Eyes of the Storm: 19th Century Egypt

"BOMBARDMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 11 July 1882 during the Anglo-Egyptian War by the British Fleet commanded by Admiral Beauchamp Seymour with gunships Sultan at right and Alexandra. - The bombardment of Alexandria in Egypt, military ships and lighthouse, drawing by Ximenes, engraving from L'IIllustrazione Italiana, no 31, July 30, 1882." (source: wiki)

Up to the 16th century, Europe traded with Asia via the Middle East - largely Italians (such as the Venetians and Genoese) in cities such as Alexandria and Constantinople.

But in 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama established a route to India around Africa. Although this didn’t cut the Ottomans out of trade in the 16th century, they were concerned about it, and launched a failed attack on Portuguese holdings in India in 1538.

During the 17th century, ascendant British, Dutch, and French traders had largely supplanted the Portuguese and Spanish, flooding the circum-Africa route with commercial traffic, now rendering the Middle East route (involving more costly overland traffic) unecessary for this increasingly lucrative commerce. By the late 18th century, the British East India Company was conquering India, and some merchants and company officials re-discovered Egypt as a potential shortcut, at least for sending letters faster. To their dismay, Napoleon attempted to conquer Egypt, putting the French alarmingly close to India (as well as for Egypt’s bountiful grain ) .

Ultimately, admiral Nelson’s Mediterranean blockade, and the forces of British-aligned Ottomans (Egypt being an Ottoman province after all), resolved this concern, but it presaged developments to come.

After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 up to WWI - the "long nineteenth century" - global commerce continually grew (CITE: Davies 2009) , with Britain in the lead, the core nodes, outside of the foundational [and horrific] Atlantic circuits, being England and India. While Britain secured the route around Africa in 1800 by taking the Cape of Good hope from the Dutch (CITE) , the route to Egypt gained prominence as it was shorter, convenient for communication, and commercial traffic after the Suez Canal. The Mediterranean’s role in global commerce - previously an Atlantic affair - was revitalized, confronting the British with an old maritime culture. The quarantine system was its most famous component, rooted in Black Death experience, with which Britain had little tradition. At the same time, rapidly growing commerce in the 19th century facilitated the spread of new diseases, most prominently cholera. Thus Egypt was at the heart of debates over epidemiology and public health. This wasn’t a debate the British could escape however, because the Suez route - especially important after the canal was built, but even before - was a shortcut to India, the exploitation of which was the lynchpin of the British commercial empire, granting it enormous wealth and financial power over the "long nineteenth century". Hence their anxiety over French rule in Egypt, Russian advances in Central Asia, and the Ottoman-German alliance in WWI.

But Egypt wasn’t simply a waypoint for European commerce - it was a rebellious domain of the Ottoman Empire, with a deep-rooted tradition of Mamluk power, non-Arabs initially imported since the 10th century by Muslim rulers as slave soldiers, but who had eventually became a ruling section themselves , funding their power through connections to long-distance trade, and in the 18th century Ottoman empire, also in tax-farming . They were a persistent thorn for Ottoman rule, and Egyptian governors of the region began forming more autonomous state systems. Yet their strike for autonomy was soon co-opted. To dispatch the French invaders, as well as put down Wahhabi rebels in Arabia , the Ottomans tasked Albanian viceroy Muhammad Ali, leading the Albanian contingent .

He handily defeated both (killing off the Mamluks and sending Wahhabism into a century-long remission), but rather than assert Ottoman rule, he carved out a path for Egyptian de facto independence (formal independence was never declared from the Ottoman sultan).

His plan was to develop cotton production for export via state monopoly (initated in 1820 ), enabling him to finance development in local industry and armed forces - the latter used for slaving raids as far south as Buganda (Uganda today) to build said development (Ali’s cotton exports had to compete with cheap US slave cotton ), defense , and ultimately to strike into Ottoman Syria for control of natural resources. This wasn’t without cost - the slaving and exploitation of Sudan would culminate in the Mahdist rebellion in the 1880s ("Mahdi" is like a messiah figure in Islam), initially against Egyptian rule, and a mess the British stumbled in when they occupied Egypt in 1882. In the countryside, the cotton push introduced tenancy and wage labor , took away classical usufruct rights to land , empowered large landowners (many of which were political allies he was rewarding) alongside state-owned land manned by corvée labor ) to take more and more land, leaving peasants more impoverished of land and into increasingly exploitative tenancy relationships with landlords . This poverty would drive them increasingly to the cities to find work, although development (largely in textile, cigarette, and transport sectors) didn’t keep pace to provide sufficient employment . That these sectors, and the overall economy, was largely controlled by foreign (European) capital was, however, a result of developments in 1841. But there was also a strong presence of Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Syrian Christians with trading firms in the country as well .

