Egypt after the French occupation through the eyes of the English
Nemenov Andrei
The author of the article examines the relations of the British participants in the military campaign of 1801 to liberate Egypt from the French occupation with their opponents – the French and their allies – the Turks and Egyptians. The sources for the study were texts of personal origin: diaries and memoirs of British soldiers, officers, and military advisers. For the first time in the history of Great Britain, Egypt was visited not by individual English travelers, but by an army of many thousands. The British recorded in detail their impressions about the course of the military campaign and about Egyptian society, about the Turkish army and the consequences of the French occupation. The British eyewitnesses of the liberation of Egypt paid a lot of attention to the ideas of residents about the French who occupied their country and about the British who expelled those. By chance, the British had to fight against their long–standing European opponent hand in hand with a very unexpected temporary ally – the Muslim subjects of the Ottoman sultan. The French were well known and understood by the British, that cannot be said about the Turks and Arabs. Desperately fighting on the battlefield with the French army, the British did not feel any personal hatred for the soldiers and officers of the enemy. The allies, the Turks and Arabs, on the contrary, seemed to them extremely dangerous creatures – cruel, selfish, hypocritical. As a result, the eternal and habitual European enemy turned out to be much closer and more humanly understandable for the British than temporary allies from the East, completely different in their behavior, order, and appearance. In this respect, the British were not much different from the same Frenchmen, who saw in the people of the Orient only “uncivilized savages” who should be used, albeit cautiously, but purely instrumentally to realize the Europeans’ goals and ambitions.
The study is sponsored by the Russian Science Foundation, grant № 23–18–00011 (https://rscf.ru/project/23-18-00011/).
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