Recent democratic reversals across the Middle East and North Africa have reinvigorated debates about the causes of its authoritarian resilience. Tunisia’s slide back towards authoritarianism after 2021, Sudan’s stalled transition following the 2019 revolution, and the broader failure of Arab Spring movements to establish lasting democracies have prompted renewed questions about whether the region faces unique obstacles to democratisation.

Popular explanations blame Islamic culture, oil dependence, hydraulic despotism or colonial legacies. But this narrative of inevitable authoritarianism overlooks a crucial historical reality: the Middle East had thriving democratic movements dating back to the late 19^th century.

My recent research funded by the British Academy examines Egypt’s forgotten democratic experiments through a unique lens: tracking every member of parliament (MP) since 1824 and parliamentary speeches from 1866 to 1882 and from 1924 to 1952. What emerges is a story not of democratic impossibility, but of democratic potential that was first disrupted by colonialism and then derailed in the post-colonial period.

Egypt’s first democratic awakening

Foundational texts in social conflict theory argue that countries democratise when an economically rising, yet politically marginalised, elite demands power-sharing with the incumbent elite (Lipset, 1959; Marx, 1885; Moore, 1966; Polanyi, 1944; Weber, 1978).

This thesis is predominantly supported by evidence from industrialising autocracies in Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th century, where a rising urban bourgeoisie challenged the incumbent landed elite (Ansell and Samuels, 2014; Moore, 1966). But agrarian autocracies in the 19^th and early 20^th century have largely been excluded from the generation of theory and its empirical testing in the study of first wave democratisation.

Egypt in the 19^th century is a case in point. Long before the 2011 Arab Spring, the country experienced its own democratic awakening. Following the 1860s cotton boom, Egypt developed a prosperous rural middle class: village headmen and owners of medium-sized landholdings, who bought slaves to work on their cotton farms. This class dominated Egypt’s parliament by design from 1824.

When Egypt defaulted on its foreign debt in 1876, these rural elites translated their economic power into demands for partial democratisation – that is, political power-sharing with the ruling Ottoman-Egyptian landed elite (Hartnett and Saleh, 2025b).

During the ‘Urabi nationalist revolution, MPs signed a national manifesto in 1879 – one of the earliest pro-democratic documents in the Middle East. This agenda called for a new constitution establishing parliamentary oversight of the executive.

MPs then drafted new laws between 1879 and 1882 that institutionalised parliamentary oversight and expanded voting rights from 3% to 11% of adult males. The Khedive, who then governed the country, ratified these laws in March 1882.

This was not political theatre. Analysis of parliamentary speeches from 1866 to 1882 reveals a dramatic shift after 1876. Before the debt crisis, MPs focused on agriculture, land and labour. Afterwards, they pivoted to democratisation topics, extensively discussing constitutional drafts.

Crucially, among MPs from the rural middle class, the largest rise in democratic speeches came from cotton-producing provinces where the rural middle class held the most economic power relative to the landed elite. These democratic demands were primarily driven by elite conflict over labour rather than land. Furthermore, MPs from cotton provinces increasingly demanded capitalist, yet protectionist, economic reforms: land privatisation, lower taxes, restrictions on forced labour and import regulation.

Our findings challenge some of the conventional views on democratisation. Rather than mass-elite conflict, Egypt experienced an intra-elite conflict between an incumbent landed elite and a rising capitalist elite. This contradicts the dominant view that democratisation requires an urban bourgeoisie. Instead, it shows that democratisation can occur in agricultural societies if there is a rising capitalist rural middle class.

Colonial disruption

The 1882 British occupation abruptly ended this democratic experiment. Scholars of indirect colonial rule often emphasise how colonial administrations preserved or repurposed pre-colonial institutions rather than creating new ones (Boone, 2014; Mamdani, 1996).

Yet evidence across multiple colonial contexts suggests that indirect rule can induce profound changes to pre-colonial power structures, even as institutions appear to persist (Apter, 1972). Colonial favouritism of some pre-colonial elites over others is well documented (Herbst, 2000; Lee, 2017).

Egypt exemplifies this pattern. Far from preserving existing institutions, the British redistributed political power within the country’s parliament away from the rural middle class towards the landed elite (Hartnett and Saleh, 2025a).

The data reveal extensive colonial political re-engineering. In cotton-producing areas where the rural middle class had been strongest, their share of MPs declined sharply after 1882. Meanwhile, the landed elite’s political influence increased under British patronage.

This was strategic. The British needed reliable domestic partners and found them among the landed elite, who shared their interest in political stability and economic extraction through free trade policies. The rural middle class, with their democratic demands and economic nationalism, threatened colonial objectives.