Such "defensive development" was characteristic of polities around the world in the 19th century - from the Ottoman Empire to Meiji Japan - hoping to build up enough strength to fend off invasion (Tipu Sultan’s Mysore, in the late 18th century, was ahead of the curve here), and Ali’s Egypt was, for a time, at the head of this trend. This almost always meant strong government control of these economies, as well as tariffs, which Europeans opposed (in favor of "free trade"), as it reduced how much profit they could obtain in such places. On the flipside, when polities fell into turmoil, Europeans would use this condition of chaos (thus threatening to commercial stability) as an excuse to step in and take control. This was much the case in the first colonial forays into Africa starting in the 1860s-1880s, such as in the Nigerian Delta and the Ashanti and Dahomey kingdoms (Reid PAGE NUMBER) , southwest across the Sahara from Egypt.

Concerned with the vitality of his military and labor force, Ali sponsored a public health program with the help of a French physician, Antoine Clot (many French of the revolutionary/republican strain were attracted to helping Ali’s development, particularly the Saint-Simonians (HOBSBAWM?) , although I don’t think Clot himself was a Saint-Simonian). In fact, to protect his soldiers’ health, Napoleon had introduced a variety of cutting-edge European health measures during his occupation, including sanitation measures and England’s new smallpox vaccine , although Egyptians had practiced the first "version" of this vaccine, called variolation .

One component - the Quarantine Board in Alexandria, with representatives from the main Mediterranean commercial nations - would put Egypt at the center of health politics in maritime commerce into the late 19th century.

While the bubonic plague kept popping up in Europe long after the initial, and most infamous, Black Death of the mid-14th century, its intensity died off. In North Africa however, it remained extremely deadly, reliably flaring up at least once a decade. This was a problem for Ali, as he didn’t want his officers and soldiers dying off before they even made it to the battlefield. To combat this, he turned to both sanitation and quarantine measures, and achieved new levels of control over the disease, as well as a robust nationwide smallpox vaccination campaign. At the same time, British-Indian commerce brought a terrifying new disease to Europe and the Middle East: cholera.

Today we know cholera is caused by Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which infects the gastro-intestinal system after exposure to contaminated water, which becomes contaminated when a victim’s infected shit is mixed into said water. Once infected, the vibrio induces uncontrollable diarrhea, rapidly dehydrating the victim, and frequently killing. Europe and the Americas were first hit in the 1820s, and the experience terrified the West, setting the stage for later medical debates. In 1831, Muslim hajj pilgrims got infected with cholera at the British port of Aden, and the disease ripped through Mecca. Despite efforts to cordon off returning pilgrims moving through Egypt, the disease hit the country hard - a frustrating experience for Ali, as he was about to invade Syria. How though was disease understood at the time?

Rooted in the writing of Classical Greek doctor Hippocrates (a canon shared by the Muslim and European world), miasma had from then served as a core explanation of disease transmission. The idea was that imbalances between people and nature, and a person’s internal "humors", as well as "putrefaction" of rotting organic material, generated bad (and often smelly) air (hence "miasma" and "malaria", the latter literally "bad air"), and these miasmas then could induce health imbalance in people, causing disease. Yet the experience with the Black Death had brought about the quarantine system, particularly strong in Mediterranean port cities (such as Marseilles (France), Venice, Acre and Beirut (Syria region), and Alexandria (Egypt)), which seeded the idea of contagionism.

In the quarantine system, ships would be given bills of health (indicating the degree of safety at the port they left), and these would be used by the port they were travelling to to determine if they should be quarantined or not - although judging the veracity of bills of health could become complicated and political. These two strands would entwine with each other, while also developing on their own right. Significantly, as Europeans explored and colonized the world, the role of different environs in health became more prominent, facilitated by the re-discovery of Hippocrates "AIR BOOK" (from Arab world? FIND ITS REINTRODUCTION TO EUROPE). Thus contagionist, environmental, and social elements were part of the evolving Western understanding of health and disease.

