In occupied Egypt, British governmental programs were closely related to England's needs as an imperial power since Egypt was occupied because of its strategic position along the route to India. British presence there, however, inevitably led to modernization during the 32 years of British rule. During the first period the British were preoccupied with the prospect of imminent withdrawal. The second period emphasized programs for such reforms as hydraulic and agricultural modernization, wider education, and urban development. The final period covered the emergence of Egyptian nationalism, whose goals proved incompatible with British rule of Egypt in spite of efforts to deal with nationalism by repression or conciliation. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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.

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.

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.

In the heyday of Empire just before the First World War, Lord Cromer was second only to Lord Curzon in fame and public esteem. In the days when Cairo and Calcutta represented the twin poles of British power in Asia and Africa, Cromer's commanding presence seemed to radiate the essential spiritof imperial rule. In this first modern biography Roger Owen charts the life of the man revered by the British and hated by today's Egyptians, the real ruler of Egypt for nearly a quarter of a century.A member of the famous City banking family of Baring Brothers, Cromer in his youth seemed to be distinguished mainly by lack of academic ability and a taste for the fashionable pursuits of his day. His first military posting, to Corfu, was welcomed by him on account of the excellent shooting to behad in the region. Roger Owen shows how, almost imperceptibly, his commitment to public service grew, due in part at least to his relationship with Ethel Errington who, after long delay, became his first wife. From the island outposts of the old British Empire, to India, the jewel in its crown, and finally to the new Empire in Africa, Cromer represented the might of Britain's Empire. Few imperial administrators had either his range of experience or his long practice of ruling different non-Europeanpeoples, at a time when the whole notion of Empire itself entered more and more into the metropolitan political debate. Roger Owen makes extensive use of Cromer's official correspondence, family papers, memoirs, and the personal letters of his friends and colleagues to explore all aspects of Cromer's life in imperial government. He examines his innovative role in international finance and his energetic re-engagementwith Britain's troubled political life following his formal retirement in 1907. Finally, he assesses the sometimes bitter legacy of imperial rule left by Cromer.