Purging to Transform the Post-Colonial State: Evidence From the 1952 Egyptian Revolution

• Published date: 01 January 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231209966
• Author: Neil Ketchley,Gilad Wenig
• Date: 01 January 2025
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2025, Vol. 58(1) 3–42

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231209966

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Purging to Transform the

Post-Colonial State:

Evidence From the

1952 Egyptian Revolution

Neil Ketchley

1

and Gilad Wenig

2



Abstract

The post-WWII era saw junior military off‌icers launch revolutionary coups in

a number of post-colonial states. How did these events transform colonial-era

state elites? We theorize that the inexperienced leaders of revolutionary

coups had to choose between purging threats and delivering ambitious

projects of state-led transformation, leading to a threat-competence calcu-

lation that patterned elite turnover. To illustrate our argument, we trace the

careers of 674 high-ranking off‌icials in Egypt following the Free Off‌icers’

seizure of power in July 1952. A multilevel survival analysis shows that off‌icials

connected to Egypt’s deposed monarch and very senior off‌icials were most

vulnerable to being purged. Experienced bureaucrats and those with uni-

versity education were more likely to be retained. This threat-competence

calculation also informed which ministries experienced more purging.

Qualitative triangulation with biographies, memoirs, newspaper reports, and

speeches corroborates the mechanism. The f‌indings show why radical state-

led change often requires a degree of elite-level continuity.

1

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

2

University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Neil Ketchley, University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations, Manor

Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, United Kingdom.

Email: neil.ketchley@politics.ox.ac.uk

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Keywords

purges, political elites, post-colonial state, revolutionary coups, Egypt

Introduction

In the decades following World War II, military off‌icers seized power in a

number of post-colonial states. Building on a new literature on purging (e.g.,

Bokobza et al., 2022;Goldring & Matthews, 2021;Sudduth, 2017;Wong &

Chan, 2021), we return to this period to examine how colonial-era state elites

were transformed by these events.

1

In doing so, we highlight a fundamental

dilemma faced by inexperienced leaders that can powerfully inform the logics

of purging: how to ward off potential counterrevolutionary threats from within

the state, while also delivering complex and far-reaching social and economic

change. This dilemma was particularly acute for post-colonial regimes

brought to power through revolutionary coups, which were frequently led by

junior off‌icers.

2

Typically grouped together in conspiratorial cells and op-

erating at a distance from organized politics, these off‌icers possessed little in

the way of administrative experience or technical expertise, leading to an

important, albeit hitherto underappreciated, threat-competence calculation

that patterned who among the old colonial-era elite was purged and who was

retained.

The scope conditions of our argument are informed by Trimberger’s (1978)

classic work on ‘revolutions from above’. In the postwar period, revolutionary

military off‌icers, often avowedly Third Worldist in orientation, looked to

repurpose colonial-era states into vehicles for national independence and

autarkic industrialization (Horowitz & Trimberger, 1976). These projects

emerged from revolutionary coups, which are analytically distinct from coups

that simply attempt to modify ‘the political structure’or ‘restore a declining

order’(Trimberger, 1978, pp. 151–156).

3

Such coups frequently targeted

aristocracies left over from the colonial period. This often saw the expro-

priation of colonial-era elites and the institution of republican politics and

economic developmentalism (Eibl, 2020;Hertog, 2022). To give a sense of

the universe of cases to which our analysis applies, Figure 1 draws on a dataset

of coups by off‌icer status collated by Albrecht et al. (2021) and one compiled

by Colgan (2012) on revolutionaries that undertook radical or transformative

economic policies, such as land reform or the mass nationalization of in-

dustry.

4

While most coups in the MENA (and globally) have not attempted

revolutionary projects, the ones that did, for example, in Egypt (1952), Iraq

(1958), Syria (1963), Algeria (1965), Libya (1969), and Sudan (1969), have

had long-run effects on social, political, and economic life (Al-Qazzaz, 1971;

Chalcraft, 2016:ch3;Khuri, 1982;Lenczowski, 1966).

4Comparative Political Studies 58(1)

How did these events transform preexisting, state elites?

5

To answer this

question, we study the aftermath of the July 23 Revolution in 1952, when the

Free Off‌icers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew

Egypt’s monarchy.

6

The Free Off‌icers’model of state capture—synonymous

with ‘Arab nationalism, republicanism, socialism, and progress and involving

a mobilization among nationalist junior off‌icers using the tactic of a revo-

lutionary coup within the army’(Chalcraft, 2016, p. 361)—served as a critical,

early exemplar that inspired copycat coups in post-colonial states across the

MENA and beyond (Ben Hammou & Powell, 2022;Thompson, 1974).

7

Indeed, the subsequent emulation of the Free Off‌icers’repertoire forms the

basis of an important new literature that disaggregates the socioeconomic

causes and consequences of coups based on the seniority and grievances of the

coup plotters (Albrecht & Eibl, 2018;Albrecht et al., 2021).

Weexamine the relationship between this mode of revolutionary action and

the logics of purging by analyzing a novel dataset of Egyptian state off‌icials.

Compiled from biographical registers published in the years before and after

July 1952, these sources record rich individual- and workplace-level infor-

mation on 674 Egyptian ministers and high-ranking bureaucrats who held

off‌ice on the eve of the July 23 Revolution. Multilevel survival analysis allows

us to reconstruct the biographical- and ministry-level correlates of purging in

the subsequent period. We deepen our understanding of the statistical f‌indings

by triangulating our results with a range of qualitative sources, including

biographies, memoirs, newspaper reports, and speeches. Here, our qualitative

Figure 1. MENA countries with at least one revolutionary coup. Notes: Inset map

shows the global distribution. Some countries see multiple revolutionary coups.

Senior off‌icer coups shown where no junior off‌icer coup has taken place.

Ketchley and Wenig 5