Egyptians realized Europe ranked them closer to Africa than to Europe in civilizational terms

Evidence

This was the uncomfortable realization that, in the eyes of western European culture, Egypt stood somewhere closer to Africa than to Europe when measured on a scale that calibrated the achievements of each civilization, and that Egypt was just as vulnerable to conquest and colonization as the Sudan. Against this tense and conflicted background, Egyptian writers and politicians labored to assert Egypt’s separateness from such vulnerability in their descriptions and characterizations of their own society. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 349

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Mamdani and other scholars of colonial legibility, and with the general literature on ‘subimperialism’ in the Global South.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, layered point about colonial ambivalence — a would-be colonizer that discovers it is defined as colonizable. Rewards repeated return.