Kingdom of Egypt

The Kingdom of Egypt was the last royal form of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, born in 1922 when Britain recognized Egyptian independence after forty years of occupation. The independence was paper-thin: London kept the army, foreign relations and the Suez Canal, ruled Sudan as a condominium in name and a colony in fact, and left Cairo a crown with little power. The 1936 treaty thinned the garrison but kept British advisers at every elbow. Kings Fuad and Farouk reigned over parties, palaces and a press that never stopped asking why foreigners still guarded the Canal: Fuad sparred with the Wafd nationalists, boy-king Farouk took the throne at sixteen in 1936, and the lost war of 1948 discredited the palace and fed the Free Officers. The officers answered in 1952: the Free Officers took Cairo, Farouk sailed into exile, and in 1953 the republic replaced a thirty-one year kingdom that had never quite ruled.