THE MAKING OF THE KHEDIVATE
I came to Egypt with the sole goal to provide the Vice-Roy with a new sign of my good will and my special affection, and to inspect this so important part of my empire. All my efforts concern the development of the happiness and well-being of all the classes of my subjects. . . . I am convinced that the Vice-Roy proceeds in the same vein, and following the footsteps of his grandfather, the great man of our nation, he will preserve and perfect his work.1
Thus spoke Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876), through his foreign minister’s French translation, to the consuls and his governor Ismail Pasha in Alexandria in April 1863. This was an extraordinary occasion: no Ottoman sultan had visited the province of Egypt in the three centuries since its conquest by Sultan Selim I in 1517. And in 1863, there were indeed signs of development to be seen in Egypt; Sultan Abdülaziz, for example, traveled by train (for the first time in his life) from Alexandria to Cairo, observed factories, and visited the museum of Egyptology.2
The purpose of this part of the book is to make sense of Egypt’s Ottoman attachment and to contextualize the interaction of imperial and local patriotisms within the Ottoman Empire. We shall follow the story of how Egypt, a quite independent province in the eighteenth century, became re-Ottomanized by the mid-nineteenth century. While “the great man of our nation” (“nation” meaning the empire here), the governor Mehmed Ali has usually been regarded as the ruler who gained “independence,” it fell to his descendants to create a new Ottoman regime-type for the Egyptian province: the khedivate.