ABSTRACT
HISTORICAL writing in Arabic on Ottoman Egypt during the period from the conquest to the French occupation is reasonably copious and varied in kind. It has not yet been adequately evaluated, and its full exploitation is still far in the future. Very little of the material has been published, nor has much work been done on the manuscript sources. The consequence of this is that writers on the period have depended excessively on the few published works, especially on the chronicle of al-Jabarti, and on the writings of French scholars, especially those who were associated with Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt. This in turn has led to a certain distortion of the history of the first two centuries of Ottoman rule, owing to the retrojection of conditions and institutions of the later eighteenth century.
