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The Long 1890s in EgyptColonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance

Edited by Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman

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£29.99

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Explores a vital and previously understudied moment in Egypt’s modern history

Egypt just before political eruption! Turns of the century in Africa’s northeastern corner have been critical moments, ushering in overt popular activism in the hope of radical political redirection – as this volume’s focus on Egypt’s 19th-century fin-de-siècle demonstrates.

The end of the 19th century in Egypt witnessed crisscrossing and conflicting political currents as well as fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social conditions, demographic conditions and cultural processes. Like Egypt’s 20th-century fin-de-siècle, much of this ferment was a prelude to the more visible and politically eruptive events of the next decades, when Egypt’s popular resistance burst onto the international scene. But its subterranean cast was no less dynamic for that.

Key Features

  • A wide ranging and theoretically coherent study of a period that was crucial to the formation of modern Egypt
  • 13 case studies challenge the prevailing view that the 1890s in Egypt was a time of withdrawal and quiescence
  • Engages with questions of political engagement, shifting gender roles, geographical ambiguities, the emergence of new media, community identity formation and changing artistic formations

Reviews

A much-needed set of studies that challenge prevailing assumptions about Egyptian political, social and intellectual passivity during the Cromer period. Breaks new ground with respect to the country’s receptivity to, and participation in, global trends.
Table of contents
Introduction, Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman; Part I: Institutionalising authority, claiming jurisdiction and space; 1. Documenting death: Inquests, governance and belonging in Alexandria, Shane Minkin; 2. The scales of public utility: Agricultural roads and state space in the era of the British occupation, Aaron George Jakes; 3. Training teachers how to teach: Transnational exchange and the introduction of social-scientific pedagogy in 1890s Egypt, Hilary Kalmbach; 4. Legitimising Lay and State Authority: Challenging the Coptic Church in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Vivian Ibrahim; 5. Criminal statistics in the long 1890s, Mario Ruiz; Part II: Challenging authority in contested spaces; 6. Anomalous Egypt? Rethinking Egyptian sovereignty at the western periphery, Matthew H. Ellis; 7. Regulating Sexuality: The Colonial-National Struggle over Prostitution after the British Invasion of Egypt, Hanan Hammad; 8. Internationalist thought, local practice: Life and Death in the Anarchist movement in 1890s Egypt, Anthony Gorman; 9. Cromer’s assault on ‘Internationalism’: British colonialism and the Greeks of Egypt, 1882-1907, Alexander Kazamias; Part III: Probing authority with the written word; 10. ‘And I saw no reason to chronicle my life’: Tensions of nationalist modernity in the memoirs of Fathallah Pasha Barakat, Hussein Omar; 11. My Sister Esther: Reflections on Judaism, Ottomanism and Empire in the Works of Farah Antun, Orit Bashkin; 12. Romances of History: Jirji Zaydan and the rise of the historical novel, Paul Starkey; 13. Before Qasim Amin: Writing histories of gender politics in 1890s Egypt, Marilyn Booth; Notes on Contributors; Bibliography.
About the contributors

Marilyn Booth

Marilyn Booth is Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, University of Oxford. Her most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is amongst numerous publications on early feminism, translation, and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies Group, she edited Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Translator of eighteen published works of fiction and memoir from the Arabic, she was co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies.

Anthony Gorman

Anthony Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught at universities in Australia, Egypt and Britain. Among his research interests are modern Egyptian historiography and the resident foreign presence in modern Egypt. He is currently co-editing a book on the press in the Middle East and on a monograph on a history of the prison in the Middle East.