This article examines one of the key campaigns waged by the British Army during the 1919–22 ‘crisis of empire’. The suppression of the Egyptian Revolution in March-April 1919 witnessed the British employ a number of techniques that would come to characterise interwar colonial policing and post–1945 counter-insurgency, including collective punishment, summary military courts, and repressive violence. The campaign was characterised by a permissive operating environment, underpinned by martial law powers, in which local commanders and military units had considerable freedom to operate. Despite the considerable variation in local practice, the employment of force in Egypt was characterised by the concept of moral effect; violence was intended to psychologically overwhelm the Egyptian population. The suppression of the Egyptian Revolution in 1919 thus highlights the extent to which the crisis of empire both heralded elements of a new 20 th -century colonial policing model and looked back to 19 th -century imperial warfare.

The Jewish Legion was one of the most idiosyncratic units that served in the British imperial army of General Edmund Allenby, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), in the Middle East during the latter stages of the First World War. The Legion drew its personnel from disparate range of nationalities in Britain, the Middle East, and America. The 38th Battalion carried out patrols towards the Turkish defences and dealt with several snipers, prior to the main EEF assault in September. Percy Radcliffe agreed with Lieutenant-General Walter Congreve, Edmund Allenby's successor as EEF commander, that any move to create a large Jewish military force ran the risk of emboldening the Jewish community. The Grand Mufti's son survived the attack unscathed, but as the EEF's commander noted, the attack created considerable ill feeling against the Jewish battalion. A number of prominent assimilationists saw the Legion as a distinct threat to those Jews who were serving the war effort by fighting in British regiments.

On 29 October 1914 the Ottoman fleet engaged the Russian Black Sea fleet in battle, with the minor skirmish resulting in the sinking of a Russian gunboat and a mine-layer. Two days later the Ottoman fleet bombarded the ports of Sevastopol and Odessa; the route to an Ottoman clash with Russia, and subsequent entry into the First World War, was now set. By 2 November Constantinople had entered into what would become, in the American diplomat and historian George Kennan’s over-used phrase, the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. The damage inflicted in these actions was relatively minor, certainly in comparison to the destruction unleashed over the next four years in the Middle East and the vast battles at that point taking place in France, Flanders and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, the violence involved in the story of the Ottoman entry into the war neatly encapsulates the complexities of the shift from war to peace experienced by a variety of states, empires and peoples in 1914.

Violence in Defence of Empire: The British Army and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution The Egyptian revolution of spring 1919 posed a serious challenge to British imperial rule in the wake of the First World War, and has traditionally been examined solely through political, diplomatic and economic lenses. Within these approaches the counter-revolutionary response of the British colonial state, principally involving the use of military force, has been ignored. The British military campaign to suppress the 1919 Egyptian revolution was one of the most significant and violent operations launched to contain anti-colonial nationalist unrest during the 1919–1922 «crisis of empire» period. This article addresses the general development of the campaign to end the revolutionary upheaval and focuses in on two case studies to examine how British army units, often isolated from assistance, dealt with unrest. The violent nature of the campaign to suppress the revolution highlights the flexible and context specific nature of British imperial policing as it developed after 1918, and challenges assumptions on the «minimum necessary force» approach that has come to characterise Britain's small colonial wars of the twentieth century.

Journal Article Changing War: The British Army, the Hundred Days Campaign and the Birth of the Royal Air Force, 1918. By Gary Sheffield and Peter Gray (eds). Get access Changing War: The British Army, the Hundred Days Campaign and the Birth of the Royal Air Force, 1918. By Gary Sheffield and Peter Gray (eds). Bloomsbury , London , 2013 . 269 pp. ISBN 9781441156334 , £70.00 (hardback). James Kitchen James Kitchen Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 26, Issue 4, December 2015, Pages 629–631, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwu041 Published: 25 August 2014

Jim Beach’s Haig’s Intelligence seeks to tackle one of the most enduring debates in the British historiography of the First World War: the question of Douglas Haig’s competence as commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front. Beach scrutinizes this controversial military figure through the lens of the BEF’s intelligence gathering and analysis system, offering an avenue to assess how Haig formed his opinions of the German Army and its shifting battlefield capabilities. The intelligence machinery of General Headquarters (GHQ) has been the subject of great debate, with criticisms raised as early as 1917 that it produced a skewed interpretation of the military reality on the Western Front, which in turn led to poor decision-making from Haig. Lloyd George—no friend of Haig or his attritional method of conducting the war—argued that Brigadier-General John Charteris, Haig’s chief of intelligence, was a malign influence. Charteris was alleged to have consistently produced an overly optimistic interpretation of the damage inflicted on the Germans by repeated British and French military efforts. This view was lent credence by the reminiscences of General James Marshall-Cornwall, who described Charteris as a man who saw it as ‘his duty to keep up Douglas Haig’s morale’, even if this meant obscuring the sanguinary reality of attritional warfare on the Western Front.

By the time the campaign ended in Palestine in October 1918, the majority of Britain's imperial army, known as the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF), was made up of units drawn from the Indian Army. In order to analyze fully the process of Indianization it is necessary to examine how it operated at lower levels of organization within the EEF. To prevent the Indianization process impacting on the combat effectiveness of the division, the new Indian battalions were slowly integrated into the front line. The ultimate test of the sepoys came in September 1918 when Allenby decided to launch his assault on the Turkish defences. The 10th Division did not begin its attack on the enemy line until late on 19 September, after the 20th Corps had already decimated the Turkish formations to their left on the coastal plain. The initial assault was planned and broke through the first line trenches. Keywords:Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF); Indianization; Palestine; Turkish defences

Much of the historiography of the First World War in the Middle East suggests that the soldiers of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force motivated themselves by seeing the British campaign against the Ottoman Empire as a crusade against Islam. The construction of the campaign as a crusade was a product of the need for politicians to portray the Egyptian Expeditionary Force's operations to the British public as relevant to the wider course of the First World War. Inter-war memoirists and novelists also chose this topos in order to boost the sales of their works. By examining the letters and diaries of soldiers from across the British Empire, it is clear that this assumption is erroneous. A religious fringe within the British Imperial Army in Palestine did perceive the campaign in such terms, but they were only a minority. Instead most soldiers focused on the Islamic culture that they encountered in the Middle East, demonstrating that a strong vernacular orientalism was present in early twentieth-century British culture.