Napoleon in Egypt

Napoleon in Egypt. Edited by Irene A. Bierman. With an introduction by Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2003. In association with the Gustav E. von Grunembaum Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. Pp. v, 189. $49.50/£29.95. This collection of ten essays considers the significance of General Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition to and occupation of Egypt. Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1798 after evading the British fleet commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson. He defeated Ottoman and Mamluk forces and established, with varying degrees of success, a new political and economic administration. Napoleon also campaigned in the Levant before returning to Egypt. In 1799, he left for France to pursue political ambitions and stranded his dwindling army, by then ravaged by war and disease. Residual French forces capitulated to British and Ottoman forces in 1801. The contributors to this book agree the French ephemeral presence had important, if not profound, implications for Egypt and the Middle East. Nelly Hanna views the expedition as part of a long-term process in the changing relationship between Egypt and Europe. Egypt was a strategic transit entrepot for the coffee trade between the Hijaz and Europe. By the time the French arrived, however, the coffee trade had collapsed due to Antiguan competition. Furthermore, native textiles faced burgeoning British and European cheap imports. Geoffrey Symcox agrees with Edward Said that the expedition acted as "the formative moment for the discourse of Orientalism" (p. 13). His essay places the expedition-a "strategic gamble" (p. 26)-in the broader context of France's conflict with Great Britain. The attack was daring and risky and meant to threaten Britain's land links with India. Although the Directory's geopolitical objectives were not attained, the French presence resulted in two particular cultural consequences: (1) the founding of the Institut d'Egypte, and (2) the confrontation between the Enlightenment and Islam. Stuart Harten provides an exceptional synthesis of Said's thought toward the expedition-"the enabling project for all subsequent Orientalist enterprises" (p. 35). He also injects Henry Laurens's interpretation of the "ideological foundations of the expedition by tracing its roots to the discourse of Oriental Despotism'" (p. 36). Harten points out that the primary contributors of the seminal Description de l'Egypte were engineers rather than Orientalist scholars. To Harten, the French expedition appropriated Egypt politically and culturally, "dispossessing the native inhabitants of their very presence" (p. 44). Juan R. I. Cole views the French invasion as "perhaps the first in a long line of liberal colonial adventures, of which the Vietnam War is the most famous in our time" (or arguably, the American invasion of Iraq). What he calls "contradictions" also serve as strategic binary relationships "between Self and Other, civilization and barbarism, liberty and dominance, public and private, male and female, Great Powers diplomacy and local politics" (p. 48). Cole uses memoirs to explore these contradictions and constructions. Nairy Hampikian examines the mapping of Cairo and describes "the drastic changes that took place in Cairo both during and after the Napoleonic invasion" (p. 70). Hampikian convincingly demonstrates not only that the Description represented an Orientalist paradigm, but that its illustrations' efforts to "see the unseen" (p. 74) are valuable for architectural and urban historians. Shmuel Moreh provides an Egyptian view of the French invasion. The chief observers were 'Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Niqula Turk, and Hasan al-'Attar. …