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(1) Muhammad Ali (1769-1849, r. 1805-1848), portrait by Auguste Couder, 1841 (source: wiki); (2): Muhammad Sa'id Pasha (1822-1863, r. 1854-1863), photograph, dated 1855 by wiki (source: wiki); (3): Isma'il Pasha (1830-1895, r. 1863-1879), photograph, dated 1860-1890 by wiki (source: wiki); (4): Dr. Antoine Clot (aka Clot Bey) (1793-1868) by Antoine-Jean Gros in 1833 (source: wiki); (5): Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894), photograph by Nadar (no date given) (source: wiki); (6): Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), photograph by Nadar, no date given (source: wiki); (7): Robert Koch (1843-1910), photograph, date not given (published in 1907 for Nobel Prize) (source: wiki); (8): Ahmed ‘Urabi (1841-1911), portrait, 1882 (source: wiki); (9): Tewfik Pasha (1852-1892, r. 1879-1892), photographed circa 1882 (source: wiki); (10): William Ewart Gladstone, Liberal Prime Minster of the United Kingdom (1868-1874, 1880-1885, 1886, 1892-1894); photographed 28 July 1884 by Rupert William Potter (source: wiki)

In 18th century Europe, the prevailing ideology was mercantilism - this viewed nations and empires as drawing strength from both population and bullion (gold and silver), and facilitating trade through powerful state-sanctioned companies, such as the French, Dutch, and British East India Companies. Thus public action had a salient role, from trade to health. Throughout Europe, medical police and port quarantines gained strength, although weaker in more laissez-faire England . No school of disease etiology was dominant per se, but both miasma theory and contagionism were credible. For example, the contagionist idea comported with new corpuscular theories of physics.

As commerce boomed in the 19th century however, liberalism was ascendant, which meant favoring free-trade over public action , and this was particularly intense in Britain. As such, scientific debates over disease were highly political . On one side were the contagionists - they believed that disease was spread by a contagion. However, rooted in medieval policy, quarantines, and therefore contagionism, was decried as "medieval superstition", even rolling back quarantine measures in the mid-19th century . Liberals touted instead miasma theory. Conveniently for liberals, miasma theory justified abandoning quarantines (which made commerce more costly), and focusing instead on sanitation. As the evidence for contagionism vs miasma wasn’t decisive until the late 19th century, the victory of miasma theory was more due to the politics of liberal interests . Notably, the British institutional support of miasma theory made it a dead zone for (contagionist-leaning) bacteriological research (Britain was satisfied to revel in Newton’s legacy, leaving Oxbridge a backwards institution throughout the century), pioneered instead by France (Pasteur) and Germany (Koch), notably two states more amenable to contagion theory (and both scientists, especially Koch, were close to their respective states) (France in particular made huge medical leaps once the Revolution broke out (R Porter PAGE NUMBR)) .

At the same time, it should be noted, theories of climate and race hardened - in the 18th century, Europeans believed different "races" could be acclimatized to new environs (that is, different groups of people might be acclimatized to different climates, but everyone could eventually live anywhere, implying a basic universality); over the 19th century, however, ideas of race began to harden, leading to the early 19th century idea of "polygenesis" (that different races had completely different origins and thus were different species) and after Darwin’s revolutionary "Origin of Species" (which at least deflated the polygenesis idea), social Darwinism and "race science". Today scientists triumphantly call race science "pseudoscience" (and rightly so), but it’s important to keep in mind that it was very much part of standard anthropological and medico-biological thinking of the time. It wasn’t "pseudo" to many of the scientists of the time (but not all scientists subscribed, such as the radical liberal German Rudolf Virchow, a participant in the 1848 German revolution (notably, he was also a miasmist)). Yet, as will be noted, medical thought for most of the 19th century was de facto undergirded by a universalist view, a practical perspective given the state of global commerce at the time.

