ABSTRACT
In June, 1906, peasants in the Egyptian village of Dinshawai attacked a group of British soldiers who had inadvertently set fire to the village threshing grounds while hunting pigeons. Determined to use the incident as a warning after one of the soldiers died from his wounds, the British demanded that a special tribunal try and punish the perpetrators. In the end, officials hanged four villagers and imprisoned or publicly flogged sixteen others. This confrontation illustrates two fundamental features of world history between 1750 and 1945. First, it highlights the authority that industrialized powers enjoyed around the globe. Dinshawai inflamed passions precisely because it pitted an Egyptian court against Egyptian peasants all at the behest of Great Britain, for the British enjoyed de facto dominion over the country despite Egypt’s nominal autonomy. Moreover, the hunting party that sparked the incident was either ignorant of or chose to disregard the fact that many peasants raised pigeons as food. In the eyes of Dinshawai’s residents, British soldiers had set fire to their assets while hunting their property. The public execution of friends and neighbors demonstrated to all, however, that Europeans controlled both resources and lives wherever they went. That strength arose from industrial might, which, by the twentieth century, fueled similar imperialist claims by Japan and the United States. Second, the popular anger that eventually took so many lives denotes the pent-up rage that coursed below the surface in many colonial societies. This resentment sprang from the economic and social dislocations that accompanied imperialism, for industrialized nations typically used their power to restructure the world to suit their interests. This usually meant the destruction of traditional patterns of agriculture and manufacture in order to feed the industrialized nations’ growing appetite for raw materials. Between 1750 and 1945, then, the world economy expanded and intensified, drawing the various parts of the globe together as never before. All of this had dramatic ramifications for the history of poverty.
