The story of the infiltration of British influence into Egypt is one of the most curious in all history.  To this day, despite the recent agreement with France (1904), the position of England in the valley of the Lower Nile is irregular, in view of the undeniable fact that the Sultan is still the suzerain of that land.  What is even stranger, it results from the gradual control which the purse-holder has imposed on the borrower.  The power that holds the purse-strings counts for much in the political world, as also elsewhere.  Both in national and domestic affairs it ensures, in the last instance, the control of the earning department over the spending department.  It is the ultima ratio of Parliaments and husbands.

In order fully to understand the relations of Egypt to Turkey and to the purse-holders of the West, we must glance back at the salient events in her history for the past century.  The first event that brought the land of the Pharaohs into the arena of European politics was the conquest by Bonaparte in 1798.  He meant to make Egypt a flourishing colony, to have the Suez Canal cut, and to use Alexandria and Suez as bases of action against the British possessions in India.  This daring design was foiled by Nelson’s victory at the Nile, and by the Abercromby-Hutchinson expedition of 1801, which compelled the surrender of the French army left by Bonaparte in Egypt.  The three years of French occupation had no great political results except the awakening of British statesmanship to a sense of the value of Egypt for the safeguarding of India.  They also served to weaken the power of the Mamelukes, a Circassian military caste which had reduced the Sultan’s authority over Egypt to a mere shadow.  The ruin of this warlike cavalry was gradually completed by an Albanian soldier of fortune named Mohammed Ali, who, first in the name of the Sultan, and later in defiance of his power, gradually won the allegiance of the different races of Egypt and made himself virtually ruler of the land.  This powerful Pasha conquered the northern part of the Sudan, and founded Khartum as the southern bulwark of his realm (1823).  He seems to have grasped the important fact that, as Egypt depends absolutely on the waters poured down by the Nile in its periodic floods, her rulers must control that river in its upper reaches—­an idea also held by the ablest of the Pharaohs.  To secure this control, what place could be so suitable as Khartum, at the junction of the White and Blue Niles?

Mohammed Ali was able to build up an army and navy, which in 1841 was on the point of overthrowing Turkish power in Syria, when Great Britain intervened, and by the capture of Acre compelled the ambitious Pasha to abandon his northern schemes and own once more the suzerainty of the Porte.  The Sultan, however, acknowledged that the Pashalic of Egypt should be hereditary in his family.  We may remark here that England and France had nearly come to blows over the Syrian question of that year; but, thanks to the firm demeanour of Lord Palmerston, their rivalry ended, as in 1801, in the triumph of British influence and the assertion of the nominal ascendancy of the Sultan in Egypt.  Mohammed was to pay his lord L363,000 a year.  He died in 1849.