27. Wilfrid S. Blunt, ‘Recent Events in Arabia’, Fortnightly Review, May 1880, p. 708.
28. Ibid., p. 719.
29. Blunt, Secret History, p. 71.
30. Ibid., p. 80.
31. Blunt, ‘Recent Events in Arabia’, p. 708.
32. Blunt, Secret History, p. 22.
33. Blunt, ‘The Egyptian Revolution: A Personal Narrative’, Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, September 1882, p. 325.
34. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 237.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., p. 197.
37. For an account of Burton’s texts as ‘operating different linguistic consciousnesses, enunciative set-ups and forms of authority’ towards creating an ‘unfixed, nomadic persona’, see Fréderic Regard, ‘Fieldwork as Self-Harrowing: Richard Burton’s Cultural Evolution (1851–56)’, in Regard, ed., British Narratives of Exploration (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 181. Blunt was keenly attuned to difference without necessarily seeing himself as ‘confronted with alterity’. Ibid.
38. Blunt, Secret History, p. 81.
39. Ibid., p. 96.
40. Ibid.
41. Wilfred S. Blunt, The Future of Islam (Dublin: Nonsuch, 2007 [1882]).
42. Ibid., p. 8.
43. Ibid., p. 22.
44. Ibid., p. 191.
45. Ibid., p. 25.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., p. 128.
48. Ibid., p. 129.
49. ‘Medicine and Colonialism’, in Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, transl. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1959), pp. 126, 128.
50. Ibid., p. 126.
51. Blunt, Future of Islam, 135.
52. Ibid., pp. 135–6.
53. Ibid., p. 136.
54. Ibid., p. 175.
55. Blunt, ‘Egyptian Revolution’, p. 333.
56. Ibid., p. 324.
57. Ibid.; Blunt, Secret History, p. 217.
58. Blunt, Secret History, p. 115; Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal Ad-Din ‘Al-Afghani’: A Political Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), p. 101. Newspapers established or edited by Afghani’s followers included Mirat ash-Sharq and Misr al-Fatat (Jeune Égypte).
59. Blunt, Secret History, p. 166.
60. Ibid., p. 167.
61. Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1882 (London: Rivington’s, 1883), p. 152.
62. Blunt, Secret History, p. 178.
63. Ibid., p. 154.
64. Ibid., pp. 177–8.
65. Ibid., p. 178.
66. Ibid., p. 179.
67. Lady Gregory, Arabi and His Household (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), p. 6.
68. Blunt, Secret History, pp. 148–9.
69. Ibid., p. 159.
70. Ibid.
71. Lady Anne Blunt, Journals and Correspondence, p. 145.
72. Ahmad Urabi, Muthakirat Urabi: Kashf Al-sitar ‘an sir al-Asrar fi al-nahda al-Masriya al-mashhura bi al-thawra al-Urabiya sanat 1298 Hijriya was sanat 1881–1882 Miliadiya (The Urabi Memoirs: Uncovering Secrets of the Egyptian Awakening Commonly Known as the Urabian Revolution 1298 Hijri, 1881–1882 CE) (Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub Al-Misriya, 1925). I am grateful to Dr Heba Youssef for translations from this text.
73. The other term used to refer to Egyptians is al-wataniyoon, from al-watan, or homeland. So also onsor or ‘national race’.
74. Urabi, Muthakirat Urab, p. 24.
75. Mounah A. Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt (1882–1922) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), p. 36.
76. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, p. 20.
77. Ibid.
78. Blunt, ‘Egyptian Revolution’, p. 324.
79. Ibid., p. 328.
80. Ibid., p. 344.
81. Ibid.
82. Blunt, Secret History, p. 220.
83. Sir E. Malet to Earl Granville, no. 4 in House of Commons Command Papers, Further Correspondence Respecting the Affairs of Egypt (London: Harrison, 1882).
84. Blunt, Secret History, p. 213.
85. Blunt, ‘Egyptian Revolution’, p. 332.
86. Ibid., p. 345.
87. Mr W. S. Blunt to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, MP, no. 7 in House of Commons Command Papers, Further Correspondence.
