Abstract

The cities of Alexandria and Istanbul seemed to present British military authorities with a tangle of insidious plots against the lives of their personnel, while a perceptibly bloodthirsty populace were feared to be on the brink of indiscriminate mutual massacre. The paper explores how such premonitions of violence, fed by burgeoning intelligence capabilities and colonial paranoia, became the centrepieces of discourses legitimating increasingly intrusive military rule. Consequent legislative measures and counter-subversive operations established a regime of coercive violence that undermined diplomatic efforts to cast British occupation as a system of Anglo-Egyptian or Anglo-Turkish cooperation in each case, resulting in confrontation and retreat. The institutional architecture of repression, however, remained largely in tact, and was passed on to new national regimes with the eventual blessing of its previous occupants, creating an enduring legacy of militarised jurisdiction and policing that would be echoed in later waves of decolonisation.