Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I EGYPT UNDER ISMAIL My first visit to Egypt was in the winter of 1875?6, when I spent some pleasant months as a tourist on the lower Nile. Before, however, describing my impressions of this my earliest acquaintance made with the Egyptian people, it may be as well, that, for their benefit and the benefit of foreign readers generally, I should say a few words in explanation of what my previous life had been as far as it had had any relation to public affairs. It will show them my exact position in my own country, and help them to understand how it came about that, beginning as a mere onlooker at what was passing in their country, I gradually became interested in it politically and ended by taking an active part in the revolution which six years later developed itself among them. I was already thirty-five years of age at the date of this first visit, and had seen much of men and things. I began life rather early. Belonging to a family of the landed gentry of the south of England with strong Conservative traditions and connected with some of the then leaders of the Tory party, I was placed at the age of eighteen in the Diplomatic Service, in the first instance as attache to the British Legation at Athens where King Otho was still on the throne of Greece, and afterwards, during a space of twelve years, as member of other legations and embassies to the various Courts of Europe, in all of which I learned a little of my profession, amused myself, and made friends. I was thus, between 1859 and 1869, for some weeks at Constantinople in the reign of Sultan Abd-el- Mejid; for a couple of years in the Germany of the Germanic Confederation; for a year in Spain under Queen Isabella; and for another year in Paris at the climax of the Emperor's prestige under Napoleon III; and I ...

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.

British forces landed in Egypt in 1882 to put down an armed rebellion against the then-ruling Twefik Pasha, Maintain order, and, most importantly, ensure access to the Suez Canal. They stayed for three-quarters of a century. The story of their rule describes administrators and soldiers who governed a people they didn't really understand, but who unwittingly created the basis for a modern country. Lord Cromer, Chinese Gordon, Kitchener, the Mahdi, Farouk, Masser and Anthony Eden are among the men who played vital roles in this period.

Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.

Annotation A history of the three-way colonial relationship among Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike most books on colonialism, this one deals explicitly with race and slavery.

The land and people -- Egypt during the Old Kingdom -- The Middle and New Kingdoms -- Nubians, Greeks, and Romans, circa 1200 BCE-632 CE -- Christian Egypt -- Egypt within Islamic empires, 639-969 -- Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, 969-1517 -- Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798 -- Napoleon Bonaparte, Muhammad Ali, and Ismail : Egypt in the nineteenth century -- The British period, 1882-1952 -- Egypt for the Egyptians, 1952-1981 : Nasser and Sadat -- Mubarak's Egypt -- Conclusion: Egypt through the millennia