Wilson’s self-determination doctrine fueled Egyptian nationalism after the protectorate.

Evidence

Egyptians’ nationalistic feeling suffered during World War I, when London declared Egypt a protectorate of the British empire. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian nationalists lost the nominal alternative of allegiance to the sultan; although it took longer to abolish the caliphate, the Islamic empire that had united them with other Muslims around the world was terribly weakened and a bulwark against European imperialism was lost. But there seemed to be ideological support from outside Egypt’s borders that, if mobilized, could fill the political vacuum left by this loss, demonstrated most dramatically when President Woodrow Wilson delivered a powerful speech to the League of Nations declaring that all nations had the right to self-determination. Sa`d Zaghlül, an accomplished lawyer in Cairo, seized on this statement of Wilson’s. It had seemed to many nationalists that the British government’s declaration of the protectorate over Egypt had been a wartime necessity, but once the war ended and there was no indication given of lifting the protectorate. Zaghlül and his associates hoped that, as representatives of Egypt, they could travel to Paris for the postwar peace conference to present their country’s case for independence from the British empire. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 819

Categorization

• XREF: Core for the reader’s central question: protectorate status (a distinct colonial tool) shaped Egypt’s nationalist trajectory vs. Sudan’s. Wilsonian rhetoric became a political weapon in the anti-colonial arsenal.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: how the collapse of Ottoman sovereignty and the rise of Wilsonian self-determination rhetoric supplied alternative ideological anchors for Egyptian nationalism.