The Cave Mission of 1876 and Britain’s Imperial Information Strategies

Abstract This article argues that the member of parliament Stephen Cave’s British government-sponsored mission to Egypt in 1876, and his subsequent report on Egyptian finances, represented a novel form of intelligence breach by an imperial power. This interference in Egyptian affairs helped to ensure the timing of Egypt’s bankruptcy that year by stymieing debt restructuring negotiations while simultaneously making conceivable future imperial interventions on a wider scale through fiscal policy oversight. Furthermore, this article develops the concept of ‘intelligence sovereignty’ through an analysis of the events leading up to Cave’s report and examines emerging British intelligence capacities in order to highlight the costs to states of sovereign intelligence breaches. In particular, it posits that sovereign debt instruments traded on the London Stock Exchange constituted a repository of information susceptible to intelligence tactics in the 1870s and offers a new entry point for considering the relationship between finance, policy making and imperial expansion.