards other forms of solidarity among people in the region, among oppressed people more broadly. It's in 1955 that Nasser intensifies, right, has turned towards pan-Arabism and pan-Arab solidarity. It's in 195 that Nasser participates in the Bandung conference and begins to adopt non-alignment and the idea of positive neutrality as a centerpiece of his agenda. And so it's this combination of anti-imperialism abroad and even within Egypt as well with a promise of social justice that I think really helps to boost the officers. popularity among many Egyptians. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that the regime didn't face all kinds of problems. They did, and they were then subject to all kinds of very strong criticisms, you know, in the late 50s, 60s, but especially by the late 60s and 70s, by Egyptian

communists. And I'd be happy to get into some of those criticisms as we go along. Well, well, we'd love to hear you, you know, tell us a little more about those, those criticisms and critiques. I did have one thought and observation here is that this idea of national development, you know, that you mentioned was, you know, very significant and important for how the free officers saw the project. And, you know, I just wondered, I don't know if it makes any sense at all to think about it, though, that perhaps some of the police. discourse or the rationale and justification for the particular form of rule or governance under the free officers and under under Nasser may have had some kind of continuity in the sense that like colonial economism is also a little bit like that. I mean, it is sovereign in the sense that, you know, that it's actually indigenous, you know, but there is also some, you know,

perhaps sense, and maybe this flows into some of the critiques that, some of the communists might have had and other, you know, kind of political critiques of Nassar's rule is that it is sort of populist. It is, you know, prioritizing national development, but it is also sort of suggesting that, you know, this kind of centralized planning and a mode and idea of what development is, you know, in this kind of moment, which involves some of these big infrastructure projects like the Aswan Dam, these kinds of things that also then create their own dynamic historically and politically and much, of course, of what you were describing about Nasser's affiliation with this kind of anti-imperial politics has much to do, of

course, with the consequences of his decisions of how to try and finance the Aswan Dam and use the nationalize the Suez Canal and use those, you know, the income for, you know, fees for passage to help, you know, kind of pay for these big, you know, infrastructure projects that themselves are, you know, kind of centrally kind of, you know, planned and imposed, you know, but because they have an ideal of what development and what kind of modern economy should be and how to be independent within the global kind of system. So I'm just wondering if, you know, you have any thoughts and comments on that and how that might also flow into where some of these political critiques from communists and maybe even from some others about

Nasserism, you know, could be located. Yeah, absolutely. So the, the Nasserist conception of national development really comes out of the 1940s, right? And it comes out of these new ideas that Egyptians, you know, whether they're Marxists or left nationalists or, you know, liberals who travel abroad and study with the famous development economists in the 1940s, right? all of them are kind of partaking in the construction of a new repertoire of ideas about what it means to attain development, right? And the vision of national development that they construct, right, is one in which the main ingredients will be, you know, national economic growth, just endless growth, industrialization, and the provision of social welfare, right?

These are kind of the basic ingredients of what comes to be understood as post-war national development. And these aren't unique to Egypt, right? I mean, the conception is a global conception in the post-war period. Of course, the details and how it plays out have their specificities in the Egyptian case, but the conception of national development is not uniquely Egyptian, right? Now, like all national development projects in the post-war period, the officers in Egypt faced a basic paradox, right? And this is something that, you know, the traditions of, well, the Sepalinos in Latin America, and, you know, followed by dependency theorists and world systems analysis and, sorry, analysts in the 1970s have all written about, right? The development paradox, right?

These states all aim to create domestic industries that could operate, or could only operate, sorry, at least initially, with imports of technology and capital and intermediate goods. And this meant that to industrialize, they needed hard currency, right? They needed dollars and sterling to be able to purchase all of that technology, intermediate goods, etc. But large inflows of hard currency into developing countries could only happen after those countries erected those industries. and could competitively produce finished goods for Western markets. And so, in other words, the main ingredient that post-colonial states needed to industrialize, right, which was hard currency, is an ingredient that could only really exist in abundance after they'd successfully industrialized, right?

