Character and imperialism: The british financial administration of Egypt, 1878–1914

The main purpose of the article is to try to show how British governing elites constructed their world through a complex mental grid summed up in the word ‘character’ and how this impacted upon imperial governance. The latter theme is then illustrated through a detailed study of the financial policies of the small cadre of British officials who controlled Egyptian government in this period. They used the language of character to justify being in Egypt in the first place and it clearly influenced the financial policies they adopted. More fundamentally, as we shall see, the character grid gave them a very negative view of Egyptians and their society and made it impossible for them to recognise that nationalist claims for autonomy had any validity.