Khan 359359Students on Soapboxes: The Metropole in
Anticolonial Nationalist Activity
Noor-Aiman Khan^
In 1911, almost thirty years after the British occupied Egypt, the Office
of the Secretary of State in London requested a list of Egyptian students
studying in Britain from the Consul-General in Egypt. Despite his title,
Consul-General Kitchener was hardly an ambassador between two sov-
ereign states; in reality, he ran the Occupation Government of Egypt and
thus was closer to viceroy than a diplomat. The information Secretary
Grey requested was to be shared not only with Scotland Yard but also with
local police forces in the university towns that housed such students. The
immediate cause of this sudden need to keep track of Egyptian students
was the recent assassination of the British-supported Prime Minister
of Egypt, Boutros Ghali, by a young man who had studied in Europe.^1
However, the larger concern was based on Britons’ realization of some-
thing that nationalists in Egypt and other colonies already knew: that the
most fertile and free arena in which to organize a cadre of strong and
committed nationalist activists was actually in the imperial metropoles,
where an entire generation of ambitious young “colonials” were being sent
to study.
ese young colonials discovered as much about themselves and Th
each other as they discovered about Europe, and they would become the
backbone of the nationalist movements throughout the British colonies.
Many were the children of the elite of their colonies, but a large num-
ber were also from middle-class families that had envisioned their sons