Egypt

EGYPT BY GEORGE YOUNG CONTENTS EDITORS INTRODUCTION AUTHORS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I The Birth of Modern Egypt: Napoleon Mehemet All Palmerston CHAPTER II Bankrupts and Brokers: Abbas Said Ismail CHAPTER III The British Occupation: Tewfik Arabi Gladstone CHAPTER IV Egypt and the Sudan: The Mahdi Gordon CHAPTER V Financial Reconstruction: Cromer CHAPTER VI Nationalist Renascence: Abbas Gorst Kitchener CHAPTER VII The War: HusseinRushdi CHAPTER VIII Rebellion and Independence: Wingate Allenby CHAPTER IX The Kingdom of Egypt: FuadZaglul r CHAPTER X England and Egypt: Where are thy Wise Men? CHAPTER XI Egypt and the Sudan: An Appendix needing Operation INDEX AUTHORS INTRODUCTION "AN interesting monument to Modern Egypt now con fronts the newly arrived traveller in the Station Square of Cairo. Egypt is represented as a Sphinx staring in its stony trance. The Spirit of Egypt, a female figure, stands beside it stretching out a hand to rouse it from its agelong apathy. That is modern Egypts conception of itselfa conception to which we shall again and again return in answering the questions of the Sphinx. What Modern Egypt is regionally can be easily defined. It is the lower valley and the delta of the Nilea belt of irrigable land broadening as it goes northward, bordered by desert on either side, and bounded by the Red Sea on the east and by the Sahara on the west. But what modern Egypt is racially is more difficult to describe. For the various races that have at different times settled in this region have only, during the last few years, begun td fuse into what can be called an Egyptian. And of all the new nations that emerged in Eastern Europe and Western Asia out of the world wars that preluded the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Egyptian is the most elusive and enigmatical. A century ago, after the Napoleonic wars, Egypt burst into the field of European politics, like a flaming comet, to the utter disorganisation of the political system of the day, much as did Turkey after the Great War, Egypt then represented a force that baffled Western rulers and broke up European alliances, much as did Turkey a few years ago. Even so did the Egypt question cause a rupture in an AngloFrench entente and the fall of M. Thiers, just as Turkey caused a rupture in a later Anglo French entente and the fall of Mr. Lloyd George. But the uprisal of Turkey was clearly a retarded national renascence. To what force are we to attribute the up heaval caused a century ago by the Egyptian expansion ? For there was no Egyptian national consciousness inspir ing the campaigns of Mehemet AH. The establishment of Egypt as an independent State by an alien adven turer compels us to believe that there is a force of nationality that can do its work before there is any national consciousness.".......