There is renewed public interest in the nature and legacies of British colonialism. Less discussed is how
colonized people were able to band together to overthrow colonial rule. In this project, I revist one of the much vaunted successes of colonialism -- the building of infrastructure -- and show how this unintentionally enabled anti-colonial revolution.
Through an analysis of the 1919 Revolution, I chart how Egyptians creatively repurposed the infrastructure of British colonial rule to launch mass protest calling for national liberation. To make my case, I match a catalogue of over 5,000 protests with geo-referenced maps, census data, newspaper reports, colonial correspondence, and memoirs. Pairing this data with new empirical techniques, I show how the material circuitries of the colonial state and economy enabled and delimited the first mass participation revolution in the region's history. Theoretically, I provide an infrastructural foundation to the study of contentious politics.