And that's kind of the basic paradox of national development, right? Now, to overcome this paradox, many developing countries had to rely on aid, subsidies, other kinds of exchange that did not go through conventional markets. Egypt relied very heavily in the 50s and especially in the 60s on food aid from the United States. They relied on earnings from nationalization, rents from the Suez Canal, preferential trade agreements with the Soviet Union. All of these are earnings that accrue to Egypt that don't go through conventional markets, right? But when those sources of funding dried up or were cut off by whichever powers provided them, it became harder to continue to pursue development, right? And this is what

happened in Egypt in the mid to late 1960s, right? So by 1964, 65, the Nassarist system entered a general crisis. You know, the rate of investment and wages began to decline pretty sharply, as a share of national income, and the costs of providing social welfare and financing industrialization and investing in defense, right? Remember, there's the state of Israel is, right next door, and this is significantly increasing defense spending in a state like Egypt. Egypt by the early 60s was also getting involved militarily in North Yemen. So all of these costs put together became too high for a state that relied heavily on international subsidies, and the country's debts then began to grow, especially to the Soviet Union.

And then in 1967, Egypt was attacked and defeated by Israel. I think the kind of political, military, even cultural, intellectual dimensions of this defeat are well known and are well studied. But the 1967 defeat also had a significant economic impact. The war resulted in a pretty severe constriction of those flows of aid and rent upon which the Nassarist state depended. So at a time when the Egyptian state was bearing enormous costs of rebuilding its military after 1967, the United States halted its food aid to Egypt. This was a decision that they took in 1966. The closure of the Suez Canal blocked the officers' ability to collect tolls from maritime traffic.

And of course, Israel went on to occupy the Sinai until the late 70s, early 80s, right? Israel's occupation of the Sinai Peninsula diminished revenues from both tourism and the production and sale of petroleum. And so by the end of the decade, Nasserism was no longer. economically viable, right? And it turned out that, you know, all of the sort of fixes that the state had relied on to address the development paradox were not sustainable on the long run. Just a small follow-up. You know, you talk about the economic impact of the war against Israel in the late 60s, but also there is the North Yemen War as well, which was a huge drain of resources and is something that also is not talked about particularly often when we're talking

about the economic implications of it on this late phase of Nassar's time and in charge of Egypt. So also working in that discussion of how the Yemen War, North Yemen War, at that time was also a constraint on economic resources. It's very important in addition to, again, as you pointed out, the economic impacts, of the six days war. Then, of course, there is a response by the government to try to shore up the economic situation. So in 1968, there was some economic, I don't want to say changes, but there was some economic acts that were put through in order to try to cope with this big impact of the two wars that were taking, that had taken place. And those economic reforms did not

really have the desired impact. So can you just briefly talk about that period of attempted reforms in 1968 and the kind of result of them up through the end of Nassar's time in in charge of Egypt? Yeah. So, you know, Nasser dies in 1970. So that's three years after the 67 defeat. Immediately after defeat, he resigns and then there's, you know, massive demonstrations and rallies on the street protesting his resignation. He stays in power until 1970. But in those three years, I mean, the project is really on the decline, right? After the 1967 war, Egypt's military outlays increase by something like 600%.

I mean, Israel completely destroyed the Egyptian Air Force in 1967, right, and the costs of rebuilding Egypt's military war. enormous, right? And, you know, for a state that's already relying tremendously on foreign aid and assistance to pursue industrialization and to pursue development, to, you know, have to pay those kinds of costs of military, you know, rebuilding on top of that, what was just too burdensome, right? Now, of course, the Soviet Union continued to extend loans to Egypt after 1967, some of the Arab states began to actively extend loans and grants to the free officers in that period as well. But it's my understanding that most of these funds were being channeled

