This work is an attempt to write the history of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, when the country was ruled by Muhammad Ali. There have been countless works written throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on that period, but no major work has appeared since 1961. In the light of recent developments in scholarship in the last ten years, I have undertaken this work as a means of opening research once again into that period of history, for, while many books deal with the period, few of them deal with it properly or even adequately. Many of them were written either by supporters of the Egyptian royal family (indeed many were commissioned by Egyptian rulers) or by detractors, so that we do not possess an unbiassed record of the age; neither is there much on the economic and social aspects of that period of Egyptian history. That is why I call my work ‘an attempt’, for we need a generation or more of researchers producing various monographs on different spects before we can claim to know the period. If one may level a major point of criticism against most of the works of the past on the Muhammad Ali period, it is that they were written without consulting the Egyptian archives, except for the pioneering work of a handful of scholars, among whom are M. Sabry, M. Fahmi, A. A. al-Giritly and A. Rustum.