The post-colonial paradox

Land redistribution became a central part of economic reforms implemented across Africa, Asia and Latin America in the post-World War II period, often with the aim of dismantling the economic power of colonial-era landed elites.

A large body of research has examined the economic consequences of land reforms (Deininger, 1999; Besley and Burgess, 2000; Vollrath, 2007; Finley et al, 2020), while more recent work has begun to unpack their political effects, particularly on intra-state conflict and national-level elite politics (Albertus, 2015).

Yet there are limited studies on how land reform affects downstream electoral politics, even though competitive autocracies have become the leading form of autocracy in the 20^th and 21^st centuries (Levitsky and Way, 2010).

How did Egypt’s postcolonial land reform alter the distribution of political power? Egypt’s 1919 anti-colonial revolution led to nominal independence in 1922 and the 1923 constitution’s establishment of a semi-parliamentary system. But this regime proved fragile. The 1952 Free Officers military coup promised to break the landed elite’s power through land redistribution.

The land reforms of 1952-61 did redistribute economic power from the landed elite to the masses. But they created new patterns of political exclusion rather than democratisation (Moshrif et al, 2025).

Before 1952, the parliament featured high turnover of MPs and MP families, yet low entry rates – essentially political musical chairs among the same limited pool. After 1952, areas with more intensive land redistribution saw increased turnover of MPs and families. But old dynastic networks were replaced not by democratic competition, but by new dynasties loyal to the military regime.

These new networks often came from families of the rural middle class whose medium-sized landholdings fell below redistribution thresholds. They formed the backbone of the military regime.

This reveals a crucial insight: economic redistribution doesn’t automatically translate into political democratisation. Post-colonial regimes broke old elite networks while creating new forms of control.

Rethinking Middle Eastern exceptionalism

These findings challenge three dominant narratives about Middle Eastern economic and political history.

First, the region is not culturally incompatible with democracy. Egypt developed indigenous democratic movements paralleling experiences in European agricultural societies like Greece in the 19^th century. Similar attempts occurred in the Ottoman Empire, Armenia and Tunisia.

Second, colonialism did not preserve traditional institutions but actively reshaped them for imperial interests. The British systematically weakened democratic forces and strengthened compliant elites.

Third, despite the revolutionary rhetoric that underpinned post-colonial land reforms, they often created new authoritarianism rather than genuine democratisation.

The Egyptian case suggests that democracy requires not just economic development, but a delicate balance of social forces. When no elite faction can completely dominate others, power-sharing becomes possible.

But foreign intervention – whether colonial occupation or Cold War pressures – can disrupt these domestic dynamics. Even without external intervention, elite conflicts may resolve through complete disenfranchisement rather than democratic accommodation.

Further reading

Albertus, Michael (2015) Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, Cambridge University Press.

Ansell, Ben, and David Samuels (2014) Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach, Cambridge University Press.

Apter, David E (1972) Ghana in Transition, Princeton University Press.

Besley, Timothy, and Robin Burgess (2000) ‘Land Reform, Poverty Reduction, and Growth: Evidence from India’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 115(2): 389-430.

Boone, Catherine (2014) Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics, Cambridge University Press.

Deininger, Klaus (1999) ‘Land Policy for Growth and Poverty Reduction’, World Bank Policy Research Report.

Finley, Theresa, Raphaël Franck and Noel D Johnson (2020) ‘The Effects of Land Redistribution: Evidence from the French Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 80(1): 1-54.

Hartnett, Allison S, and Mohamed Saleh (2025a) ‘Precolonial Elites and Colonial Redistribution of Political Power’, American Political Science Review, forthcoming.

Hartnett, Allison S, and Mohamed Saleh (2025b) ‘The Other First Wave: Elite Conflict and Democratization in Agrarian Autocracies’, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 20260.

Herbst, Jeffrey (2000) States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, Princeton University Press.

Lee, Alexander (2017) ‘Redistributive Colonialism: The Long Term Legacy of International Conflict in India’, Politics & Society 45(2): 173-224.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A Way (2010) Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, Cambridge University Press.

Lipset, Seymour Martin (1959) ‘Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy’, American Political Science Review 53(1): 69-105.

Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl (1885) Capital, Volume II, Verlag von Otto Meisner.

Moore, Barrington (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Beacon Press.

Moshrif, Rowaida, Mohamed Saleh and Allison S Hartnett (2025) ‘Land Redistribution and Postcolonial Redistribution of Political Power’, mimeo.

Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation, Farrar & Rinehart.

Vollrath, Dietrich (2007) ‘Land Distribution and International Agricultural Productivity’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics 89(1): 202-16. Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, University of California Press.