In Egypt, Muhammad Ali’s strategy was going quite well. Still a nominal vassal of the Ottomans, and now with the most powerful army in the empire, the sultan called him in to put down a Greek revolt in 1821, promising him control over Syria to do so. Initially successful, the crackdown lead to European intervention (and ultimately Greek independence), Ali still felt entitled to Syria. In the 1830s, with a powerful army, he launched an invasion of Ottoman Syria and the Levant, and threatened to march on Constantinople when the sultan protested . Aiming for the status quo (and also, the Ottomans first went to Russia for help, and Britain wanted to avoid a Russo-Ottoman alliance), British forces intervened on behalf of the Ottomans , beating back Ali by 1841, imposing terms and free trade on both sides - the price of British aid to the Ottomans in 1838 was free trade , the price of defeat for Ali was reducing the size of his army (KUHNKE?) , on top of his ending of state monopolies in 1836-1837 to reduce exposure to market volality, amidst a global depression. Replacing this was a system of direct land taxes, extracted by grants given to politically favorable notables (including his family), and nucleating a powerful new landlord class, along with opening villages to a Greek/Levantine/Jewish merchant class (largely from within the Ottoman Empire; see Alff) to transact the crop .

Europeans made Ali reduce the size of his army (the engine of his mercantilist economic policy) and surrendering the state monopoly on cotton, and thus undermining the capacity of his successors to finance development. These developments - reducing state income - forced the state began to turn to cheaper professionals in public office, replacing higher-paid Turkish officials and European specialists with Egyptians, the nucleus of an increasingly self-conscious urban nationalist section . Ali’s successors, the khedives, still tried to keep course with these new restrictions, but ended up enthralled to Europe by debt, the big reason being the Suez canal, built by French Saint-Simonian Lesseps. Said and Isma’il Pasha believed maritime traffic through the canal would be a lucrative source of income, but ultimately had to borrow money from European banks to finance construction (in the 1860s, enjoying a cotton boom as the US South was mired in the American Civil War, big investments deceptively appeared like a good idea). They ended up so deep in debt, they had to sell their shares in the canal to Europeans to stay afloat, and that still wasn’t enough.

Rising traffic in the Red Sea also meant increasing numbers of hajj pilgrims, carried by steamships from European countries and Egypt. Egypt attempted to impose quarantine regulations on these pilgrims and restrictions on passengers per ship, but shipping companies openly flouted these rules (the Egyptian steamer company, Khediviyah, was even the most flagrant abuser) . At the same time, the quarantine system’s regulations sharpened medical debate in the region, contagionist Mediterranean (championed by Italy, Spain, Egypt, and the Ottomans, and generally popular in lay opinion) and miasmatic Atlantic (championed by Britain, Austria, and Holland) (France indulged both views) . These debates sparked multiple international medical conferences, such as Paris 1851 and Constantinople 1866, although the fierce political interests behind the debate resulted in no medical consensus, although a quarantine system was accepted by participants, hinging on Egyptian regulations of trade and hajj pilgrims around the Suez route. Such measures successfully contained a hajj cholera breakout in 1872 - even the miasmatic British begrudgingly admitted to this . But this regulation of hajj pilgrims was a sore spot for Egyptian nationalists (religious fraternity was also one reason that the quarantine of hajj pilgrims in 1831 failed), especially considering their horrific treatment by ship captains flouting and abusing quarantine regulations, and the involvement of Europeans in Egyptian government and quarantine management.

Ulama at the eminent al-Azhar university-mosque of Cairo were grumbling about the corruption of the ruling class . On top of this, nationalists were increasingly resentful of their exclusion from the upper echelons of power, occupied by Turkish-speaking elites (recall Ali and the khedives were Albanians), although the top was slowly Arabizing, who levied large taxes on the countryside , largely going to paying off foreign debt. This increasingly impoverished the peasants, adding weight to Arabic nationalist concerns

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Images from Gelvin 2011; (1) page 77; (2) page 94; (3) page 95;

