Egypt

The Kingdom of Egypt was nominally independent from 1922, when Britain unilaterally ended the protectorate it had declared in 1914, and the word nominally is the whole of its history. Britain reserved four matters entirely to itself: imperial communications, defence, the protection of foreign interests and minorities, and the Sudan. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 formalised a garrison in the Canal Zone for twenty years. When war came the country was a base rather than a belligerent: Egypt did not declare war on Germany until February 1945, while the decisive North African campaigns were fought on its territory, and the Alamein line lay sixty miles from Alexandria. In February 1942, with Rommel advancing and King Farouk unwilling to appoint a government Britain trusted, the British ambassador surrounded Abdeen Palace with tanks and presented the king with an abdication instrument and an alternative; Farouk appointed the Wafd government. The humiliation was public and it radicalised a generation of Egyptian officers who watched it, among them Nasser and Sadat. Defeat in the 1948 war in Palestine, corruption scandals over the arms supplied to that army, and the burning of central Cairo in January 1952 destroyed what authority the monarchy retained. The Free Officers took power on 23 July 1952 and Farouk sailed from Alexandria three days later; his infant son was proclaimed and the monarchy formally abolished on 18 June 1953, when the republic was declared. Farouk was eighteen at his accession and thirty-two at his abdication. The Abdeen incident was never formally protested by the Egyptian government. Nasser later said it was the moment he decided the army had to act. Egypt declared war in time to qualify as a founding member of the United Nations.

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