Customer Reviews

The Cambridge History of Egypt, Vol. 2: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century

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I am writing this review in 2011: this year's revolution made it tempting to look for a good history of modern Egypt. Unfortunately, there is less choice than might be expected. Most books start with pharaonic Egypt and commit only superficial coverage to modern times, leaving the Cambridge History's Volume II as the key work on the subject.

The book starts in 1525, with Ottoman Egypt, and its political narrative is divided in ten main periods. Interspersed among the chapters on political history are short social and cultural sections. Each period is covered by a different historian, and therein lies the book's weakness. The editors have done a decent job ensuring that the size and scope of the various chapters remain comparable, but they could not overcome major differences in style and quality. Thus Khaled Fahmy shines on Muhammed Ali Pasha and the early nineteenth century, and Donald Malcom Reid has written a clear and lively piece on the Urabi revolution and subsequent British colonisation, 1879-1882. The chapters on the early Ottoman centuries and on the Liberal age, 1923-1952, are a little more difficult to digest without prior knowledge, but they remain enlightening. But several of the book's contributors lack the same clarity, and are hampered by an only tenuous grasp of economics. Finally, what is arguably the most important chapter for understanding contemporary Egypt: the chapter on Republican Egypt, written by Alain Roussillon, borders on incoherent. The writing is bloated and abstract, the plot impossible to follow, and the author makes his page unreadable by putting a ever increasing number of terms in quotation marks.

Alternative works include Al-Sayyid Marsot's History of Egypt. I have not read it, but starting at the Arab conquest and encompassing only 184 pages, this cannot have much meat on the modern era. Unfortunately, then, the Cambridge History remains the reference English-language work so far.