Book

Home Front Egypt: Famine, Disease, and Death During the Great War

When Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire in 1914, General Reginald Wingate assured Egyptians that this was not their war to fight. It was a promise Britain broke almost immediately.

Home Front Egypt tells the story of what the First World War cost Egypt’s poorest people — the fellahin (agricultural workers) and urban poor who made up the vast majority of the country’s population. It is a history of hunger, disease, and death that takes place far from the battlefield: in the villages of the Nile Delta, in the crowded streets of Cairo and Alexandria, and in the fields where the harvest rotted because the men who should have brought it in had been conscripted into British labor battalions.

The book argues that the war did not arrive in an otherwise healthy society. Egypt’s cotton monoculture economy had been structurally fragile for decades — its smallholders driven into debt by a financial system engineered to serve European interests, its soil depleted by monoculture, its people weakened by diseases contracted from irrigation canals built to grow cotton. The country had been transformed from one of the world’s great grain exporters into a net importer dependent on food it could no longer grow. The war broke what was already under severe strain.

Cotton markets collapsed overnight. Food prices spiraled. The government’s attempts to control prices and ensure supply failed repeatedly — and by autumn 1916, the average Egyptian family could no longer afford sufficient food. The crisis the existing scholarship dates to 1917 or 1918 had, in fact, begun two years earlier.

The book traces the consequences of that hunger through the epidemic diseases it produced, culminating in the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed at least one in every hundred Egyptians in its final ten weeks — a catastrophe that has been largely written out of Egyptian history because it struck hardest where Egyptian history has looked the least: in the countryside, among the poor.

Drawing on the Arabic press, official records, and Egyptian scholarship that has long been examining these questions — often in Arabic, and often without the international attention it deserves — Home Front Egypt recovers the lived experience of people who left few records of their own. It argues that the celebrated 1919 Revolution is only fully intelligible as the culmination of a much longer story of dispossession, exhaustion, and accumulated outrage.

Current status: The manuscript is in active development. Chapter outlining is underway.