“Area in interim, presumably no-man’s land”
—Dec. 1956.

Such was the description of the Sinai provided by Sir John Walter Nicholls, the British Ambassador to Israel. They were his last words to the Sinai Mining Company at the end of the 1956 “Suez Crisis.” Following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a high-water mark of Arab Nationalist ambitions to gain sovereignty over infrastructures, shipping, and resources, Britain, France, and Israel attempted to invade Egypt in response. As a result of the loss of the canal, Britain experienced anxieties over potential depreciation of the Pound Sterling. The historian Stephen Galpern argues that the increasing costs of shipping through the canal, now owned by Egypt, limited Britain’s ability to cheaply transport oil from the Persian Gulf to Europe, putting the empire at risk of a dollar shortage. Britain had recently lost substantial outlets that backed its currency value, including the closure of the Haifa refinery since 1948, and Iran’s nationalization of its own oil resources. In a desperate attempt to maintain its own sphere of imperial relevance amidst the rise of US geopolitical hegemony, Britain pursued war.

In the pursuit of war against Egypt, Britain’s partners in the tripartite aggression, France and Israel, had their own agendas in mind. France sought to limit Nasser’s support for the anticolonial revolution in Algeria. Israel sought to crush supply lines and fedayeen attacks operating from Gaza, then under Egyptian rule. On October 29, Israel began attacking Sinai. Israel intended to gain control of the Gulf of Aqaba, which had been under a naval blockade from Egypt, limiting exports to the port of Eilat. Britain followed through by bombing Port Said, with plans to occupy the Canal zone with the assistance of the French and Israeli militaries. In response, the Egyptian government closed the Suez Canal from November 1956 to April 1957, limiting over 66 percent of Europe’s oil reserves. As a result of the loss of this vital waterway, the major imperial powers only participated in the conflict for a week. In contrast to its benefactors, Israel had other agendas in mind, pursuing territorial annexation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.

If the British and French aimed to renegotiate the terms of the Suez Canal, hoping to regain access to this vital infrastructure underpinning global shipping and trade, the Israeli military aimed to limit Egyptian capacities for independent economic growth. Under its occupation of Sinai, the Israeli military directly attacked prior colonial investments in the region. Egypt was a site of British investment in a variety of infrastructure projects as a member of the Sterling bloc. Notably, this included the Aswan High Dam, and the withdrawal of sterling funds dedicated to its financing prompted the nationalization of the canal to begin with. In Sinai, Royal Dutch Shell had long-standing investments as an owner of the shares of the Anglo-Egyptian Oilfields. Since 1914, Shell utilized these oil reserves to produce liquid fuel, due to their heavier sulfur content. Despite rhetoric towards economic nationalism and sovereignty, Nasser’s government allowed foreign companies such as Shell to maintain their assets in Egypt well into the 1950s, in order to secure international investment and overseas currency reserves. This changed as a result of the Suez crisis. When Israel invaded and occupied the Sinai, a hidden telegram from the British embassy stated that “as the Israelis withdrew from Sinai’s oil wells, they were stripped of any movable equipment.” This damage was so severe that Shell withdrew from any plans to develop these oilfields further, withdrawing from its prior partnerships, hindering Egypt’s future plans to utilize these energy resources for domestic industrialization.

With the defeat of the British Empire, Nasser’s government carried out its largest nationalization initiative, ‘Egyptianizing’ over all commercial banking, insurance firms, and foreign trade agencies, including the British-owned Sinai Mining Company, run as the Sinai Manganese Company today. The British Foreign Office in Tel Aviv could declare this terrain ‘no man’s land,’ but in reality, the war allowed Egyptian nationalists to fulfill long-held ambitions towards economic sovereignty. As argued by Ahmad Shokr, this nationalization campaign reflected a long trend of economic nationalist thought emerging since the emergence of the First World War, which had highlighted Sinai’s resources, including its petroleum and mineral wealth, as a means by which Egypt could attain economic sovereignty. . Figures such as Ismail Sidqi Pasha, a member of the Wafd delegation to the conference of Versailles, expressed interest in Egypt’s potential regarding the production of petroleum, phosphates, and manganese as early as 1922. Throughout the British Occupation and the First World War, Sinai’s manganese reserves served steel plants operating in Manchester, but Sidqi believed that these resources, in combination with local industrialists and foreign investors, could break Egypt’s dependence on cotton production for the world economy. Central to these nationalist economic arguments was the demand for autonomous control of Sinai, as the primary location of these resources.