into rebuilding the military. And the costs were just so enormous that I don't think at that point there was any coming back from it. And then, of course, add to that the fact that Egypt no longer has access to tolls from the Suez Canal, to oil in the Sinai, which is now occupied by Israel, to food aid. I mean, Egypt in the early 1960s was, I believe, the largest per capita recipient of food aid from the United States in the world, right? Egypt and India were tremendously reliant on food aid from the United States, right? It was American wheat that provided many of the calories that fed, you know, Egyptian

urban workers and the Egyptian proletaria, which had almost doubled in size during the Nassar's period. I mean, none of that was available to Nasser anymore. And so, you know, after 1967, the project is very much on the decline, and I don't think that there is much turning back. Now, just to go to an earlier point about, you know, how the communists began to understand the regime by the late 60s. early 1970s. I mean, I think that the, so one of the critiques that the, you know, communist thinkers, not all of them, I mean, communist relationship to Nasser is very complicated, right?

I mean, for at many points of Nosser's rule, under Nassar's rule, communists, many of them actually developed very warm relationships, right, with the regime, especially in 195, 56, around the time of the Band-Dun conference and Nassar's refusal to join the Baghdad Pact, and then the tripartite aggression, right, the invasion of Egypt that followed by Israel and Britain and France. And then another moment when Nasser's popularity among communists was also boosted was the early 1960s, right? When the regime began to undertake, you know, a set of, again, began to promote a set of new socialist laws and decrees, and to embrace a project that they termed Arab socialism, right? And they passed a new national charter in 1962 that embodied some of these new ideals.

And so, you know, in moments like that, communists had all kinds of debates amongst themselves, sometimes in prison, right? Debates over where do we stand vis-à-vis Nasserism, right? Is this a project that can lead to a socialist future? Or is it a project that is going to obstruct that kind of transformation? Should we understand the Nassarist system in the early 1960s that is sort of raising the banner of Arab socialism? Should we understand it as a properly socialist system? Which was the position of some communists in Egyptian prisons, right?

Communists were, there was a massive roundup, crackdown of communists in 1959. Thousands of them were sent to prison and wouldn't be released until, the mid-1960s. And so these were very real debates that they were having in their prison cells, right, in 1961, 62, right? Is this truly a socialist regime or not? If not, then how do you describe it? Right. Some communists began to use the term non-capitalist path of development, right? That had gained currency in some parts of the global south around that time to describe nocerism. You know, a smaller number of communists understood the Nosser system to be fundamentally capitalist, right? And, and theorized it as a kind of what they called state capitals, right?

And so, you know, I think these, these, you know, communist voices that took a critical stance towards the Nasarist project are very important to think with, right, when approaching this project critically, right? I think, you know, the foremost thinkers from the Egyptian left, You know, they typically understood the Nasserist project to be compromised by both its class character and by its subordinate position in the world capitalist system, right? So on the question of the class character of Nasserism, well, from the mid-50s to the early 60s, some Egyptian Marxists began to develop the idea that Nasser's Egypt represented, like I said, a form of state capitalism, right, that looked different from capitalism in Western Europe,

but was still capitalism nonetheless. But this idea only gained traction among the left in the 1970s. Ibrahim Thethe was a brilliant Egyptian Marxist who was part of a group that rejected the dissolution of the two major communist parties in 1964. And he wrote that the Nasirist system was dominated by what he called a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, that deployed state institutions and mechanisms to engage in the accumulation of capital and thus maintained and even developed, right, capitalist socialist relations, sorry, capitalist social relations, sorry, in Egypt, right? So, you know, things like the cooperativization of Egyptian agriculture and the enforcement of a compulsory delivery system, right, through which the state extracted surpluses from the peasantry.

