British abolitionists read Ismail’s Sudan expansion as despotic Islam, not reform.

Evidence

But though he was ready to extend Egypt’s reach into Africa, Ismaïl could not afford to be brash in disclosing his ambition. He told British diplomats that his intentions for Africa were not imperial but were of a reformist nature: to end the trade in slaves and to open new forms of trade with the East African heartland, thus civilizing peoples long excluded from international markets. But in the eyes of many British observers, particularly members of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Ismaïl’s attempts at empire represented no civilizing mission, no opening of the dark continent to free trade, but instead were an extension of what seemed to them the notoriously despotic rule of Islam. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 294

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how European powers interpreted Egyptian expansion and to anti-slavery politics as a colonial pretext, resonant with other works on the abolitionist movement and imperial discourse.