Egyptian nationalists distinguished humane European colonization from genocidal imperial variants

Evidence

All the great civilizations were imperial, Salah Hamad wrote, although many, like Spain in America or Britain in Australia, had butchered and committed genocide; but England and the rest of Europe had developed a more sympathetic and humane colonization, exemplified in the abolitionists’ care for African blacks. Egyptians could also trace historical precedents for imperialism in their own history, and Hamad turned to the links with the Sudan: There is no doubt that the Egyptian Sudan is part of our beloved Egypt like the soul to the body; from it comes the blessed Nile, the life of the country and the source of Egypt’s resources and welfare. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 760

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader African coloniality framework the reader is mapping: Egyptian intellectual elite adopting European colonial ideology even as they resist it on themselves.
• QUESTION: Were Egyptian pro-imperial arguments about Sudan widely echoed or contested within the nationalist movement?