Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition was colonial aggression, not merely a European strategy move.

Evidence

Historians have rarely approached Napoleon’s expedition as an imperial conquest. Many have examined it purely from the point of view of foreign policy, seeing it as an attempt by France to seize control of the Mediterranean and establish a base from which to threaten the British in India. Others have simply included the conquest in a general history of France’s revolutionary wars, thereby suggesting that the invasion of Egypt was no different from the annexation of Savoy or the establishment of republics in the Low Countries or ItalyY Such approaches are reasonable, insofar as Napoleon’s adventure combined a variety of motives. Nevertheless, for all its importance to Napoleon’s strategy for European hegemony or its affinities to the revolutionary wars of liberation, the Egyptian expedition was emphatically an act of colonial aggression-albeit one with a new outlook, compared to earlier overseas ventures. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 71

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader questions of how republican/revolutionary France exported ‘civilization’ as colonial ideology, setting up the republican imperialism theme that presumably runs through this book on West Africa.