Britain valued its soldiers more than Egypt valued its own officers.

Evidence

True to form, Fawzï never said this directly but presented it as a lesson learned from Gordon. In the final days of the siege of Khartoum, Gordon lost hope that British forces would rescue him and his men in time, and, as conditions deteriorated, he looked for ways to evacuate others. He asked Fawzï to escape with the remaining foreign consuls to Metemmeh. Gordon authorized Fawzï to save himself from the disaster about to fall on the city because, according to Gordon, “If I become a prisoner in the hands of those scoundrels, the government of the Queen will not abandon me, and will send tremendous amounts of gold for my ransom, and I wish, from the bottom of my heart, my dear Fawzï, to save you, because if you become a prisoner in their hands, your government will not send even one dirham for your ransom.” Fawzï’s quotation from Gordon infused irony into the writing of his own narrative, since he remembered these words, publicly, after fourteen years of not being ransomed by the Egyptian government. When the long-awaited rescuers finally came, they carried the ambiguous flag of the “Anglo-Egyptian” forces led by General Kitchener (it should also be remembered, however, that political hesitation in London prevented the forces of his majesty’s government from arriving on time to rescue Gordon from the Mahdï’s armies). — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 599

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete instance of the hollowness of Egyptian authority that the reader is tracking — the motherland’s failure to ransom its own servant.
• SEED: A piece on how imperial powers’ differential valuation of subjects’ lives (Gordon vs Fawzï) maps onto the nested-colonial hierarchy is a viable essay angle.