Tewfik Pasha
Tewfik was made khedive because Europe removed his father, and he kept the throne by asking Britain to occupy his country. His father had borrowed on a scale that made Egypt insolvent - the Suez Canal, the railways, the opera house and the Sudan campaigns, financed at rates that assumed cotton prices would stay where the American civil war had put them. When they collapsed, Egypt's revenues were placed under Anglo-French supervision, and when his father resisted, the powers had the Ottoman sultan depose him in 1879. Tewfik was installed at twenty-seven as a man expected to cooperate, and did. The revolt that followed was the first modern Egyptian nationalist movement. Egyptian-born officers, excluded from the senior ranks by a Turco-Circassian elite and facing pay cuts imposed by the European controllers, demanded a constitution, a parliament with power over the budget, and an end to foreign supervision. By 1882 their leader was minister of war and the khedive was effectively their prisoner. Riots in Alexandria in June killed dozens of Europeans; a British fleet bombarded the city in July; and Tewfik went aboard a British warship, denounced the movement as a rebellion against himself, and invited the intervention that followed. A British army landed and destroyed the Egyptian force in a twenty-minute action at dawn in September, and the occupation that followed lasted seventy-four years. Tewfik reigned for another decade as a constitutional fiction: the British consul-general governed, the Egyptian ministries executed, and the debt was serviced in full. In the same years Egypt lost the Sudan entirely to a religious rising it could not put down, and the garrison sent to evacuate it was destroyed at Khartoum. He died at thirty-nine, having presided over the end of Egypt's independence and the beginning of the movement that would eventually recover it.
- Lived: 1852 CE – 1892 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
