SAMIR SAUL, La France et L'Egypte de 1882 à 1914: Intérêts économiques et implications politiques, Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France (Paris: Ministère de l'Économie, des Finances et de l'Industrie, 1997). Pp. 787. Fr 249 paper.

Abstract

This is an exhaustive study of French economic interests in Egypt, the development of a particular type of capitalism in Egypt, and Franco-British relations in Egypt between the British Occupation in 1882 and World War I. It is based on an extraordinarily wide range of sources from Belgium, Britain, Egypt, and France, including British, Egyptian, and French diplomatic documents and material from a variety of banks and business enterprises, such as the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Crédit Lyonnais, La Compagnie du Canal de Suez, and La Société Générale. The book was published in 1997, but—and this is the only negative remark I shall make—it is a matter of some regret that (apart from some of the author's own more recent papers) its very wide-ranging bibliography stops somewhere around the end of the 1980s, possibly because the doctorat d'État, of which this book is “une version réduite” (p. xi) was defended in 1991. There is a warmly appreciative preface by Saul's maître, Jacques Thobie, author of Intérêts et impérialisme français dans l'Empire ottoman (1895–1914), and Saul expresses his own debt to Thobie and other French historians of overseas investments in Morocco, Russia, and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Allain, Girault, Guillen, Poidevin).