The 1930s were a crucial decade in the evolution of modern Egypt. Many things changed in Egypt between the onset of the world depression in late 1929 and the outbreak of World War II ten years later. Not the least of these changes was a major shift in the character of Egyptian nationalism. In place of the exclusivist territorial nationalism which had marked the 1920s, the period after 1930 witnessed the development of new supra-Egyptian concepts of national identity.

Three processes laid the basis for the emergence of supra-Egyptian nationalism. One was the manifest economic and political difficulties of Egypt in the 1930s, difficulties which produced a widespread mood of disillusionment with the existing Egyptian order and which led many Egyptians to question the territorial nationalist premises upon which that order was based. A second development was the changing social composition of the articulate Egyptian public after 1930 – the physical growth and growing political importance of a larger urban and literate population which was less thoroughly Westernized than the smaller Egyptian elite of the previous generation, and correspondingly whose nationalist inclinations were toward greater identification with Egypt's Arab and Muslim neighbors. The third was the gradual growth of a variety of new institutional as well as personal contacts between Egyptians and other Arabs, contacts which over time reinforced an Egyptian identification with Arab nationalism in particular.