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Technology and Euro-Egyptian Imperialism:The First Arabic Military Journal, 1873-1877
Abstract
This presentation examines the relationship between technology and what can be termed “Euro-Egyptian imperialism” in late nineteenth-century Egypt. I focus on the forgotten journal Jaridat Arkan Harb al-Jaysh al-Misri (The Journal of the Egyptian Army's Chief of Staff), published between 1873 and 1877 in Cairo. This was a periodical of the Chief of Staff in the army of Khedive Ismail and it was only distributed to members of the official corps. The journal was printed in Arabic, instead of Turkish, and thus contributed to the Arabization of the army. It was the main intellectual platform of the Egyptian army because it contained both translated and original articles about military technologies, strategies, and engineering plans, often with an educative goal. It regularly published current news concerning changes in foreign armies and also historical recollections of the Egyptian campaigns led by the sons of governor Mehmed Ali in the early nineteenth century. Thus Jaridat Arkan Harb, I argue in this paper, built up a relationship between technological expertise and a victorious past on its pages. The material distribution of knowledge gains an additional importance if we consider this period as the age of Khedive Ismail’s expansionism, in which American, French, and British officers joined his army to conquer new territories in Africa. The civilizing mission and technological expertise in Arabic mutually constituted the ideology of Euro-Egyptian imperialism, expressed in ideas of Jaridat Arkan Harb al-Jaysh al-Misri.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries