xx Introduction
political process by which the European system of racial
and regional national States has, race by race and region
by region, encroached on the Eastern system of the
religious Super-State.
It is indeed curious to note how closely the course of
events coincides in each of these contiguous countries
from the end of the eighteenth century, when the expand-
ing European system first began to invade the declining
Islamic State. Take, for example, the close parallel
between the early history of the Egyptian and of the
Turkish nations. We see Mehemet Ali, an Albanian
Turk, breaking up the Asiatic ancien regime of the
Mamelukes and Janissaries at the same time that
Mahmoud II., another Europeanised Turk, was break-
ing up that of the Phanariotes and Janissaries. Both
these despots forced Western fashions and Western
forms on their reluctant subjects. Both started European
financial, military, and educational systems that were not
sustained by their successors. Both were followed by a
short reaction, which was itself followed by a (t golden
age,JJ in which their successors squandered the millions
of credit acquired by Europeanisation. In both countries
spendthrift autocrats—Abdul Medjid and Abdul Aziz in
Turkey, Said and Ismail in Egypt—first pawned the in-
dependence of their State to European moneylenders,
and then vainly endeavoured to restore their authority
and their credit by conceding constitutional liberties* In
both cases a measure of foreign occupation was the
result; but in Turkey this was restricted to a financial
control by the cleverness of Abdul Hamid and by the
competition between the Powers. Whereas in Egypt the
British Empire eventually bought out its rivals.
This parallel might be a coincidence if it were not that
we find the same course of events in other regions where