@chebhocine @forsoothsayer As @chebhocine notes, I deal with this issue at some length in my book, which will not be out until this summer. (Thanks for the plug, Hussein.) I'll be giving a talk along these lines at MESA in New Orleans on Friday evening, so here's a preview of the argument:
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer The central organizing premise of British rule throughout the decades of the occupation was that Egyptians, as racially distinctive human subjects, were capable of no more and no less than a bare recognition of basic material interests.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer On this basis, they argued that Egyptian peasants might, under a just, technocratic regime, become liberal economic subjects capable of managing the transactions of modern commercial society to advance their own interests and those of Egyptian society as a whole.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer Politics as such, however, required a capacity to think and act beyond the horizons of material self-interest, and it was that capacity, the British claimed, that Egyptians, and peasants in particular, lacked.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer On this understanding, rooted as it was in the racial taxonomies of British colonial thought, peasants were not capable of *properly* political thought and action. This was the reason the British gave for shutting down existing avenues of local political deliberation in the 1890s
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer As a more organized and vocal opposition to occupation began to take shape by the early 1900s, British officials consistently claimed that what claimed for itself the name of "nationalist politics" was only ever the reflection of narrow class interests casting outsize shadows.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer This economistic premise of British rule was articulated with sufficient clarity, regularity, and publicity that the leading political theorists and strategists of the nationalist movement took it up as the central object of anti-colonial critique, in both thought and practice.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer (I'll jump to 1919 in a moment, but it's worth mentioning here that it was as a narrative vehicle for explaining that the question of British rule could not be reduced to the calculus of the balance sheet that the nationalist press first identified Dinshawai as significant.)
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer Back to 1919 now: In light of this prior history of British colonial thought, "peasant politics" as such was an impossibility. Manifestations of discontent in the countryside could only ever be a reaction against adverse economic conditions.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer In early 1915, Cromer dealt at some length in his preface to *Abbas Hilmi II* on the fact that there had been no notable incidence of rural insurrection since 1882. He explained that absence as evidence for how British focus on "material interests" yielded peasant acquiescence.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer So here's the kicker: When the uprising occurred after the war, the rural insurgency seemed to pose a problem for this well-established line of reasoning because it looked like peasant politics of a kind the British had long deemed impossible.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer The British were not terribly surprised by the mobilization in the cities in March 1919, despite the sheer magnitude of the demonstrations. They were, as it was unfolding, utterly shocked by the rural dimensions of the uprising.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer Their befuddlement was compounded by the fact that the high-ranking officials who were communicating with London were largely unaware of the extent of the rural devastation that scholars like Ellis Goldberg, Kyle Anderson, and Alia Mossallam have documented.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer In other words, rural insurgency was confusing and frightening to them precisely because many of them believed, in the spring of 1919, that Egypt's rural population had actually benefited from the war. Lacking an economic explanation, they first resorted to conspiracy theories
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer So the central task of the Milner Mission was to provide an explanation for forms of rural contestation that the British had for decades deemed unthinkable. And the explanation they arrived at was entirely unsurprising:
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer In arriving at the conclusion the British war effort tin Egypt had been far more devastating for the peasantry than officials in March-April 1919 had recognized, Milner was able to provide an explanation for the rural dimensions of the uprising that reaffirmed colonial economism:
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer By criticizing the mismanagement of the Labor Corps and Britain's practices of rural requisition, the Milner Report was thereby able to explain 1919 as a predictable reaction to economic hardship and *not* any kind of indication that peasant could think and act politically.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer So my disagreement with recent historiography on 1919 in the countryside is not that it seeks to document and recover the dire experiences of working peoples in the face of war-time extractivism in all its brutal rapacity.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer The problem is that treating an account of economic hardship as an adequate explanation for what was taking place reproduces the very same argument the colonial archive itself is making and thereby affirms a distinction between economics and politics that organized British rule.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer I would just add that many distinguishing tactics and practices of the nationalist movement well before 1919 aimed specifically at exploding that distinction as a basis for claims to political subjectivity. Uses of the strike as a repertoire of contention are an obvious example.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer The strike might have been a "modular" form by the early 1900s, but at the time it was widely understood that this was a practice particular to certain kinds of groups (i.e. "workers") and certain kinds of demands.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer Because this circulating form of collective action carried with it these expectations about who could or should use it to leverage particular kinds of claims, the choice to employ the strike--as a kind of willful category error--became a way of smudging political taxonomies.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer There had been a major wave of strike actions between 1908 and 1910 by a range of groups that had never gone on strike before and/or had been regarded as in one way or another "apolitical." Not by accident, those same groups were first to mobilize in March 1919.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer From this perspective, the suggestion (whether in the colonial archive or in recent historiography) that what was taking place in urban areas was a movement by "the afandi class" entirely overlooks the novelty and significance of what was taking place.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer As it was (widely) employed in the colonial archive, "the afandi class" was a slippery and capacious category that glossed over the incredible diversity of urban groups and constituencies that mobilized in March 1919, many of them for the first time.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer And as I understand it, the fact that may of these groups--lawyers, public sector employees, bank clerks, etc.--chose to announce their participation in a growing movement by going on strike was decidedly *not* about a simple reaction against wartime hardship.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer The choice to adopt the practice of the strike was, by this point, a well-established way of announcing a claim to political subject hood in defiance of the expectations ascribed through dominant social taxonomies.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer As was true in other places at the same time, this was a moment of radical expansion for the possibilities of mass politics and mass democracy. Lumping the diverse constituencies of that mass movement within "the afandi class" was a way of denying that novel transformation.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer Last, somewhat polemical, point: Without addressing the politics of the archive, those who seek to portray 1919 as two movements--a peasant insurgency "coopted" by a liberal nationalist movement of "the afandi class"--risk reproducing arguments of colonial propaganda.
@chebhocine @forsoothsayer To this last point, in conclusion, here's a document in which British officials are describing the form of class analysis that organized their counter-revolutionary propaganda during the revolt itself: 
