For a year before the British intervened, Egypt's government and the country's influential European community had been locked in a struggle with the nationalist supporters of General Ahmad 'Urabi. Although most Western observers till see the 'Urabi movement as a 'revolt' of junior military officers with only limited support among the Egyptian people, Cole maintains hat it was a broadly based social revolution hardly underway when it was cutt off by the British. While arguing this fresh point of view, he also proposes a theory of revolutions against informal or neo-colonial empires, drawing parallels between Egypt in 1882, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Islamic Revolution in modern Iran.

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