Introduction xxi
industrialised Europe and islamised Asia came into con-
tact. Thus in Tunis it is the extravagance of the Beys
Ahmed (1837-1855) and Saddok (1859-1882) that
ended in a European protectorate. In between came
Mahomed, who granted a constitution which, however,
did not save the State from foreign financial control
(1869), 111 1878, at the Congress of Berlin, Great
Britain, for diplomatic reasons, retired from competition
with France in Tunis ; and a French protectorate was
declared over Tunis (1881) at about the same time that
the British established a de facto protectorate in Egypt
(1882).
Morocco travelled the same road, but a little later.
The Sultan Muley Hassan (1873-1894) profited by his
predecessor's experiences, and was well aware of the
danger. He so established the authority of the Maghzen
and so excluded European penetration, that Morocco re-
mained an outpost of Asia half a century after Turkey
and Egypt had been Europeanised. But the inevitable
end only came all the more swiftly when his successor,
Abdul Aziz, began borrowing. Thereafter the process of
establishing Spanish and French protectorates went
rapidly forward, and has recently been completed by
the surrender of the Riff after a siege of five years by
the armies of two European Powers. So that after study-
ing the stories of these various neighbours of Egypt
we cannot but conclude that our own part in it has been
one that, had we not been there, would have been played
by someone else in much the same way with much the
same results. But not in quite such a gentlemanly way,
nor with quite such good results. Tel-el-Kebir was a
murderous business, but it was a fair fight, and nothing
like the massacres that went with the establishment of
foreign rule in Tripoli and Algeria. The bombardment of