Ottoman Legal Challenges to the Scramble for Africa

In 1899 the British government announced the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over Sudan. Theoretically, the Condominium was a form of shared sovereignty held between the Khedive of Egypt and the British Government. While the invention of this hybridized political form might be seen as little more than a legal justification for empire, the Condominium triggered intense debate between diplomats and international lawyers concerning Egypt’s constitutional relationship to the British and Ottoman Empires and called into question Egypt’s international legal status as an Ottoman province administered by a European power. At issue was the location of sovereign authority in Egypt.

Until very recently European and Ottoman historiographies have maintained that that the Ottoman Empire did not care or was too weak to participate in the Scramble for Africa - much less effectively respond to the British occupation of Egypt. This paper argues instead that the Ottoman Empire took an active role in challenging European imperial expansion in North Africa and did so by relying upon international law. Ottoman International lawyers, ambassadors in London and Paris as well as the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt advised the Sultan to engage European powers directly and to assert Ottoman territorial rights in North Africa and along the Red Sea coast. Between 1882 and the end of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s reign in 1909, the Ottoman government claimed territorial rights in North Africa as part of a broader strategy to ensure that Egypt remain legally within the fold of the Empire. The announcement of the Condominium renewed these efforts and led the Ottoman government to assert more direct control over Libya. In addition to showing Ottoman engagement with the European partition of Africa, this paper also emphasizes the use and importance of international law in imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.