Abbas II of Egypt
Abbas II was the last khedive of Egypt, from January 1892, when his father Tewfik died and he was brought from the Theresianum in Vienna at seventeen, to December 1914, when the British, having declared war on the Ottoman Empire whose nominal vassal he was, deposed him while he was in Constantinople and made his uncle Hussein Kamel sultan of a British protectorate. The twenty-two years were the argument with Cromer. The young khedive wanted to govern, the consul-general who had governed since the occupation of 1882 did not intend to let him. The two crises of 1893, when he dismissed the prime minister without asking and was made to take a British nominee, and of January 1894, when he criticised the British officers of the Egyptian army on a frontier inspection and Kitchener resigned until he apologised, settled who governed. After that he was a khedive who signed. He turned to the nationalists instead. He financed Mustafa Kamil's National Party and its newspaper through the 1890s, and patronised the Ottoman connection and the sultan. Then, after Cromer left in 1907 and Gorst came with orders to conciliate him, turned on the nationalists too. By 1910, when the prime minister Butros Ghali was assassinated, he had no party but his own household and his estates, which were very large. The British found him useful and contemptible in equal parts. He was in Constantinople when the war began. He was shot in the face by a would-be assassin there in July 1914, recovered, and stayed. The British deposed him on 19 December 1914 for adhering to the king's enemies, which he had. The Ottomans had named him ruler of an Egypt they meant to reconquer. He spent the war in Vienna and Switzerland intriguing with both sides. He was declared to have abdicated by the British in 1922 when they gave his uncle's son Fuad the title of king. He took a settlement from Fuad's government in 1931 in exchange for renouncing every claim. He lived in Switzerland and died in Geneva in December 1944. He was buried in Cairo. He was born at Alexandria. The Egypt he lost was the one in which the British ruled through a khedive and did not have to say so.
- Lived: 1874 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: khedive, monarch
