| | 1 | Author: | Chirol
Valentine
Sir
1852-1929 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Egyptian Problem  | | | | Published: | 2003 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | It is little more than a century since Egypt emerged
into modern history from the inglorious obscurity into
which she had sunk after Selim the Conqueror incorporated
her in 1517 into the dominions of the then mighty
Ottoman Empire, and Europe, having discovered new
trade routes to the Orient, ceased to take the slightest
interest in her fate. Nor did she then emerge from that
long obscurity by any effort of her own. She was violently
dragged out of it by the vast ambitions of two great
soldiers of fortune, neither of them of Asiatic or of African
but both of European stock, and both born, by a curious
coincidence, in the same year, 1769, in different parts of
the Mediterranean—the Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte
and the Albanian Mehemet Ali. Napoleon was prompt to
realise that in the great duel which had commenced
between France and Britain the most vulnerable part of
the British Empire was to be sought in the East, and that
Egypt provided the best strategic base for threatening the
great dependency we were building up in India, and
perhaps driving us out of it as we had not so long before
ourselves driven out the French. Mehemet Ali, who landed
in Egypt during the great upheaval produced by the French
invasion and in the very bay of Aboukir in which Nelson's
great victory of the Nile had doomed Napoleon's enterprise
to ultimate failure, realised in turn that, in the
steady disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt
offered a rich and fertile field of incalculable potentialities
to his masterful genius. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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