'Atrocities of Justice': British Responses to the Denshawai Trial

It is known by historians that the Denshawai trial (June 1906) proved a turning point in the history of the British occupation of Egypt: it ignited a fierce political debate in Egypt and in Britain, and eventually caused the resignation of Lord Cromer, the redoutable British Consul General and de facto ruler of Egypt since 1882. This paper attempts a survey of the corpus of texts in English generated by the Denshawai trial, taking into account the records of the Parliamentary debates, and then focussing on the involvement of intellectuals and men of letters. It highlights the crucial role of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, arabophile, poet and anti-imperialist, in making the facts known and provoking a public outcry in Britain; the mobilization which resulted in a petition published in The New Age (October 1907); and the literary responses to the debate, ranging from George Bernard Shaw’s polemical denunciation of the “Denshawai horror” in his Preface (1907) to John Bull’s Other Island, to Hall Caine’s controversial novel The White Prophet (1909), or to such pro-imperialist rejoinders as Marmaduke Pickthall’s The Children of the Nile (1908) and Rudyard Kipling’s “Little Foxes” (1909).