To date, little is known about how Copts viewed landmark debates in Egyptian history. This is especially true for the period before 1910. One historian has observed that Copts were simply “absent” from the national movement. Others have limited their engagement with Coptic history to elite politicians such as Butrus Ghali or eccentric figures like Salama Musa. Through analyzing the early historical writings by Coptic thinkers, I argue that early Coptic historiography served to legitimize specific conceptions of the Egyptian nation state that have gone unnoticed. I examine the ideological contexts in which the first generation of modern Coptic historians operated and ask how we might relate discourses of a “Coptic nahda” to that of the Arab Nahda. Did Copts meaningfully contribute to this transnational cultural movement (i.e. the Nahda), or should the Coptic nahda rather be approached as a derivational product? How, if at all, does it change the way we view the place of the Coptic community in the late Ottoman world?