88. Annual Register, 1882, p. 147.
89. See William Gladstone, Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East (London: National Press Agency, 1884 [first published in The Nineteenth Century in 1877]).
90. Blunt, Secret History, pp. 181–2, emphasis in original.
91. John Stuart Mill, ‘A Few Words on Non-intervention’, in Mill, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867 [first published in Fraser’s Magazine, December 1859]), p. 168.
92. For an illuminating discussion of liberalism’s demand for ‘equivalence’ in the context of empire, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
93. Edward Dicey, ‘England in Egypt’, Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 12: 67 (November 1882), pp. 807–8.
94. Blunt, Secret History, p. 188.
95. ‘Programme of the National Party of Egypt’, The Times, 3 January 1882.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.
98. See Chapter 5 of Cole, Colonialism and Revolution.
99. Blunt, Secret History, p. 111.
100. Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’, Including a Translation of the ‘Refutation of the Materialists’ from the Original Persian (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), p. 43.
101. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, p. 73.
102. Blunt, Secret History, pp. 109–10.
103. Ibid., p. 112.
104. Keddie notes that ‘Afghani used to spend long hours holding forth at cafés … where he would drink tea, smoke cigarettes, and gather around him large groups of disciples and curious onlookers, as he expounded his ideas’. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’, p. 84.
105. Ibid., p. 110.
106. Dispatch to The Times, 20 August 1879, cited in ibid., p. 117. Elie Kedourie cites an account from M. E. Vauquelin’s articles for the French left-wing newspaper L’ Intransigeant, which claims that, on 3 August, 1879, Afghani preached at the Hasan Mosque before an audience of 4,000 people. The khedive, he told his audience, was ‘compelled to serve – consciously or not – British ambitions, and ended his speech by a war-cry against the foreigner and by a call for a revolution to save the independence of Egypt and establish its liberty’. Ibid., pp. 29–30. Kedourie also points to claims that this speech directly caused a group of Syrian Christians to band together with some Muslims to form a society, publish a newspaper and submit a plan of reforms to the prime minister. The official reason given for Afghani’s expulsion a few days later was that he had organized a secret society aimed at ‘the ruin of religion and rule’. Elie Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh: an Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (Oxford: Routledge, 2008 [1966]), p. 31.
107. Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 50.
108. ‘Afghani’s Egyptian followers continued to be active in politics after his expulsion, and several of them worked for the Urabi government after it took power, being subsequently exiled after the British victory and occupation of Egypt’. Keddie, Islamic Response, p. 21.
109. Keddie, drawing on Rida’s Tarikh, in Sayyid Jamal ad-Din ‘al-Afghani’, p. 101.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., pp. 101–2.
112. Ibid., p. 106. Keddie describes Afghani as one who ‘in large part expressed a mood and viewpoint that was in any case beginning to come to the fore in the Muslim world … a mood of many who did not wish simply to continue borrowing from the
West or bowing to growing Western domination, but wished rather to find in indigenous traditions, both Islamic and national, precedents for the reforms and self-strengthening they wanted to undertake’. ‘From Afghani to Khomeini: Introduction to the 1983 Edition’, in Keddie, Islamic Response, p. xiii.
113. Afghani, ‘Lecture on Teaching and Learning’, in Keddie, Islamic Response, p. 101.
114. Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire, p. 84.
115. Afghani, ‘Lecture on Teaching and Learning’, p. 104.
116. Ibid., p. 107.
117. Afghani, ‘The Benefits of Philosophy’, in Keddie, Islamic Response, p. 110.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., p. 115.
121. Afghani, ‘Answer of Jamal ad-Din to Renan, Journal des débats, May 18, 1883’, in Keddie, Islamic Response, pp. 181–7.
