Egypt for the Egyptians: Menotti Garibaldi, Ahmad Urabi, and Republican Brotherhood in the Mediterranean

Just a few weeks after his father’s death in June 1882, Menotti Garibaldi, the eldest son of Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, called for the organization of a foreign legion to support the Egyptian nationalist movement under the leadership of Ahmad ʿUrabi. ʿUrabi and his supporters had protested the inefficiency and autocracy of the khedive’s government, sought greater autonomy from Ottoman leadership, and opposed the increasing British presence in Egypt. Fearful of the growing power of ʿUrabi’s movement, the British government had seized upon the pretext of a riot in Alexandria to invade Egypt and attack ʿUrabi’s forces. Italian democrats, workers, republicans, and radicals united in their opposition to the British invasion, claiming it violated the principles of self-sovereignty and the rights of nations that had been instrumental in their own unification. Seeing echoes of their own recent history in the Egyptian situation, they repurposed Risorgimento imagery and slogans, such as Italy for the Italians into Egypt for the Egyptians, and called ʿUrabi an Arab Garibaldi. ʿUrabi supported these parallels and further argued that the Italians and Egyptians had a shared history as sites of arts and science and ancient civilizations. This paper analyzes how both ʿUrabi and Menotti Garibaldi laid claim to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s legacy of international freedom fighting. It also uses the younger Garibaldi’s support for ʿUrabi as a lens to examine the wider relationship between Italian radicals and Egyptian nationalists and the limits of republican solidarity more generally. In doing so, it adds to the growing scholarship on transnational volunteerism in the Mediterranean. As part of this analysis, it examines how the Egyptians and the Italians navigated their liminal position between colonizer and colonized and between hegemonic and subordinate.