The Taba Crisis (also known as the Aqaba Crisis) was a diplomatic conflict arising from territorial disputes between the British and Ottoman empires in Egypt and in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. It holds significant importance in political history: in conjunction with preceding events, the conflict nearly precipitated the outbreak of a conflict that foreshadowed World War I as early as 1906.See Its aftermath also led to the emergence of the Negev as a distinct region, ultimately incorporated into Palestine as a "historical accident.": "The elongated triangle of South Palestine between Gaza, the Dead sea, and the Gulf of Aqaba is a historical accident produced by the arbitrators who fixed the frontier between Palestine and Egypt in the last century. It is not a geographical unity, and has no single Arabic name. [...R]ecent Jewish writers have revived the old Hebrew appellation Negev, meaning 'The Dry,' applied vaguely to the lands south of Beersheba."
Background
In the first half of the 19th century, Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt were part of the Ottoman Empire, but they were integrated into it to varying degrees: in Egypt, Muhammad Ali had taken power in 1805 and was now ruling there as a kind of semi-independent vassal king ("Wāli"). The Sinai had for many centuries been an integral part of a region that also included the region later known as the "Negev" and often also southwestern Jordan and northwestern Hejaz, which, as a whole, was known during Ottoman times as the "Province of Hejaz." Up to this time, the Negev region didn't even have its own name (→ History of the Negev during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods). This area was almost exclusively populated by Bedouins, who were largely independent of Ottoman rule.See . Cf. also p. 332: "In sum, Ottoman rule was barely effective in the nineteenth-century Negev. As a result, the Bedouin there lived an autonomous, if not independent, existence, pursuing their lives and wars with little interference. Without sufficient manpower and weaponry at government disposal, it could hardly have been different."See : "According to Bailey, the Bedouin in the desert ignored the existence of the Ottomans and simply carried on with their traditional way of life. [...] Throughout the nineteenth century Bedouin in the various districts of Palestine, including the southern district, and uniterrupted by the Ottomans, effectively controlled the desert's economic trade routes, levying charges on traders and peasants who passed through the Bedouin region with goods, such as wheat, that were being taken to other places." Only a region along the northern coast of the Sinai Peninsula known as al-Jifâr,See through which an important trade route known as the Via Maris passed, appears to have generally been regarded as part of Egypt territorially from around the 14th century onward.After al-Dimashqi (~1300), who was the last to include it within the east Jordanian region of Karak, this became the "standard description of the Egyptian borders in the medieval Muslim/Arabic sources.": On al-Dimashqi, cf.
However, in the 1830s, Muhammad Ali revolted against the Ottomans and briefly gained control over Sinai and Palestine. Following the Egyptian–Ottoman War from 1839 to 1841, in which the Egyptians were pushed back in Palestine and which was ultimately a proxy war between France, who supported the Egyptians, and a coalition of European nations, which supported the Ottomans,: "Four European powers, Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia, whose policy aimed at the preservation of the integrity of the Ottoman empire, intervened in the conflict and imposed a political settlement upon both sides (France acted outside the European consensus and supported the cause of Mohammed Ali)."On French support for Egypt, cf. On British support for the Ottomans, cf. at the Convention of London in 1840, it was enforcedSee that Egypt largely withdraw from the Sinai, retaining only the Jifâr region northwest of a line from Rafah to Suez, corresponding to Egypt's "ancient borders". This territory was then marked on a map and formally assigned to their Egyptian subjects by the Ottomans through the so-called "Inheritance Firman" of 1841. Later, the starting point of the Firman line from Rafah would mark one of the two points crucial for defining the Negev. Despite this firman, the Egyptians, with the consent of the Ottomans, continued to administer the waystations along the second major trade and pilgrimage route through Sinai and the Negev, extending further southeast into the Hejaz region, from Suez via Nekhel and Aqaba, known as the King's Highway.Cf., e.g., : "It was traditional Ottoman habit to impose upon the Valis of Egypt the duty of safeguarding the pilgrimage route from Egypt to Mecca and Medina, which went through Sinai and the Land of Midian. Nothing was changed by the Egyptian withdrawal from Hijaz proper. [...] Thus, not only for the sake of safeguarding the annual pilgrimage, but also for administrative purposes, the Sinai Peninsula and the Land of Midian were attached to the Egyptian administration. The Valis of Egypt were in charge of maintaining the privileges granted by the various Sultans to the Greek Orthodox monks of St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. [...] The Egyptian government maintained law and order along the roads and built new roads in Sinai and Midian. The Egyptian army occupied five forts: Nakhl, Akaba, Muweila, Daba and Al Wajh. The strength of the Egyptian government representation in Sinai and in the Land of Midian was proportional to the requirements of the annual pilgrimage and of the population whose fixed settlements numbered no more than four, almost all of the area's inhabitants being nomads."
Both stipulations led to the territorial status of Sinai and the Negev becoming somewhat ambiguous after 1841: The Ottomans initially sometimes produced maps that depicted the Negev as "Egyptian" territory,Cf. : "[Maps produced by the Ottomans after 1841] reflect[ed] the situation on the ground in Sinai as it developed after 1841. This was de-facto control by the Egyptian house of Muhammad ´Ali over the Sinai, Egyptian guarding of the pilgrimage route through this desert, and even a permanent Egyptian presence in ´Aqaba in the Province of Hijjaz." while the Egyptians produced maps that did not even recognize the area of the Inheritance Firman as part of Egypt.
The French subsequently built the economically vital Suez Canal by 1869, with its southern end still lying in Ottoman territory.Cf. However, after Britain established effective control over Egypt as a de facto protectorate in 1882 (with Egypt being only nominally still under Ottoman sovereignty) British and Indian merchants benefited economically from the canal while concomitantly weakening the value of Ottoman trade routes.Cf. : "Britain and British India dominated imports and exports after the decline of the coffee trade, which had been largely under Muslim Ottoman control earlier. The planting of coffee outside Arabia, especially in the Western Hemisphere in the eighteenth century, decreased the importance of Yemen coffee and, therefore, Jidda as an exporter of it. After 1875 the value of coffee imported into, and re-exported from, Jidda rapidly declined and stayed quite low, with only a slight increase in the years after 1903. [...] British and Anglo-Indian dominance of the Jidda marketplace (see table 5) continued basically unaltered from 1840 to 1908." Britain's control over the canal also made Ottoman military movements in Palestine and the Hejaz dependent on British authorization.
Consequently, the Ottomans began efforts to extend their de facto control southwestward. Meanwhile, the British sought to keep the Ottomans away from the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, which had the potential to threaten their dominance in the Red Sea through the Suez Canal. This struggle for the Sinai and the Negev unfolded roughly in four stages:
1892: Border redefinitions
Stage 1 consisted of two measures that were more symbolic than directly political: When Egypt's ruler, Khedive Tewfik Pasha, died in 1892, the Ottomans had to confirm the rule of his son, Abbas Helmy II. In the renewal of the firman that confirmed Abbas as the ruler of Egypt, however, the document was deliberately crafted to explicitly exclude the Sinai from Egyptian territory. Instead, it was only stated in a telegram that Egypt should continue administering some of the Sinai forts:
The return of Aqaba as the westernmost of these mentioned locations would soon become the second point in defining the Negev border.