On Thursday, September 12, Graham Centre Visiting Fellow Erin O’Halloran kicked off our year with a broad-ranging and comprehensive look at the British Empire in Egypt and India before and during the Second World War. Like our world today, the 1930s, she told her audience, represented an era of rapid technological advancement, heightened global interconnectivity, and contending ideologies. O’Halloran offered a compelling reassessment of this period as a “Collaborative Moment,” when relations between the British Empire and nationalist movements in India and Egypt were briefly, yet consequentially, redefined. At the same time, developments in South Asia and the Middle East were linked, both through the British imperial system, and via networks of alliance between Arab and Indian politicians and activists, including such towering global figures as Mohandas Gandhi, Mustapha al-Nahhas, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

In the face of wartime reverses after 1942, the British resorted to increasingly harsh measures to contain colonial nationalists, including an attempt to dethrone Egypt’s King Farouk and arresting Nehru and the leadership of the Indian National Congress. Abandoning the liberal imperialism of the 1930s sharply undermined the appeal of nationalist strategies based on collaborative relationships with the British with dramatically different consequences in South Asia and the Middle East. In Egypt, individuals such as Colonel Gamal Nasser quickly concluded that Egyptian independence required an authoritarian politics. In contrast, by jailing Nehru and his colleagues, the British ensured their legitimacy in the eyes of their supporters, allowing them to play key roles in post-independence democratic politics. Meanwhile, the links between Egyptian, Indian, and other nationalists formed the foundation for the anti-colonial neutralist “third world” of the 1950s and beyond.