ABSTRACT
When Shafiq Ghurbal published in 1928 his first historical work, The Beginnings of the Egyptian Question and the Rise of Mehemet All, Egyptian historiography can be said to have entered a new stage in its development. It was subtitled by the author as ‘a study in the diplomacy of the Napoleonic era based on researches in the British and French Archives’. Thus an Arab historian had decided to reconstruct a certain period of his country’s modern history from original and unpublished sources.
