Peasants in Revolt — Egypt 1919

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century.1Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires.2For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state.3. The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation (wafd) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.