THE EXPERIMENT OF SHARIF PASHA'S CABINET (1879): AN INQUIRY INTO THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EGYPT'S ELITE MOVEMENT

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In studies of resistance against European penetration prior to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Urabi movement takes the focus of attention. This may be warranted, given the scale, duration, and consequences of that movement. In the leading Western historiography of that period, however, the focus on the Urabi movement dominates historians' perspectives of another important movement, if shorter and less eventful, that took place in 1879. Unlike Urabi's case, the 1879 movement was dominated by groups of economic and political elites whose interests as large landholders and as partners in state administration were traditionally or customarily perpetuated by the existing social system. I will use the term “traditional elites” to distinguish those elites from other elite groups in Egypt who did not hold such a combined stake in the existing system. The traditional elites' movement aimed to defend material interests that were threatened by European encroachment on Egypt, as well as to negotiate a new distribution of power with both the khedive and European-dominated bodies that came to play a crucial role in the financial and political administration of Egypt after it entered a state of bankruptcy in 1876. In this article, I will refer to those bodies collectively as “European control.”