Thirteen chapters on fin-de-siecle Egypt tackle an important but relatively neglected decade in its history, as the editors’ introduction argues through an assessment of previous scholarship. Chapters consider the overarching impact of a British colonial administration through policies and practices such as statistics-gathering and infrastructure building as well as attempts to control prostitution. Institutions and ideologies of modernity and reform are represented in chapters on education, fiction-writing, history writing and its translation, the press as a vehicle of historical consciousnes ... More

Thirteen chapters on fin-de-siecle Egypt tackle an important but relatively neglected decade in its history, as the editors’ introduction argues through an assessment of previous scholarship. Chapters consider the overarching impact of a British colonial administration through policies and practices such as statistics-gathering and infrastructure building as well as attempts to control prostitution. Institutions and ideologies of modernity and reform are represented in chapters on education, fiction-writing, history writing and its translation, the press as a vehicle of historical consciousness, and political memoirs of a rising class of professionals. How Egyptians drew from and critiqued European institutions is a concern of several chapters, as well as concerns with gender issues, minority rights and the role of historic minorities such as Jews. Egypt’s heterogeneous population is also seen through chapters on its Greek community, Coptic activism and reform, anarchism, and the different agendas of local actors in the country’s far west. Together these scholarly studies show the decade as one of enormous though often quiet intellectual, political and institutional activity.