While the Sinai frontier became central to the discourses of economic nationalism, throughout the British Occupation it remained a contested borderland territory. This paper will trace the history of the Sinai by situating it as Egypt’s frontier geography on the margins of the state. Under Sinai’s 1906 occupation, conflicts throughout the First World War, and its peri-governance under the Egyptian Frontier Districts Administration (FDA), this borderland turned into a mineral resource frontier. Mining activity in Sinai had predated the British occupation, but its mineral resources were discovered by the Manchester-based Sinai Mining Company. The frontier nature of Sinai became especially apparent throughout the First World War, where it was transformed into a battleground between empires, workers, and tribal populations. During this conflict, Bedouin tribes directly damaged the Company’s holdings. Even though its shareholders primarily consisted of overseas investors, its reconstruction costs fell upon the Egyptian government. Egyptians were forced to cover these costs at the expense of their populations, who viewed Sinai and its people as a foreign frontier territory. I argue that wartime reconstruction within Egypt’s border territories centered the frontier in the nationalist imagination, defining its boundaries of national sovereignty, while perpetually remaining at the country’s margins.

The Concept of a Frontier:

Within the history of colonialism, the frontier invokes the definition provided by George Fredrick Turner. The ‘Turner Thesis’, used to explain the colonization of the Americas, argued that frontier space contained abundant land and resources, but more importantly, remained highly remote and ‘unsettled.’ These regions required settlers and state functionaries to subordinate these terrains to legitimate authorities, at the expense of their prior residents. This definition of the frontier somewhat characterizes colonial administrators’ attitudes towards some underdeveloped regions, including Sinai, because of its mountainous geography and unsuitable landscape for large-scale agricultural settlement. But it does not usefully describe the practice of military-colonialism in this borderland territory. For military colonies, the frontier represented limits to military occupation. In his study of the Peshawar Valley frontier, the historian Robert Nichols argued that for the British Raj’s military establishment, the frontier was understood as a region which requires taming for “stability and revenue extraction,” while Islamic scholars understood it as a region of spiritual backwardness, “in need of guidance.” For British colonial administrators and potential revenue-farming entrepreneurs, the frontier represented a region for social and technological transformation to usher it into modernity. For both, the frontier is remote, on the edges of the space of governance, making it prone to conflict. To pacify this terrain, the state must transform and modernize it, in order to ameliorate its perceived backwardness.

What also remains consistent in these definitions of the frontier is the intense precarity of life amidst conflicts and breakdown of “traditional” forms of order. The geographer Michael Watts, drawing on his study of conflict in the Niger Delta, describes a ‘frontier’ as operating within asymmetrical state capacities. These military-buffer frontiers, while highly securitized and policed, operate within a vast amount of precarity, as they remain formed in the wake of the collapse of prior legal and authority spaces, populated by groups who live within ‘states of insecurity.’ As a result, frontiers are suitable environments for continued extraction of low-cost resources, to provide a source of revenue, but to concentrate systems of authority upon power brokers within these contested terrains.

Prior understandings of the colonial frontier describe certain characteristics of them, but are limited by their lack of attention towards the spatial imaginaries of nationalism, which see the frontier as an integral component of the nation’s self-identity. In his concept-history of the term, the historian Lucien Febvre declared there to be ‘no natural frontiers.’ Febvre argued that, in contrast to geographically deterministic frames arguing that there were natural regions designed for conquest, these reflected social conditions, existing insofar as countries and national visions perceived them as such. Manu Goswami discusses the production of colonial state-space as “inseparably part of a broader imperial scale-making project, one that sought to secure and maintain a Britain-centered imperial economy.” For the postcolonial world, which drew upon these colonial spatial imaginaries to construct nationalist visions aspiring for sovereignty, the frontiers and borders that establish the geographic limits of state power remain essential in defining the identity of the nation-state.

Simultaneously, while defining the boundaries of state authority, the frontier is associated with the externalities of a national polity, distantiated away from the core of the nation. This produces an effect where these geographies remain external and internal on a variety of different scales, reifying racial or hierarchical differences among the national population. In her account of the construction of borders in Iran, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet describes how a nation’s frontiers remain zones of “friction and fluctuation.” Groups living on both sides of a border are often perceived as backwards, external, or fundamentally different from majority cultures and populations within a nation, prompting a substantial amount of distrust towards them. In cases with mobile populations, their fluidity across borders remains a source of distrust and possible subversive behavior to the laws of the national polity.