122. Afghani, ‘Benefits of Philosophy’, p. 113.
123. Ibid., p. 114.
124. Ibid., p. 116.
125. Ibid., p. 114.
126. Ibid., p. 120.
127. Ibid., p. 122.
128. Keddie, ‘Sayyid Jamal ad-Din’s Ideas’, in Islamic Response, p. 38.
129. Blunt, Secret History, p. 212.
130. Ibid., p. 211.
131. Ibid., p. 190.
132. Ibid., p. 212.
133. In his private papers, notebooks titled ‘From Alms to Oblivion’ (Part VI, Chapter 6), Blunt writes: ‘I have been many times on the point of making my public declaration of faith, if only as a protest and proof of my standing on the side of Eastern right against Western wrong’, but what has deterred him is lack of belief in a future life. He also says that, had he actually been in Egypt during the bombardment, he would have ‘proclaimed myself a Moslem’. Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
134. Blunt, Secret History, p. 243.
135. Annual Register, 1882, p. 139.
136. Blunt, ‘Egyptian Revolution’, p. 346.
137. Ibid.
138. Blunt, Secret History, p. 225.
139. Ibid., p. 419; Blunt, ‘Egyptian Revolution’, p. 333.
140. Annual Register, 1882, p. 148.
141. Ibid., p. 152.
142. Ibid., pp. 151, 156.
143. Ibid., p. 147.
144. HC Deb 12 July 1882, vol. 272, c. 191.
145. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, p. 3. Cole goes on to observe: ‘The British invaded in order to ensure that a process of state formation did not succeed in creating a new sort of stable order that would end European privileges and threaten the security of European property and investments’. Ibid., p. 17.
146. Sir Wilfrid Lawson ‘said the time had come when those who felt deeply the position of dishonour in which the country was placed should not hold their peace if they were not to be held responsible for a national crime. They had been drifting into war with their eyes open, and he took blame to himself for not having spoken out earlier. Now they were at war, and they had no distinct information for what they were fighting, and there had been no declaration of war … It was said that the Government wished to maintain the rights of the people of Egypt, but the way they showed their regard was to go out and shoot them down’. Cited in the Annual Register, 1882, p. 147.
147. Blunt, Secret History, p. 417.
148. Ibid., p. 244.
149. ‘Egypt’, in Frederic Harrison, National and Social Problems (London: Macmillan, 1908), p. 209.
150. Ibid., p. 202.
151. Ibid., p. 200.
152. Ibid., p. 196.
153. Ibid., p. 198.
154. Ibid., p. 200. Harrison summarizes imperialism in Egypt as a series of manoeuvres involving bullying, coaxing and influencing as needed, and setting up the handy device of the Control. The latter allowed Egyptians to pay ‘for the luxury of not being allowed to raise or to expend their own taxes as they please’, even though half the total revenue was carried out of the country to foreign bondholders. Ibid., 197–8.
155. Ibid., p. 201.
156. Ibid.
157. Ibid., p. 203.
158. Ibid.
159. Ibid.
160. ‘An Appeal to Mr Gladstone’, 1 July 1882, in Harrison, National and Social Problems, pp. 212–13.
161. Ibid., p. 218.
162. Ibid., p. 216.
163. Ibid., p. 222.
164. Ibid., p. 173.
165. John Seymour Keay, Spoiling the Egyptians: A Tale of Shame, Told from the Blue Books, 4th edn (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), p. 33, emphasis in original.
166. Ibid., p. 53.
167. Ibid., pp. 5, 49, 79.
168. Ibid., p. 54.
169. Ibid.
170. Ibid.
171. ‘Empire and Humanity’, in Harrison, National and Social Problems, p. 261.
172. Ibid., p. 260.
173. Ibid., p. 259.
174. Ibid., p. 193.
175. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, Vol. II (1870–1910) (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), p. 126.
176. Cited in Broadley, How We Defended Arábi, p. 349.
177. Ibid.
178. Ibid., pp. 350, 349.
179. Ibid., p. 350.
180. Wilfrid S. Blunt, The New Situation in Egypt (London: Burns & Oates, 1908), p. 15.
181. Wilfrid S. Blunt, The Wind and the Whirlwind (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1883), p. 5.
182. Ibid., p. 7.
183. Ibid., pp. 11–12, 14.
184. Mohammed Abdu, ‘Interview with Sheyk Mohammed Abdu, as published in the “Pall Mall Gazette” ’, 17 August 1884, Appendix E in Wilfrid S. Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum: Being a Personal Narrative of Events in Continuation of ‘A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt’ (London: S. Swift, 1911), p. 623.
