ABSTRACT
The question of the ‘Mamluks’ in Egypt after the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate is bound up with the complex and wide-ranging historiographic controversy about key issues in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Egypt which has been taking place over the past two decades. It centres on the debate between the ‘Ottomanist’ and ‘Mamlukist’ approaches to the composition and character of the elite which developed in Egypt at this period. Historians differ in their views of those who are called Mamluks in Ottoman Egypt. The Mamlukists base their arguments mainly on Arabic chronicles, and, therefore, all of their terminology, phraseology, and imagery are formulated in Arabic. Their researches present an Egyptian ‘national’ narrative. Jane Hathaway maintains that these Mamluks were no less Ottomans than Mamluks, and that they were not the remnants of the Mamluks of the Sultanate, but belonged to the provincial elite which flourished increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1 Another approach, led by Ehud Toledano, claims that there developed in Egypt a local elite group which he calls ‘the Ottoman-Egyptian elite’. Its members, who were widely known as Mamluks, were, in effect, kul: military slaves of the sultans. 2