This was overseen by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, right? The country's industrial transformation that was guided by, you know, central planning, that was also overseen. by what these thinkers started to call a bureaucratic bourgeoisie or what later Marxists would call a state bourgeoisie. Another Egyptian Marxist, Mahmoud Hisein, which was actually the pen name of a pair of communists who wrote in the 70s, they presented a very similar analysis of Nazerism as a form of state capitalism, right,

that fostered the creation of what they called a state bourgeoisie. Now, on the question of Nasserism's position in the world capitalist system, By the 1960s, Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, for example, who's very well known in the Western world, well, he began to consider noclerism to be what he calls in his memoirs an inherently national bourgeois project. In his analysis, it was never realistic that a national bourgeois project in Egypt or anywhere in the global south could actually bring about a transition to socialism because to believe that was the case. what was to fundamentally misunderstand

Egypt as a kind of enclosed national unit, whereas in reality Egypt was part of a world capitalist system, and on that basis, Amin believed that any national bourgeoisie would always remain weak and subordinate and dependent because the dynamics of the world capitalist system

inevitably gave these projects a kind of comparador character, and made them kind of eternally complicit with the dynamics of the world system. And so, you know, these are some of the critiques that begin to emerge. You know, there's seeds of these critiques in the late 50s, early 60s, but they really begin to emerge in the late 60s and through the 1970s after Nosser's death.

Yes, so my next question that I had planned was on successes and failures of the project, but you actually did a fairly decent job of covering that in that previous answer. So in lieu of that and in light of the fact that we have a hard cut, off in about 10 minutes, and Adnan and I each have one question each. I'll just ask mine very briefly, and hopefully it'll be, since we already got to this phase of history, hopefully the answer won't take too long and we'll have time for Adnan's then. Can you talk about the end of this project? You mentioned Nasser dies in 1970. What is the fallout from this project? I mean, well, you know, Nasser has a kind of iconic status in the Egyptian political imagination.

I think Nasser is, well, Egyptians tend to have a very complicated relationship to Nasser, right? On the one hand, he's someone who is remembered very fondly as an anti-colonial leader who brought the monarchy to an end, brought the British colonial presence in Egypt to an end. and really tried to fight to defend Egyptian national sovereignty when he was in power, right? I mean, like I said, the free officers successfully ended British involvement in Egypt. They also avoided being too closely aligned during the Cold War. Nasser's ability to assert control over important assets like the Suez Canal, right, that were previously kept out of the hands of Egyptians, presented a very serious challenge to colonial powers. The nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 was not an insignificant thing.

The Suez Canal is one of the major arteries of world trade, and its nationalization, I think, represented a very significant victory at the time against Western imperialism. And so, you know, Nasser's remembered fondly for all these reasons, but, you know, he's also remembered as someone who helped foster undemocratic forms of political life in the country, right? You know, someone who, you know, imprisoned indissidents, whether they were communists or Islamists or trade unionists, right?

There's a rich body of prison memoirs from the Nasser period that offers, you know, pretty awful accounts, right, of torture and mistreatment, treatment, and Egyptian prisons in this period, you know, is remembered by, you know, some Egyptians, especially from more progressive circles and on the left as, you know, someone whose project involved the extension of state control over any efforts to collectively organize different groups in Egyptian society, right? Workers were not allowed to organize independently, right? Instead, they were only allowed to belong to a state-run trade union that was created in 1957, and the officers effectively offered workers' corporatist representation, but silenced any radical voices of dissent and

outlawed any political initiatives coming from them. You know, we could say something similar about initiatives to reorganize gender relations in Egypt, right? You know, scholars like Mirvath Haatim and Laura Beer have both written about different laws and social programs and protections and institutions, right, that they call state feminism. And on the one hand, you know, These things empowered women in the 50s and 60s with the right to education, to jobs, to benefits. But on the other hand, they also helped give the officers the ability to exercise new kinds of government intervention and control in the everyday lives of Egyptians. So I think, you know, when Egyptians reflect on the Nasserist experience, they remember it in very mixed. terms, right? They remember it both fondly, but also as a project that, you know, laid the

ground for, you know, some of the, you know, persistent forms of kind of political on freedom that we continue to see in Egypt until today. Yeah, well, you know, a lot of times Egypt's history is framed almost exclusively within the terms of, you know, Middle East, Africa, Swana, Middle East, you know, Arab, Arab histories. And we've included the story of the, you know, free officers, blessed movement and revolution. And I, you know, take your pick, depending on when we're talking about within the context of African revolutions and the story of decolonization. And, you know, it's something that Abdunasser himself, you know, sometimes tried to affiliate it with.