185. Ibid.
186. Ibid., p. 626.
187. Blunt, ‘The Shame of the Nineteenth Century: (a Letter Addressed to the “Times”)’, (S.I., 1900).
188. Ibid., pp.1–2.
189. Ibid., p. 4.
190. Ibid., p. 5.
191. Ibid.
192. Ibid., p. 1.
4. Passages to Internationalism
1. Wilfred S. Blunt, India under Ripon: A Private Diary by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Continued from His ‘Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt’ (London: T. F. Unwin, 1909), pp. 7–8.
2. Wilfrid S. Blunt, Ideas about India (London: Kegan Paul, 1885), p. vii.
3. Ibid., p. xi.
4. Annie Besant, India and the Empire: A Lecture and Various Papers on Indian Grievances (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1914), pp. 3–4.
5. Blunt, India under Ripon, p. 1.
6. Ibid., p. 223.
7. Blunt, Ideas about India, p. 3.
8. Ibid., p. 7.
9. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
10. Ibid., p. 10.
11. Ibid., p. 74.
12. Ibid., pp. 74–5.
13. Ibid., pp. 26–7.
14. Ibid., p. 174.
15. Ibid., p. 71.
16. Allan Octavian Hume, Old Man’s Hope, cited in Edward C. Moulton, ‘The Early Congress and the British Radical Connection’, in D. A. Low, ed., The Indian National Congress: Centenary Hindsights (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 48.
17. Besant, India and the Empire, p. 3.
18. Edward Thompson and G. T. Garratt, Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 540.
19. Edward C. Moulton, ‘British Radicals and India in the Early Twentieth Century’, in A. J. A. Morris, ed., Edwardian Radicalism 1900–1914 (London/Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 26.
20. Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 125–6.
21. J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy (London: P. S. King, 1909), p. 259.
22. Ibid., p. 259.
23. Ibid., p. 260.
24. Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left an
d the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 30.
25. Ibid., p. 32.
26. Marcus Morris, ‘From Anti-colonialism to Anti-imperialism: The Evolution of H. M. Hyndman’s Critique of Empire, c.1875–1905’, Historical Research 87: 236 (May 2014), p. 293. For a full accounting of the ambiguities in how Hyndman was seen in relation to imperial matters, see Claeys, Imperial Sceptics.
27. H. M. Hyndman, The Indian Famine and the Crisis in India (London: Edward Stanford, 1877), p. 6.
28. H. M. Hyndman, The Unrest in India (London: Twentieth-Century Press, 1907), p. 1.
29. Ibid., p. 2.
30. Ibid., p. 7.
31. Ibid., p. 8.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 9.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 11.
37. Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics, p. 32.
38. Hyndman, Unrest in India, p. 15.
39. The term is Owen’s.
40. Philip Snowden, ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’, in Keir Hardie, India: Impressions and Suggestions (London: Home Rule for India League [British Auxiliary], 1917), p. xi.
41. Sir Henry Cotton, New India: Or, India in Transition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907), p. 37.
42. Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-imperialism 1885–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 17.
43. I take my descriptive cue in the subheading for this section from Nicholas Owen’s ‘Edwardian Progressive Visitors to India’, Chapter 3 of The British Left and India. Owen writes: ‘After 1907, four Labour figures – Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as well as the Radical journalist H. W. Nevinson – visited India in quick succession, and their differing perceptions and recommendations provide a good cross-section of responses to the new Indian nationalism’. The phrase ‘the line of most resistance’ is used by H. W. Nevinson to describe the ‘Extremists’ in India. Ibid., pp. 84, 329.
44. Owen, The British Left and India, p. 50.
45. Ibid., pp. 61–2.
46. Ibid., p. 62.
47. Ibid., p. 81.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., p. 84.
50. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October 34 (1985), pp. 324–46.
51. Cotton, New India, pp. 29, 16.
52. Ibid., p. vi.
53. Cited in D. V. Tahmankar, Lokamanya Tilak: Father of Indian Unrest and Maker of Modern India (London: John Murray, 1956), p. 136.
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