Class struggle inside Egypt drove its imperial expansion

Evidence

Egyptian society and Egyptian military expansionism, Fred Lawson argues that the struggle between Egypt’s dominant social forces left the ruling members no choice but to adopt military expansionism as a means of preserving their control of domestic society. Because they controlled the local armed forces and had “concentrated capital,”“Egypt’s dominant coalition of state administrators, rich import-export merchants and—later on—largescale commercial estate-holders succeeded in carrying out a program of imperialist expansion during the first third of the nineteenth century.” But Lawson’s descriptions of these campaigns inexplicably exclude the Sudan. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Domain-internal comparison: Egypt’s expansion is read as preserving domestic ruling-coalition control — an internal-contradiction account of colonial ambition versus Sudan’s distinct drivers.