Frontier territories are considered geographically distinct from the national polity, often viewed as a site of distrust and anxiety for postcolonial state-formation, but at the same time, the frontier remains essential for nationalist understandings of state space. Hafsa Kanjwal, in her study of the Indian occupation of Kashmir, highlights the fact that in spite of the fact that Kashmir remains distant and inaccessible to the majority of the population, its occupation is integral to India’s formation as a nation-state. Occupation and ‘pacification’, militarization, and the violence which occurs within these frontier territories remain an essential aspect of nation-state-centered governance, at the expense of the frontier’s prior inhabitants. The following paragraphs will situate the history of the Sinai during the First World War within these varied conceptions of the frontier, as a geography animating colonial and national visions, a source of capitalist enterprise, while kept within political, racial, and social marginalization along its borders.

Colonizing Sinai:

The Sinai represented one of Egypt’s frontier territories within its modern history as a nation-state. In his study of Egypt’s western border territories, Matthew Ellis describes the 1841 firman declared by Sultan Abdulmecid I as establishing Egypt’s first modern political map “within [Egypt]’s ancient limits.” This firman, issued by the Sultan under European pressure, tasked Mehmed Ali with withdrawing his forces from Syria and Palestine, clarifying Egypt’s position “within the broader domain of Ottoman imperial sovereignty.” Under this geographical jurisdiction, the Sinai Peninsula was partitioned in two, delegating the North, which extended from Suez to Rafah, to Egyptian rule. Territories south of this line, including the Gulf of Aqaba, were granted to the Vali of the Hijaz. The Ottoman Empire had little political and military authority to enforce competing claims in the Peninsula. The Egyptian and Kingdom of Hijaz were primarily responsible for maintaining this border.

While in 1841 Firman established the first boundary in Sinai, this did not substantially impact its populations. The Egyptian and Hijazi Vali were responsible for ensuring safe passage for land-based Hajj routes, which passed through Sinai into the Naqab Desert, into Ottoman Palestine and the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Under Egyptian and later British rule, the Sinai Peninsula did not receive substantial investment from central governments. Its Bedouin populations primarily relied on camel and goat-herding for pastoral subsistence, or occasional sales of coffee and tobacco, but a primary source of revenue for its populations came from collecting rent through guiding pilgrims through the region’s desert and mountain terrains. This route went from Suez to Nekhl, the administrative capital of Sinai, and to Aqaba and the rest of Arabia.

In 1906, Britain “reunified” the Sinai Peninsula, invading the territory to secure naval hegemony in the Red Sea. With the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Red Sea became an increasing site of contestation between Ottoman rulers and the British. The British feared the Ottoman Empire placing torpedo boats in the Gulf of Aqaba, which would limit Britain’s fragile control of the Suez Canal and its trade routes to India. Following the British occupation of Egypt, in 1892, the Ottoman sultan Abbas Hilmi II attempted to remove the entire Peninsula from Egyptian sovereignty, issuing a firman without the Sinai under Toufiq Pasha’s rule. In response, Lord Cromer established that the Ottoman authorities were not allowed to interfere in Egyptian governance without British approval. Britain eventually fully occupied Sinai after various contentions over the line of the border between Palestine and Egypt, to ensure British domination of the Suez Canal and hegemony over maritime travel.

Consequentially, the construction of the Suez Canal substantially impacted the lives of Sinai Bedouin. Previously, they had open mobility to raid and conduct warfare and commerce throughout Egypt’s Eastern desert. As the Canal Zone became increasingly securitized, they experienced increasing limits to their land mobility. Under the British governance of Sinai, divided boundaries between Sinai and Ottoman Valis in Palestine and Hijaz limited travel further, restricting their ability to profit from pilgrimage tourism to the Sinai monastery or their ability to carry out long-distance trade. The 1906 occupation took place with the precondition that Britain would police and enforce the border between Egypt and Ottoman Palestine, which limited the presence of arms along the Ottoman Palestine border. As part of establishing this boundary, the British Sinai administration established policing measures that staffed the police forces with English officers and Bedouin deputy directors, chosen from clans. To carry out legal administration and resolve disputes, the British administration established ‘urf courts and a tribunal court with tribal elders, reifying their authority to maintain order. The peninsula was administered by English figures and Bedouin tribal authorities due to the need to ensure security along the Suez Canal. These police posts became consequential in combating smuggling along the boundary between Egypt and Palestine, but more consequentially, limited mobility for pastoral populations and routes for religious pilgrimage.

