When Sir Eldon Gorst succeeded Lord Cromer as Agent and Consul-General in Cairo in 1907, Britain effectively ruled Egypt and the Sudan. The period Gorst spent in Egypt was critical in shaping Africa's history.
The British government gave Gorst the task of liberalising the Egyptian regime, a role he pursued with vigour. However the reforms he introduced satisfied neither Egyptian nationalists nor British expatriates, who believed he was merely pandering to agitators. Pressure increased after Boutros Ghali, the Egyptian Prime Minister and Gorst's close ally, was assassinated in 1910. Under...

This book provides an in-depth assessment of the pioneering work of British Hospitals in Palestine in the nineteenth century, and finds these institutions made great contributions to the modernization of the country. The large numbers of Europeans, spearheaded by British missionaries, who began to visit Palestine and the Levant, brought modern medical practices to the region. The driving factor for this change was the medical enterprise of the London Mission and the series of hospitals it established. This pioneering initiative led to the development of competition among the Great Powers in...

This book examines the role of the Scottish churches as part of the British imperial enterprise in the Middle East. These missions had as their stated aim the conversion of Jews to Protestantism, but also attempted to ""convert"" other Christians and Muslims. Michael Marten dicusses the missions to Damascus, Aleppo, Tiberias, Safad, Hebron and Jaffa. He describes the three main methods of the missionaries' work--confrontation, education and medicine--as well as the ways in which these were communicated to their supporting constituency in Scotland.

This book examines how the French transformed and dominated Moroccan society in the colonial period. The French established vocational and fine art schools, revived local methods for producing crafts, imposed modern systems of industrial production and pedagogy and reinvented old traditions. By marrying the old with the new, they revitalized arts and crafts and made them saleable commodities. Hamid Irbouh demonstrates how Moroccan artists have struggled to exorcise French influences and rediscover their authentic visual culture since decolonisation.

The British Empire drew on the talents of many remarkable figures whose lives reveal a wonderfully rich interweaving with the crucial issues of the period. In some cases they left a legacy of travel writing, novels, biography and ethnography which made important contributions to our knowledge of other cultures. Writing, Travel and Empire explores the lives and writings of ten figures, including Sir George Grey, Winwood Reade, Roger Casement, and Gertrude Bell. Embracing issues such as gender and travel, racial science, the globalization of ""native management,"" the internal colonies, and...

By the nineteenth century the British had ruled India for over a hundred years, and had consolidated their power over the sub-continent. Until 1858, when Queen Victoria assumed sovereignty following the Indian Rebellion, the country was run by the East India Company - by this time a hybrid of state and commercial enterprises and eloquently and fiercely attacked as intrinsically immoral and dangerous by Edmund Burke in the late 1700s. Seeking to go beyond the statutes and ceremony, and show the reality of the interactions between rulers and ruled on a local level, this book looks at one of the...