The scholarship on Ottoman Egypt generally supports a narrative that depicts Egypt emerging as an autonomous political entity in the mid-19th century and steadily marching towards becoming a sovereign nation-state in the first decades of the 20th century, with the process being led by the Egyptian ruling family. There has been little focus, however, on the role that the Ottoman cultural consciousness played in shaping the way the Egyptian ruling elite identified themselves under various historical contexts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper focuses on the philanthropic activities which the members of the Egyptian family undertook during the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897 and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 in their efforts to help the Ottoman Empire. It pays special attention to the female members of the Egyptian ruling family, who played a major role in the organization of donation collection campaigns for the Ottoman military as well as providing relief to the Ottoman refugees. The paper argues that self-identification in late Ottoman Egypt was fluid and situational and that the members of the Egyptian ruling elite, who are usually depicted in the scholarship as Egyptian nationalists, continued to identify themselves as Ottomans until World War I. The paper goes beyond the dichotomy that pits national identities and imperial commitments against each other and contributes to the debates on the emergence of national identities in late Ottoman Empire.