As a result of the limits to mobility throughout the land borders, and the increasing use of steam-powered sea travel for the Hajj voyage, the British occupation of Sinai substantially diminished the role of the Bedouin pilgrimage economy. This loss in revenue led to a substantial out-migration of Sinai’s population, which dropped by half, according to Karim Zeki-Khalil, who relied on their tribal affiliations in order to guarantee their migration patterns. The majority of those who left relied on joining their tribal affiliates in Palestine and in Hejaz, especially those belonging to the Sawarka, Charkia, Tarabin, and Huwaitat tribes. For those who remained, they would provide a large reserve of labor for Sinai’s mining enterprises.

While the British occupation of Egypt was informed by the need to preserve the safety of the Suez Canal, the late-nineteenth century administration was primarily motivated by broader ideological purposes concerning ‘modernization’ of Egypt’s economy. As described by the historian Aaron Jakes, the British occupation of Egypt was guided by a discourse of ‘Colonial Economism.’ British administrators sought the continuous expansion of commodity frontiers, primarily cotton, and later, sugarcane in the Egyptian countryside. Guided by this vision, colonial administrators and financiers in Britain and France sought to transform small and medium peasants in the Nile Delta into rural entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurial peasants would, hypothetically, continuously increase investment into their rural production enterprises, and correspondingly, their market-based consumption. As a result, the Egyptian government would become a state capable of repaying its debts, remaining a site of stable financial investment. In practice, this had to operate within a prior system of land tenure ownership patterns, populated by rural smallholding peasants. ‘Colonial Economism’ had the effect of consolidating rural wealth among large landowning classes, who increasingly oversaw cotton plantation complexes, virtually immiserating peasant smallholders who had to compete with these producers. Increasingly, the expansion of the commodity frontier contributed to the globalization of capital throughout the colonial world, increasingly orienting capitalist development towards British industrialization at the expense of its colonies.

The discourse of colonial economism remains generative for thinking about the ways in which metropolitan capitalism impacted the expansion of commodity frontiers in the colonial world. Under the British occupation, Sinai was viewed as a site of vast mineral wealth that could be productively exploited through mining. Sinai’s resources were primarily Manganese, which, in a similar fashion to Cotton, became intensively produced in service of an increasingly Europe-centered world market. Manganese was a highly valued commodity due to its demand in the European steel industry. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, steel production consumed over 90 percent of the resource. After Henry Bessemer patented the ‘Bessemer Process’ in 1856, manganese became widely used in steel production as a means of removing impurities from pig iron, such as excess oxygen and carbon, which made British steel a highly pure and desired material. Steel produced from this process experienced less environmental degradation, allowing figures such as Robert Mushet to patent a steel variety that extended railway life from two to eight years. British shipbuilders also used manganese to produce bronze propellers resistant to saltwater degradation, which became widely adopted by the navy in 1860.

While the British occupation of Egypt did not feature virtually any investment in Egyptian steel production, the Manganese resources in Sinai were particularly attractive to Manchester’s steel factories as a result of their purity and close distance to the Suez Canal. Britain’s pursuit of manganese was driven by rivalry with its largest producer, Russia. The Russian Empire’s Chiatura deposits in the Georgian Caucasus region contained over half of the global supply of this mineral, leading Britain to seek manganese resources elsewhere. In the nineteenth century, British steel producers primarily purchased manganese from Nagpur, in Central India, and Brazil’s Minas Gerais region, which began production by the late 1890s. In the early 20th century, the largest supplies of global Manganese reserves would be discovered in the Kalahari field in the Cape Colony and in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, in settler colonies where cheap depressed costs of labor-power could be found among indigenous populations and migrants. These routes were all substantially greater distances than the route from Sinai to Britain. Additionally, Sinai’s manganese resources, as highlighted by its survey from the Department of Mines, were particularly purer than other discovered sources at the time, between 30-35% purity. The actual magnitude of Sinai’s manganese reserves remained extremely marginal in proportion to Brazil, India, and South Africa, but its purity and close distance to Britain prompted Manchester’s steel producers to invest in Sinai’s mining enterprises.

In contrast to colonial economism within the cotton frontier, Manganese production was guided by its geographic location within Sinai’s frontier terrain. Under British rule, the town of Abu Zneima, located 80 miles south of the Suez Canal, transformed into Sinai’s urban hub of mineral processing. This town was located 15 miles away from the Ummbogma (Umm Bajma) mines, and was where the Sinai Mining Company received its construction lease to begin operations in 1913. Sinai Mining Company’s assets included a 510-acre region to acquire manganese deposits. It received the right to construct a port in Abu Zneima and a mineral processing plant, which comprised a variety of parts, including a power station, a condensing plant, workshops, storage bunkers, as well as buildings for staff and laborers. Additionally, a railway that could transport ore from the town to the port required construction. Deposits were located 2000 feet above sea level, and in some regions, ores were entirely exposed for open-face quarrying. In other parts of the deposit, shallow mining was able to take place. The Sinai Mining Company spent over 160 thousand pounds to transform this environment into an extractive frontier before operations began in 1914, entirely with the use of Bedouin labor reserves.

With the disintegration of the prior economic system, there were substantial reserves of low-cost labor among the Bedouin population. Bedouins were noted by the general manager of the Sinai mining company as being “fairly good workers and tractable, and capable of great improvement under the influence of steady employment.” Costs of labor were not particularly expensive for the Company, having spent 24 thousand pounds to support approximately 1700 Native laborers, and there was little shortage of labor, highlighting that as soon as the manager arrived in Abu Zneima, a variety of Bedouins arrived in search of work. He held a particularly paternalistic view of the Bedouin population, viewing employment as a necessary form of pacifying the colonial frontier, as it prevented them from returning to their “natural instincts for looting.” Within this frontier terrain, a similar discourse of ‘Colonial Economism’ could be identified in the need for colonial administrators to pacify rebellious populations who experienced increasingly precarious forms of existence. This form of pacification could be identified through their employment in lands which increasingly became valued for speculative reserves of wealth.

Mining capitalism in these frontier territories did not need to rely on prior systems of land tenure and ownership, having virtually disintegrated prior systems of pastoral and pilgrimage economy through restrictions on human mobility. As highlighted by Matt Shutzer in his study of coal mining in Central India, the value of land relied on speculative investment, on the supplies of resources located in a terrain, and on the prospective value of what the mineral resources could sell for, when extracted and refined. This was suitable in a frontier environment without substantially established property rights based on the potential for land to derive rent based on agricultural productivity. Before large-scale mining occurred, geologists with the Sinai Mining Company proved that over 2.5 million metric tons existed in the region, with 9.5 million remaining speculative. Mining activities formally began in the beginning of October 1914, shipping over a thousand tons of ore per day. The vast availability of cheap labor reserves, and more importantly, the need to ensure discipline within a precarious frontier environment, made mineral extraction more suitable within a region where investment in extraction would be valued by its prospective returns. As Manganese would become a more valuable commodity throughout the outbreak of the First World War, the speculative value of these colonial constructions would only increase.

The First World War in Sinai:

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin wrote that imperialism could best be characterized by a division of the colonial world amidst coalitions of inter-imperial rivals. To Lenin, the export of finance capital divided overseas industries into cartels, mediated by competing financial investors, which led to no direction other than international conflict. Nothing could better describe the situation experienced by the Sinai Mining Company during the First World War. In the winter of 1915, the manganese mines and warehouses held by the Sinai Mining Company were raided by Bedouin watchmen and the Sinai police. These figures had previously been placed in charge of operating the company during its temporary closure during wartime, which made the company managers speculate that they were connected to Turkish influence. They were former employees of the mines themselves, who disliked the loss of revenue during wartime. The Consul General in Egypt vetoed any action in response. The Company manager pleaded for support, arguing that it would symbolize to the Bedouins that the authority of the Company in Sinai was fragile, and more importantly, to keep Bedouin workers employed. A month later, the raids intensified, being led by German officers, which cost the Company over a hundred thousand pounds in damage. At the same time, the costs of repaying the Sinai Mining Company had broader consequences due to the international ownership of its company shares.