In 1881, cholera broke out once again on the hajj, and the Quarantine Board of Alexandria imposed draconian containment measures, even resulting in pilgrims running out of food, leading to rioting in the lazaretto’s they were housed in - an issue that Egyptian nationalists began rallying around. Steamship companies were simultaneously frustrated by the chokehold on Red Sea shipping, swamping the British Foreign Office with complaints about expenses and losses, even threatening to revive the circum-Africa route around the Cape - this even lead Lesseps to openly announce, in Pasteur’s home turf, that there was no basis for contagionism, that miasma was the cause of disease, and thus the quarantine restrictions should be ended. On top of all of this, the Quarantine Board of Alexandria had imposed particularly strict regulations on ships that called at the port of Aden (such as rejecting clean bills of health), a major coaling station for the British, due to its historical role in spreading cholera into Arabia. While attacks on foreigners in Alexandria began in the summer of 1881, British personnel were arguing that cholera prevalence in Egypt was exaggerated, and the British government forced Egypt to back it on an upcoming Quarantine Board vote. The issue: should the heavy restrictions on British ships be maintained? The outcome: in favor were France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal; against: England, Greece, three Egyptian representatives, and a tie-breaking vote cast by the Egyptian president of the board. British ships could now travel freely, and other Mediterranean countries began imposing their own harsh restrictions on British ships (KUHNKE) .

In September 1881, nationalists under officer ‘Urabi - himself from a peasant background, and educated at Al-Azhar, and able to become an officer (despite being non-Turkish/Balkan) due to reforms after 1841 - took power in Egypt (although the khedive was still technically ruler), carried on a wave of popular anger at foreign involvement in the country, and the simultaneous ill-treatment of hajj pilgrims. This lead to some tangible changes in the country. For example, over 100 miles east by ship from Alexandria, Egyptian coalheavers (largely peasant migrants from the south) at Port Said - the major coaling station on the Suez Canal - launched a strike in April 1882, demanding higher wages. Although contracted to work through local shaykhs (which gave employers flexibility in avoiding a long-term work force, and the demands that come with it), the demand was aimed at the international companies at the Canal. They in turn complained that the workers were already overpaid (and thus they, the companies, were actually "the oppressed"), and that Arabs didn’t need higher pay because they lived in a "state of nature". Yet a commission sent by the Egyptian government - now under nationalist control - called for higher wages. Ultimately these came through, and further gains after .

Yet the khedive, Tewfik Pasha, was looking for foreign support to regain power . In Europe, the press flooded with warnings that ‘Urabi would lead a fanatical regime - The Times ran nearly 700 articles on the 'crisis' in 1881-1882 alone, fearmongering over property and loans in jeopardy, and the Christian minority of Egypt. In the higher echelons of power, the British were concerned about a popular, Islamic-tinged rebellion cutting off their link to India (as well as potentially igniting Islamic rebellion in India - this was doubly evoked in the memory of the 1857 Mutiny in India, and fears of losing the subcontinent if they couldn’t get soldiers there fast enough, as implied by an uncertain access to the canal). So in 1881-1882, the Liberal prime minister of Britain, Gladstone, bombarded Alexandria and invaded Egypt, installing British officials as "advisors" to the khedival government (that is, Tewfik Pasha), in an indefinite occupation , securing firm control over the Suez chokepoint (although technically Egypt was still a province of the Ottoman empire). Predictably, as the British favored the interests of the shipping companies in the Suez Canal, the wage gains made by the Port Said workers in Spring 1882 were rolled back . The floodgates were soon opened to European capital, which would crash the Egyptian economy in the 1900s (decade) due to speculative investment, stoking nationalism in a new generation .

Other European powers were outraged over the British power grab, as it had established British rule in an area where multiple European nations held their own commercial interests. The partition of Africa at the Berlin conference in 1885 was in part to appease other Europeans with their own African holdings, in part an effort to formalize who had economic precedence in different parts of the continent (to avoid military escalation over commercial interest disputes), although it remained a major sticking point with the French.

