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Starting with observations on a coffin that was brought from Egypt in 1722 and displayed at the British Museum from the first day of its opening -- coffin EA6695 -- this paper explores physical engagements with Egyptian mummies in London at the turn of the 19th century. It argues that it is through physical engagements -- including investigations and destructions -- that the Egyptian mummy was used to construct knowledge, not only about ancient Egypt, but about the body, race and the modern world. Using a number of sources from a range of individual reports, this paper sheds light on the cultural practices that surrounded and shaped engagements with Egyptian human remains, and reappraises the value of looking at destructive investigations as cultural interventions that can explain later practices, including the public mummy unrolling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on nineteenth-century Egyptian women includes two important themes: one, the tendency of women to resist patriarchy; and two, the ostensibly negative impact of state modernization projects on women. This essay’s exploration of patterns of female land acquisition during the mid-century decades challenges these depictions. It argues that the number of peasant women landholders remained low during the nineteenth century because of the widespread prevalence of the societal notion that identified landholding as a male prerogative, and that this entailed intense male opposition to female landholding as well as the internalization of this notion by the majority of peasant women. This caused women to relinquish their shares of the family land patrimonies to capable men (often relatives) in return for assistance during crisis times. After the introduction of the 1858 land law, women relied on it to negotiate more advantageous land-for-security exchanges with their brothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. Similarly, diplomats of Europe, Cairo, Istanbul, and local consular officials operated across borders and cooperated to hunt anarchists down. By following people who were on the move on boats, in post offices, and in taverns, I make a methodological and historiographical argument. First, I examine the Mediterranean as a space of flows and show how the Maghreb/Mashreq divide in Middle Eastern history has concealed webs and connections. Because anarchists and authorities acted on multiple fronts simultaneously, so must scholarship of this part of the world take account of several histories at once. Second, I look beyond the micro-macro binary to emphasize the interconnections and mutual implications of the micro, the macro, and everything in between. I highlight competing, intersecting, and even contradictory trajectories of some of these anarchist migrants’ belonging. As the affair of the bombs unfolded, all of these contradictions and scales of analysis became visible at once. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT Foucault's analysis of the history of evolutionary thought in Les Mots et les choses introduces monsters as incomplete beings that form important steps on the evolutionary ladder toward the terminal species. Monsters represent attempts by nature to achieve the perfection of the terminal species and are, therefore, significant for naturalists in constructing the details of the natural continuum. Despite their incompleteness, monsters underwrite the natural continuum and evidence the grounding of this continuum in reality. To a great extent, the continuum of nature, proposed by Foucault, resembles a continuum of civilization through which the history of the world and the history of colonization were often seen. The non-European emerged as the monster that showcased the deeper history of the more-perfect European. In the same way that monsters were written into natural history as intermediary and incomplete beings, losing in the process their uniqueness as independent species, the colonized were written into the (new) World History as objects of colonization, modernization, and development and as the living fossils of a bygone European past. This new history was not only created for European consumption but was also an important part of European-style education in the colony shaping colonial and postcolonial identities and perceptions of self and other. This article uses Foucauldian monsters to understand the making of historical narratives about the precolonial past in nineteenth-century Egypt, where one of the earliest European-style medical schools in Africa and Asia was built in the early nineteenth century. In this school and surrounding emerging educational system, narratives about science, modernity, and religion produced new histories that came to form colonial subjects. Finally, the article asks about a postcolonial/postmonstrous epistemology, what it might look like and whether and how it can emerge from the postcolonial condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the nature and content of the work of several prominent lawyers in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Egypt, highlighting the history of private international law. These lawyers include Gabriel Noradounghian, Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri, and Pierre Arminjon. Also discussed is the Arabic-language study on international law by lawyer Abd al-Hamid Abu Haif.

Egytian Journalism was born in the early Nineteenth Century, parallel to the re-forms introduced during the time of Kavalali Mehmed Ali Pasha. The number of the periodicals in the form of official and private, proliferated only after 1870s. The British occupation in 1882 marked a watershed for the rise of journalism in Egypt. National awakening against the foreign infiltration was articulated in the columns of newspapers. Egypt was still under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire and Abdülhamid II found in press a cheap and non-violent ins-trument to wage a latent fight against the British authorities in Egypt in order to maintain his sovereign rights as sultan and religious rights as the caliph. Al-Say-yädT sent his followers from Istanbul on mission to Egypt in order to found perio-dicals. The main of these news organs was to form a public opinion loyal to the Ottoman Empire. The periodicals founded by his followers spread his political and spiritual influence in the Arab provinces in general and Egypt in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the replacement of the traditional Islamic lunar calendar, called the Hijrī calendar, by the Gregorian calendar, a shift that took place beginning in the 1870s during the colonial period in Egypt. The author argues that calendric reform at this time involved the relegation of a previously operative form of social time-keeping into a purely "cultural" domain.

The study of 239 manumission acts registered in the court records of the Red Sea port of Massawa, now in the modern state of Eritrea, allows us glimpses into the practice of slavery and emancipation in that town in the 1870s and 1880s. The evidence sheds light both on urban slaves owned by local Massawans, commercial entrepreneur-sojourners, Egyptian officers and the Egyptian government, as well as on those slaves who might have been captured en route before their shipment across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. In the context of the scanty historiography of slavery in the Ethio-Eritrean area, the data provides unique information about gender, age, names, origins, geographic provenance and the circumstances of manumission of 276 slaves, many of whom originated in what are today areas of south-western and western Ethiopia, but also from the Eritrean borderlands and the Sudan. The evidence also provides insights into ethnic and racial distinctions and categorisations, as well as the experience of slaves before and after manumission, including concubinage, marriage and, perhaps, employment with the Egyptian government which ruled Massawa between 1865 and 1885. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of pre-colonial Middle Eastern populations has been limited by the lack of data. The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian censuses provide two snapshots of the Egyptian population in its early attempts to make the transition into a modern society. These censuses are perhaps the earliest in the Middle East and among the earliest in any non-Western country to include individual-level information on all segments of the population, including females, children, and slaves, on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. This article describes the digitization of two nationally representative samples of the 1848 and 1868 censuses from the original manuscripts at the National Archives of Egypt. It then introduces an application of the samples in Egyptian economic history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the 1882 Egyptian nationalist revolt (referred to as the Urabi Revolt) against British inference in the country that was led by the army colonel Ahmad Urabi Pasha. Particular focus is given to the British's efforts to disclaim the moral aspects of the revolt and Urabi's motives through British newspapers. An overview of the Egyptian leader Khedive Tewfiq's role in the Urabi Revolt, including British attitudes in this regard, is provided. Urabi's patriotism towards Egypt, including his relationship with the Egyptian National Party, is discussed. The role that the July 1882 riots in Egypt played in the British invasion of the country is mentioned.

British colonialism in Egypt marked a period of a failed empire and an unfinished nation. The colonial administration and the co-opted native ruling elite attempted to unify the north with the south—the Delta with Upper Egypt—into one market, the basis for a modern state. Nevertheless, the empire's capitalism in Upper Egypt proved utterly incompetent, faced bailout crises, and generated environmental catastrophes including the cholera epidemic. Thus, the separatist south was constantly simmering with subaltern rebellion, where ruthless bandits assumed leading roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the roles of Turkey and Iran in Middle Eastern affairs, 19th century Egyptian leader Muhammad 'Ali, and Palestinians in Israel.