Egypt: British Colony, Imperial Capital - Paperback

by James Whidden (Author)

This book is a comprehensive portrait of the British colony in Egypt, which also takes a fresh look at the examples of colonial cultures memorably enshrined in Edward W. Said's classic Orientalism. Arguing that Said's analysis offered only the dominant discourse in imperial and colonial narratives, it uses private papers, letters, memoirs, as well as the official texts, histories and government reports, to reveal both dominant and muted discourses. While imperial sentiment certainly set the standards and sealed the image of a ruling caste culture, the investigation of colonial sentiment reveals a more diverse colony in temperament and lifestyles, often intimately rooted in the Egyptian setting. The method involves providing biographical treatments of a wide range of colonials and the sometimes contradictory responses to specific colonial locations, historical junctures and seminal events, like invasion and war or grand imperial projects including the Alexandria municipality.

Front Jacket

This book is an account of the British experience in Egypt over two centuries, informed by the testimonies of a diverse set of individuals. Providing life stories alongside institutional portraits, it offers multiple perspectives on colonial and imperial cultures, from five generations of a British, Alexandrian family to a Reuters correspondent with the ear of ambassadors, generals, and pashas. By relating the British colony to discourses on civilising missions, race and nation, law and order, religion, governance, and war, the book identifies the contradictory attitudes of consuls and bishops, artists and soldiers, mothers and daughters, patricians and clients, and long-term and short-term colonials. A biographical treatment of the colony discloses problems of historical memory, identifying divergences based on location, time period, and profession. Official narratives sometimes bore little resemblance to private recollections, indicating that the imperial 'project' was not uniform or even coherent. Nevertheless, certain salient features emerge, among them that the colony in its initial phase was more Levantine than imperial, and that it was recollected as having its 'golden age' between the military occupation of 1882 and the end of the First World War, with the ensuing years being marked by conflicting visions of a threatened colonial future. These themes engage with recent imperial historiography, but are applied to a setting that is often overlooked, in spite of the prominent treatment of Egypt in Edward Said's ground-breaking Orientalism. Egypt was an integral site in the imperial network and this book will be of great interest to area specialists working in political, historical, or cultural studies.

Back Jacket

This book is an account of the British experience in Egypt over two centuries, informed by the testimonies of a diverse set of individuals. Providing life stories alongside institutional portraits, it offers multiple perspectives on colonial and imperial cultures, from five generations of a British, Alexandrian family to a Reuters correspondent with the ear of ambassadors, generals, and pashas.

By relating the British colony to discourses on civilising missions, race and nation, law and order, religion, governance, and war, the book identifies the contradictory attitudes of consuls and bishops, artists and soldiers, mothers and daughters, patricians and clients, and long-term and short-term colonials. A biographical treatment of the colony discloses problems of historical memory, identifying divergences based on location, time period, and profession. Official narratives sometimes bore little resemblance to private recollections, indicating that the imperial 'project' was not uniform or even coherent. Nevertheless, certain salient features emerge, among them that the colony in its initial phase was more Levantine than imperial, and that it was recollected as having its 'golden age' between the military occupation of 1882 and the end of the First World War, with the ensuing years being marked by conflicting visions of a threatened colonial future.

These themes engage with recent imperial historiography, but are applied to a setting that is often overlooked, in spite of the prominent treatment of Egypt in Edward Said's ground-breaking Orientalism. Egypt was an integral site in the imperial network and this book will be of great interest to area specialists working in political, historical, or cultural studies.

Author Biography

James Whidden is Professor of History at Acadia University