Prior to the establishment of the Sinai Mining Company, the Company’s owners had to turn to a variety of different shareholders to raise capital to invest in its enterprises. Before the First World War, Britain’s economic crisis depressed overseas investment patterns, forcing the Sinai’s mineral entrepreneurs to seek elsewhere, including in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. As an international colonial company, a variety of international actors divided the 250 thousand shares of the Sinai Mining Company. British and Egyptian investors owned 85 and 69 thousand respectively, but between 80 and 90 thousand shares were held by German investors. This prompted a political and diplomatic crisis, since the German shares were considered ‘enemy elements’ within their holdings. Declaring overseas shareholders as ‘enemies’ was a novel practice at the time. As argued by the economic historian Nicholas Mulder, the First World War was the first major inter-imperial use of an economic blockade, where Britain exercised an embargo against the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. Blockades legally prevented British investors and colonial governments from providing investment or insurance for German-held economic assets, contributing to a diplomatic crisis in contexts where wartime compensation involved transferring value to German shareholders for their losses.

Within the colonial frontiers, contestations over repayment for wartime losses produced a secondary consequence: whether the colonial governments would finance the costs of reconstruction, or place it upon tax-paying colonial subjects, who only related to these colonial possessions as employees, rarely owners. The Financial Advisor for the British Government laid out three possibilities in response to the Sinai Mining Company’s high costs of damages. 1) Allowing the company to liquidate, which would allow its assets to be purchased by a new company; 2) Purchasing shares to directly obtain the Company, including buying out German possessions; or 3) effectively placing the costs upon the Egyptian government. The Egyptian Government did not wish to delay operations of the Mine further. To “eliminate enemy interests”, the Egyptian Government proposed to purchase all shares of the Sinai Mining Company and provided all necessary funds to resume operations of the company.

Throughout the communications between the Sinai Mining Company and the British Government, the narrative from the Egyptian residency in Cairo changed as the war accelerated. Initially, the mining company’s damages were considered not particularly serious, with low costs of reconstruction. By 1916, an increasing sense of urgency described its conditions. The British Government considered the attack entirely carried out by a conspiracy of Turkish and German forces, mentioning the fact that it was carried out by Bedouin laborers as an aside. Increasingly, it was framed as a violation of Egyptian sovereignty by a raid of Ottoman Turks. Contestations over the mine became framed around the security of British colonies, as these enemy shares became a foothold that would allow Germany to control the mine. Following the elimination of ‘enemy shares’ held, the Mine received over 1100 camel-backed reinforcements to defend it against perceived aggressors, in spite of the fact that its own workforce caused the bulk of damages. At the same time, the British government did not view the Egyptian colonial government as capable of bringing the mines to productive capacity, instead suggesting that the Egyptian government would provide advances to cover the costs of the damage, while still allowing the original company based in Britain to maintain its overseas possessions. Throughout the First World War, the costs of maintaining overseas colonial possessions increasingly rested on the Egyptian workforce, tasked to defend economic investments they were alienated from managing themselves, as military campaigns descended into violent theatres of war.

Outside of the Sinai’s mining frontier, the Peninsula increasingly became a major battleground of the First World War. With little control over Cyprus, under British occupation at the time, the Ottomans were primarily locked on the peninsular land route to Egypt, crossing desert terrain with poor supply chains. Beyond military dynamics, the war allowed the Egyptian colonial government to exercise technocratic administration of Sinai for the first time. This was through the Egyptian Intelligence Agency, which was tasked with providing detailed maps and identifying clan networks and histories. It was during this campaign that the Lebanese historian Naum Shoucair, a member of the Egyptian Military Intelligence organization under F. R. Wingate, wrote his voluminous 800-page history of Sinai and its tribes. These intelligence agencies were tasked with securing connections to the Hijaz and Palestine campaigns, contributing to British victories on the Ottoman Arab frontier.

