This book is the first study in English of the multi-volume set of texts and engravings of theDescription of Egypt, a work produced following the three-year-long Egyptian campaign led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. The book challenges the conventional and rather reductive interpretation of theDescriptionthat followed Edward Said's Orientalism,as a summation of an orientalist colonial project. It re-centres theDescriptionin the much more complex and dynamic political and intellectual world of France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and its colonial aspirations. It follows...