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Coda

In the fall of 1883, Robert Koch arrived in the now British-occupied Egypt at Port Said to investigate yet another cholera outbreak (navigating the regulations of quarantine, notably still in place, to reach Alexandria via an Egyptian steamer). They were commissioned by the German government after the French sent their own commission with a team of Louis Pasteur’s assistants, part of the national feud between the two countries, particularly sharp after the French defeat in 1871. Equipped with all the accoutrements of contemporary bacteriology, he obtained some samples of cholera, visited the pyramids and travelled the country. His French counterparts were less successful, mortally so. Louis Thuillier, a close assistant of Pasteur and a leading member of the French team to Egypt, succumbed to cholera on September 19th, after last ditch medical efforts (opium dosages, "strong frictions", ether injections, champagne, the whole kitchen sink) - a grim reminder of the dangers of studying cholera (despite the team not running into a cholera patient for over two weeks). The loss hit Pasteur hard. As for Koch, Pasteur’s other assistant Émile Roux wrote back to the maestro:

After Egypt, Koch’s team travelled to India from Suez to Calcutta (today named Kolkatta), via Ceylon and Madras (today named Chennai), where he collected further cholera samples, enjoying the service of two Indian servants, compliments of their British hosts (Koch chastised these servant boys in letters to his wife as "lazy and good-for-nothing"). He found that where cholera infections happened, there was a shared bacterium: the Vibrio cholerae. While the British Medical Journal kept tabs on his work since landing in Egypt - compellingly showing that a particular bacterium caused cholera, and thus dealing a blow to miasmatic theories of disease - they predictably expressed skepticism as well. In Germany, after meeting with the eminent Bavarian miasmist and local rival Max Joseph von Pettenkoffer, the Kaiser himself triumphantly welcomed Koch back to Berlin (see Brock 1999). Geopolitical drama aside, by the late 19th century, miasma theory was on the way out, the yoke of British Hippocratic regression finally thrown off.

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Figures from Brock 1999. (1) page 149; (2) page 161; translations: Jüngste Kolonien: Youngest Colonies; Nach Verflüssigung der Gelatine: After Liquefying the Gelatin; (3) page 156; (4) page 142;

Both germ theory and miasma theory, in their 19th century versions, expounded a universalist view of health (everyone agreed, for example, that 'Asiatic cholera', the disease that struck in India, was the same that struck around the world). Simultaneously in Europe, over the late 19th century, there was a strong "pressure from below" for health reform, driven by suffrage and socialist movements . Such a medical view implied a moral responsibility, that disease was a social problem, both in Europe and the rest of the world, which they were rapidly colonizing in the late 19th century. So the empire’s heart produced a new medical theory: Patrick Manson’s tropical medicine, institutionalized in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Environmental considerations had always been present in European medical thinking (and this wasn’t simply a spurious observation; even today, travel to different locales can introduce you to new gut problems), but tropical medicine asserted that non-Europeans were already, by virtue of their race, basically safe from local endemic diseases (paradigmatically with a parasitic vector), while Europeans were not. This was of great benefit to European colonial administors, especially the British, as they could avoid developing costly sanitary and health infrastructure in the colonies (which, despite the hazy scientific underpinnings, did improve health in Europe in the 19th century), except in areas where white people lived - the "teeming masses" thus remained a "reservoir" of disease that Europeans segregated away (so-called "racial hygiene"). This convenient racialization thus had a lot of institutional support behind it, in the wake of the more universalist view of health suggested by germ theory , buoyed by the successes of controlling malaria and yellow fever in the Panama Canal project by the US, which had stifled the construction under Lesseps (of Suez Canal fame).

This utter neglect of colonial subject health had dire ramifications - tens of millions would die in the upheavals of colonialism (what Mike Davis calls "Late Victorian Holocausts", but the chronic death rate was also consistently high outside of acute crisis), most infamously in Belgian Free Congo, and peaking in the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Not until the 1920s, as the atrocious rate of death precipitated concerns that there might be a labor productivity issue in the colonies , were systematic efforts initiated to get a handle on colonial mortality (a subtle acknowledgement that different "races" didn’t mean some fundamental immunity to different diseases), contemporaneous with new trends in anthropology (spearheaded by Frans Boaz) to discredit race science (he was, of course, decried as a Bolshevik Jew by American race scientists by the 1910s, in language you would expect from a Nazi, many of whom were housed in the "Galton Society", named after the founding father of eugenics ). This re-universalization of health came in the form of identifying and addressing nutritional diseases - that is, acknowledging that the colonial condition of hunger was bad for health (although it should be noted, awareness of the nutrition-health connection was not new - for example, European observers commented on the connection in 19th century Egypt (KUHNKE) ). Of course, while race science was now under the microscope, it wasn’t yet dead, reaching its horrific zenith under Nazi Germany.

