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When an online petition urged Egyptians to protest on January 25, the call was not only taken up by an internet savvy minority. The demonstrators who took to the streets on that day - many of whom remained there until they forced Hosni Mubarak, the country's autocratic ruler, to step down - transcended the divisions of class, age, religion and political affiliation. The true force behind the Egyptian people's uprising rested in its leaderless and spontaneous nature. A widely-felt wound had been poked and festering at the centre of that wound was decades of economic exploitation and corruption made tenable by police violence against any form of public dissent.

One sign held up by protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square read: "Tell them to remove the plague and price increases Mubarak." It was signed: "A citizen that loves Egypt." That simple message conveyed the essence of the uprising, for the 18 days of protests were, in many ways, the culmination of a wave of much smaller and more localised strikes and demonstrations that had been taking place across the country since 2006.