I think in that book that was translated as Egypt's liberation, the philosophy of the revolution. You know, he does talk about, you know, situating, you know, Egypt within, of course, the Arab environment, but also he does mention the African environment. So I was just wondering, you know,

are we right to include, you know, the story within this kind of a series in this context, what do you see as the kind of positioning of Egypt within, you know, African history and African stories. So I'll say this. Well, let me start by backing up a bit and say something I probably should have said in my last answer, which is that, you know, there continues to be a decent amount of nostalgia for the Nossarist period. You know, in some ways, you know, the Egyptian

political imagination today is still heavily influenced by the noclerist experience, right? Prevailing conceptions of social justice and what that means, right, are heavily kind of inflected and shaped by the noclerist experience. And I think that it's, you know, it's both understandable why that is the case, but there's also a danger in holding that up, right, as the model. for what a liberated, socially just Egypt can be. And, you know, I thought about this a lot during the Egyptian revolution that happened in 2011, right?

You know, the revolution, among other things, was born out of, you know, a very deep crisis of neoliberalism and, you know, that had all kinds of effects across the country. And there was a way in which I think many people were quick to assume, that what Egypt looked like in the 50s and 60s could somehow provide an alternative model, right, to the ravages of neoliberalism that we see today. I tend to think about it differently, right? I think the Nasserist project was born

out of very specific historical circumstances. It's a project that reflects the circumstances of its creation. And if we want to think productively about pathways out of the world, neoliberalism, beyond neoliberalism in Egypt today, we need to do so in a way where it doesn't simply entail a reversion to a romanticized kind of golden age of the 1950s and 60s. And that kind of like golden age nostalgia for the 50s and 60s actually

exists more broadly, right, in many countries and many different societies around the world. So I would say this not just about Egypt, but I would say this. more broadly. Now, in answer to your question, Adnan, I think, you know, while I would warn against too much nocerist nostalgia for the reasons I just mentioned, on the other hand, I think one of the most inspiring things about the project is the way in which it envisions a shared destiny for people who have been subjected to colonial oppression and who share kind of the in the experience of colonialism. As you mentioned, Nasser writes a manifesto in 1954 called Philosophy of the Revolution

in which he talks about three different circles to which Egypt belongs, right? An Arab circle, an African circle, and an Islamic circle, right? And, you know, all of these circles are sort of imagined forms of solidarity between colonized people, between oppressed people, that I believe was essential to the success of any anti-colonial project at the time and remained so today, right? I mean, imperialism is not a project that respects any national borders and national boundaries and in a similar vein, resistance to imperialism and solidarity among anti-imperialists

shouldn't be respecting those borders and those boundaries as well. Now, in the African context specifically, I mean, Nasser was a big supporter of African liberation movements, right? I mean, he writes, like I said, about the African Circle in 1954. Nasser was very much influenced by the Mao Rebellion. Nasser, you know, got involved in the Congo crisis in the early 1960s. Nasser supported Nekrumah after his removal from power in 1966. Nasser was very active at the 1955 Bandung conference and was active in forging links of solidarity across Afro-Asia, right?