By the 1930s, mortality rates in colonial India, for example, had finally began returning to mid-19th century levels (levels comparable to those found in feudal peasant societies - still an improvement over the liberal hellscape of the late 19th/early 20th century. Here Egypt was exceptional - suffering less loss in this period, due to the persisting public health institutions established by Muhammad Ali, and showing the viabilty of such institutions, even in an agrarianate peasant society in the 19th century. It wasn’t until independence, and strong postcolonial states supporting public welfare (along with medical breakthroughs such as penicillin), that death rates in the Third World began their downward trend - the very trends that liberal sycophants like Stephen Pinker chalk up to "[European] Enlightenment values", with no reference to history.

In the summer of 1913 a young lady graduated from secondary school in Vienna, capital of the empire of Austria–Hungary. This was still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe. To celebrate the occasion, her parents decided to offer her a journey abroad, and since it was unthinkable that a respectable young woman of eighteen should be exposed to danger and temptation alone, they looked for a suitable relative. Fortunately, among the various interrelated families which had advanced westwards to prosperity and education from various small towns in Poland and Hungary during the past generations, there was one which had done unusually well. Uncle Albert had built up a chain of stores in the Levant – Constantinople, Smyrna, Aleppo, Alexandria. In the early twentieth century there was plenty of business to be done in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, and Austria had long been central Europe’s business window on the orient. Egypt was both a living museum, suitable for cultural self- improvement, and a sophisticated community of the cosmopolitan European middle class, with whom communication was easily possible by means of the French language, which the young lady and her sisters had perfected at a boarding establishment in the neighbourhood of Brussels. It also, of course, contained the Arabs. Uncle Albert was happy to welcome his young relative, who travelled to Egypt on a steamer of the Lloyd Triestino, from Trieste, which was then the chief port of the Habsburg Empire and also, as it happened, the place of residence of James Joyce. The young lady was the present author’s future mother.

Some years earlier a young man had also travelled to Egypt, but from London. His family background was considerably more modest. His father, who had migrated to Britain from Russian Poland in the 1870s, was a cabinet-maker by trade, who earned an insecure living in East London and Manchester, bringing up a daughter of his first marriage and eight children of the second, most of them already born in England, as best he could. Except for one son, none of them was gifted for business or drawn to it. Only one of the youngest had the chance to acquire much schooling, becoming a mining engineer in South America, which was then an informal part of the British Empire. All, however, were passionate in the pursuit of English language and culture, and anglicized themselves with enthusiasm. One became an actor, another carried on the family trade, one became a primary school teacher, two others joined the expanding public services in the form of the Post Office. As it happened Britain had recently (1882) occupied Egypt, and so one brother found himself representing a small part of the British Empire, namely the Egyptian Post and Telegraph Service, in the Nile delta. He suggested that Egypt would suit yet another of his brothers, whose main qualification for making his way through life would have served him excellently if he had not actually had to earn a living: he was intelligent, agreeable, musical and a fine all-round sportsman as well as a lightweight boxer of championship standard. In fact, he was exactly the sort of Englishman who would find and hold a post in a shipping office far more easily in ‘the colonies’ than anywhere else.

That young man was the author’s future father, who thus met his future wife where the economics and politics of the Age of Empire, not to mention its social history, brought them together – presumably at the Sporting Club on the outskirts of Alexandria, near which they would establish their first home. It is extremely improbable that such an encounter would have happened in such a place, or would have led to marriage between two such people, in any period of history earlier than the one with which this book deals. Readers ought to be able to discover why.

However, there is a more serious reason for starting the present volume with an autobiographical anecdote. For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life. For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin – say, from the earliest family photo which the oldest living family member can identify or explicate – to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognized as inseparable and as mutually defining one another (‘I met him shortly before the end of the war’; ‘Kennedy must have died in 1963, because it was when I was still in Boston’). The length of this zone may vary, and so will the obscurity and fuzziness that characterizes it. But there is always such a no-man’s land of time. It is by far the hardest part of history for historians, or for anyone else, to grasp. For the present writer, born towards the end of the First World War of parents who were, respectively, aged thirty-three and nineteen in 1914, the Age of Empire falls into this twilight zone.

Hobsbawm (1987, 2010) "The Age of Empire: 1875-1914", section: Overture