Although Mehmed Ali Pasha’s rule in Egypt (1805-1848) is sometimes regarded as the beginning of the post-Ottoman period in that country, the “khedival” government actually intensified Egypt’s contacts with the rest of the Ottoman Empire and generated a veritable flood of Turcophone immigrants from provincial cities in the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia, who began working in the pasha’s new institutions. Strangely, the origins and political identity of this new and influential group have rarely been examined by historians, who have tended to focus on the European presence in Egypt or the roots of Egyptian nationalism. One reason for this may be a lack of Turkish-language narrative sources produced by this cadre. However, one major (albeit long-forgotten) Turkish-language work did emerge from this group: Arif Mehmed Efendi’s Models of Humanity in the Thirteenth [Hijri] Century. Born in the Macedonian city of Drama, Arif Mehmed Efendi moved to Cairo around 1825 to join Mehmed Ali’s Consultative Council (meclis-i şura). Written in 1870, his manuscript was inspired by the publication of the first volume of Lutfi Efendi’s imperial history, and the author combines biographies of members of the Mehmed Ali-era Turcophone Egyptian officials with Egypt-oriented addenda to Lutfi Efendi’s work. Drawing on this manuscript as well as other published and unpublished archival sources, my paper will examine the origins and identity of the nineteenth-century “Turco-Egyptians” and will argue that these officials were far more concerned about following Ottoman norms of behavior than with European ideas. As Mehmed Arif Efendi’s writings indicate, Turcophone residents of nineteenth-century Egypt were anxious to assert their place in a broader Ottoman world. They struggled against the widespread impression among intellectuals in the Ottoman centrals that Egypt was a rebellious upstart province and its Turkish-speaking officials parvenus. This new generation of Turcophone Egyptians gained prestige through connections to Mehmed Ali Pasha and to Istanbulite elites, and their stories provide a counter-narrative to the one best remembered today, that of nineteenth-century Egypt embarking on a “separate path.” These elite officials were firmly in control of Egypt’s administration until well beyond mid-century, and so nineteenth-century Egypt cannot be fully understood without an idea of their origins, worldviews, and collective habitus.