ABSTRACT
‘It is a nasty business, and we have been much out of luck’, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, wrote to a colleague, Lord Spencer, in June 1882, referring to the tangled situation in Egypt. Few have doubted that the last thing which a British Liberal government, under William Gladstone and pledged to reverse the ‘forward’ foreign policy of the previous Conservative administration of Benjamin Disraeli, wanted was a military intervention in Egypt in 1882, followed by a prolonged occupation. It has been generally agreed by contemporaries and most historians that the British cabinet ‘muddled’ into the Egyptian occupation. How then did they get into this situation? A number of very different factors must be taken into account: Egypt's role as part of the collapsing Ottoman empire, the newly built Suez Canal and its significance for British communications with India, the investment of European financiers in Egypt and the diplomatic alignments of Europe at this time. [ Docs 6, 7. 8. 9, pp. 102, 103, 105, 107]