From the perspective of labor, the First World War heavily employed the use of the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC). The ELC enlisted 4 percent of the Egyptian population in its campaigns, using young men from Egypt’s countryside, large cities, and Bedouins throughout the country as a labor source for wartime construction. One of their most significant campaigns was in Sinai, where the ELC was responsible for constructing over 130 miles of rail necessary to connect Egypt to Palestine. This involved employing over half a million laborers through Sinai, as well as drawing upon knowledge of Bedouin caravan travel routes throughout this geography, in order to establish these key infrastructures. Kyle Anderson argues that the knowledge of logistics and space gained from their national deployment allowed laborers from all over Egypt to view themselves as part of a nation. Through constructing infrastructures necessary to bind frontier terrains to their political cores, the war allowed workers from all backgrounds in Egypt to view its geography as a unified whole. The war had the effect of fixing the geography of the Sinai into the conception of the Egyptian nation, viewing it as an integral part of articulating the politics of sovereignty. In the wake of the Egyptian Revolution and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, its sovereign identity received substantial contestations, maintaining Sinai’s frontier status throughout the twentieth century and today.

Conclusion:

One of the preconditions established to withdraw British troops from the Nile Valley was the Egyptian government’s permission to allow Britain to maintain a military presence in Sinai. The Treaty of Lausanne, which formally relinquished Ottoman holdings on their former Vali territories, did not grant the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Despite this, the territory, in practice, was governed by the British under the Egyptian Frontier District Administration (FDA), while subsidized by the Egyptian government. The Wafd had a strong dislike for the FDA as a lasting remnant of the British occupation in Egypt. This fact would be invoked by the Sinai Mining Company, which, by then, still had not resolved disputes over repaying wartime damages.

With the outbreak of the First World War, manganese commodities became increasingly valuable. It was used in various steel helmets, artillery shells, and Zeppelin frames, the use of which saw few limits throughout the conflict. The total estimated cost of damages suffered by the Sinai Mining Company inflated, as a result, due to the losses of prospective value that they could have produced with their Manganese resources. The Sinai Mining Company placed these charges on the Egyptian government, stating that “British prestige in certain circles in Egypt would suffer if this British company had to be regarded as a failure.” This argument, which would have been successful in 1915 under colonial rule, was straightforwardly refused by Egypt, led by the Prime Minister Saad Zaghlul, the leader of the Wafd. When this request was taken to the British delegation, the British emphasized that the damages took place on Turkish territory, invoking the fact that the Sinai’s status predating the war remained ambiguous concerning Ottoman and British sovereignty. The Sinai Mining Company responded with a straightforward enthusiasm for Egyptian territorial claims for the peninsula, claiming that all proceeds of enemy property liquidations occurred in Egypt, under Egyptian territory. In doing so, the Sinai Mining Company echoed Egyptian nationalist opposition to the British, who continued to maintain territorial claims in the region under the guise of protection.

For Egypt’s nationalist economic thinkers, the FDA was deeply unpopular among Egyptian nationalists. Sinai, and its resources, were important for the sovereignty of the country. Jacques Berque states that Egypt’s budgets under the Wafd had always been particularly “forward-looking” and ambitious, and by 1931, Sidqi’s government produced a budget that supported increased mining for manganese and phosphates, as well as the production of oil in the Sinai. This was aimed at powering the creation of a military airforce, for which the Government of Egypt allotted £E50,000. At the same time, the Egyptian society and army were deeply reluctant to engage with political figures in Sinai, preferring to mediate through foreign companies such as the Sinai Mining Company as economic intermediaries, while maintaining the region as a frontier under ambiguous governing status.

With this understanding of Egyptian nationalism in mind, the Sinai Peninsula can be viewed as having been transformed into an ambiguous frontier territory throughout British Occupation. Following Egypt’s independence in 1919, the territory remained administered by British officials, while being utilized for its resources, allowing the Egyptian government to not formally administer the territory. The visions of independence and sovereignty articulated by Egypt’s early economic nationalists relied on economic independence as a goal, a pattern that has continued in its status today. Sinai remains a vital cornerstone of Egypt’s nationalism, with its recapture following the 1973 war being heralded as a proud moment of defending Egypt’s sovereignty. The Camp David Accords, which ensured political and economic normalization with Israel, were signed in the name of preserving Sinai’s territorial integrity. The region has been governed informally, a pattern persisting since Egypt’s independence, extracted for oil and mineral resources, and bled in the name of counterterrorism. A common discourse within Egyptian society argues that the state conducts its repressive policies in Sinai to secure the nation’s sovereignty, attributing the causes of discontent within this frontier region to external interference instead of genuinely addressing their grievances. Egyptian nationalism as a discourse operates to avoid broader engagement with the wider region’s politics and conflicts, citing the need to preserve its border integrity along Sinai, but at the same time, relegates Sinai to its margins.