The Description of Egypt from Napoleon to Champollion

This book is the first study in English of the multi-volume set of texts and engravings of the Description of Egypt, a work produced following the three-year-long Egyptian campaign led by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. The book challenges the conventional and rather reductive interpretation of the Description that followed Edward Said's Orientalism, as a summation of an orientalist colonial project. It re-centres the Description in the much more complex and dynamic political and intellectual world of France of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and its colonial aspirations. It follows closely the notes, texts, and illustrations of the contributors to the work, the majority of whom were graduates of the first years of the Polytechnic school in Paris, and the well-documented editing process that continued for almost thirty years, in which France moved from Revolution to Empire and Restoration.