Entangled alliances: North African regionalism and the invasion of Egypt 1798-1801

Abstract

This article analyzes the role of Ottoman Tripolitania and Tunis in shaping the 1798 French invasion of Egypt. Examining the Ottoman Maghreb’s response to the French invasion allows us to remap the region’s sociopolitical geography in two ways-first, by reincorporating Egypt back into broader Maghrebi history and by reintroducing Tunis and Tripoli into the Ottoman imperial narrative. These correctives demonstrate how historians have anachronistically imposed mid-to-late nineteenth-century colonial divisions on the tum-of-the-nineteenth-century world. By underscoring the role of the geopolitical regionalism, which was underscored by a complicated and at time conflicting web of political entanglements, we see how political actors engaged with and manipulated the ties that bound provinces together. By looking at 1798 as a regional phenomenon, we are given a lens into how the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century world viewed the geopolitical map of the Mediterranean.