This book is the first study in English of the multi-volume set of texts and engravings of the Description 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 the Description that followed Edward Said's Orientalism,  as a summation of an orientalist colonial project. It re-centres the Description in the much more complex and dynamic political and intellectual world of France of the late eighteenth...