Egypt's Occupation

Jakes, a historian, wrote a study of the political economy of British-occupied Egypt from 1882 to the First World War, working from Egyptian and British archives.

His central analytical concept is what he calls colonial economism: the argument, made by British administrators and particularly by Lord Cromer, that Egyptians were unsuited to political self-government but that British administration would deliver material prosperity, and that economic development therefore substituted for political rights. Jakes traces how this argument was constructed, how it justified the occupation to British and international audiences, and how Egyptian nationalists contested it.

The economic material examines what the occupation actually produced. Egypt was reorganised around cotton export, with irrigation infrastructure built to expand cultivation, land tenure reformed to support it, and a financial system oriented toward crop finance. Jakes documents the resulting exposure: an economy dependent on a single crop sold into world markets, financed by credit that expanded with the crop cycle, which produced the 1907 financial crisis in Egypt when international credit conditions tightened and land and share prices collapsed.

He argues that the occupation's economic record was far worse than its administrators claimed, that the benefits accrued substantially to European bondholders and to a narrow local elite, and that Egyptian critics at the time made these arguments in terms the historiography has largely ignored.

The book is academic history with a theoretical apparatus drawn from recent scholarship on capitalism and empire. The reference has not verified every empirical claim. The general subject, of how an export monoculture economy was constructed under colonial administration and what it produced, is relevant well beyond Egypt.