And so, yes, I mean, part of the Nassar's story absolutely belongs and within that broader context of African liberation movements and pan-Africanism. And, you know, part of the Nassar's story is also about the first of those three circles, right? shared destiny for Arab people in the region. And, you know, I think this is, I know this wasn't your question, Adnan, but it is something that's on my mind because it's important to think about in our context today, right? I mean, in 1948, Nosser returned from Palestine, right, after the dispossession of its

native population. And, you know, reflecting on that journey to Palestine, he wrote that quote, I have the quote here somewhere, that it was a remarkable consciousness of our fate that Rafah was not the last boundary of our country, and that a sphere of security compelled us to defend the frontiers of our brethren with whom we were destined to live together in one region, right? So in this quote, I mean, Nasser really recognizes that the manifold fates of Arabs who for centuries, right, had lived in an integrated area, were inextricably linked. And his description of Raffa has an anti-border of sorts, right, a kind of passage that

connects people with a shared destiny, stands in stark contrast to the way. hey, you know, the Raffa border is understood by the military and intelligence officers who currently rule Egypt. And so I think, you know, one of Nasser's most important insights was that the inhabitants of the Arab world shared a common destiny, right? And that their common liberation was, you know, interlinked among inhabitants across the region. And that this extended beyond the Arab world as well. and that solidarity among all colonized and all oppressed peoples was imperative. That, in fact, actually, is exactly why I was asking you that question, Ahmed. So I'm so glad for your answer because you pulled the threads together that I was trying to get at,

that like the anti-colonial sort of thought in that book, philosophy of the revolution and the larger project and his involvement is of relevance to African history. and you gave us wonderful examples of his support for contemporary anti-colonial movements and so on. And also that's just so important having some sense of solidarity in a political imagination that transcends just nation states because given you as you've been analyzing and as Samiram even, you know, you mentioned his discussion, the place of Egypt or of any particular location within the world imperialist, you know, capitalist. system means that to really resist and achieve freedom, liberation, social justice, and national development, you know, sovereign development, you know, you're going to have to have some kind of project or program or dream that brings in other components within that world system. And, you know, we see that, you know, tentatively in those three circles of, you know,

Abdon Nasser. And so even if some people look at him, you know, with nostalgia in a kind of maybe overly conservative way because, of course, you see the films from the time. And it's just like, oh, wow, we were, you know, there's some modernity there, you know, all these kind of images of from that wonderful, you know, those films from from the 50s, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, that it's, sometimes it can be confirmed as a, you know, make Egypt great again kind of project. But, you know, what you were just talking about is the real, you know, kind of, you know, benefit of studying this history is thinking about, well, how in our own time, especially since you mentioned several times, the very important kind of way in which, you know, Israel was so crucial, you know, in defining and patterning and limiting, you know, these projects of liberation, you know, over militarization of the economy, the war. you know and of course what we're what we've what we've seen today and so anyway I just have to thank you so much for that final wrap up because it really brought together the threads that I actually

was after and thinking in in in my mind so thank you oh thank you I appreciate it yeah unfortunately Adnan has to run now so we're going to wrap up this conversation again listeners our guest was Ahmed Schorh hopefully I was okay with the pronunciation or at least somewhat close. Again, he's a professor at Swarthmore College. And his book is Harvests of Liberation, Cotton Capitalism and the End of Empire in Egypt out May from Stanford University Press. Professor, it was great having you on the show. Is there anything that you would like to direct the listeners to to find more of your work, including the book, but anything else that you'd like to direct them to as well? No, it's just the book for now. I have a couple of other

writing projects that are in the pipeline, but that'll be further into the future. So thank you. All right. I hope that we can have you back on the show to discuss the book once it's out. Adnan has to run, so I will read him out. You can follow Adnan on Twitter at Adnan A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N. Adnan's show, which you previously knew as the Mudge list, is now retitled the Adnan Hussein show and is completely independent from his university, which means

Adnan can say anything he wants on that show now. So be sure to subscribe to the Adnan Hussain show on YouTube or your podcast apps of choice. As for me, listeners, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995-H-H-U-C-K-1995. As for guerrilla history, you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this, both within our African revolutions and decolonization series, as well as without, by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history, and follow the show on social media to keep up with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually and collectively. You can find us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, on Instagram, Gorilla underscore History,

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