Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/602

 594 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October Anglo-Egyptian relations, the reason for which he finds in the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, except from 1699 to 1756, this country had only intermittently a consul in Egypt. He shows from official documents that the earliest British interest there was due to the coffee trade with Moka, whereas the French, under Louis XIV, and the Austrians, after the publication of Jauna's history of Cyprus, saw the value of the route by way of the isthmus of Suez to India. Only after the estab- lishment of British hegemony in India did private Englishmen, thwarted as usual by their government, urge the importance of this trade route. Thus Lord North snubbed the traveller Bruce, while Turkey forbade Christian ships to penetrate the north of the Red Sea, despite the treaty of 1775 between Warren Hastings and Abu-Dahab, the Mameluke sheikh of Cairo. Then the British government demanded from Turkey the right to transmit the Indian dispatches by the Red Sea, and finally adopted the ideas of two experts, Capper and Baldwin, about transport of mer- chandise to India by Suez. In 1786 Baldwin, an intriguer of great fore- sight, who long before Nicholas I considered Turkey as ' a sick man ', was appointed consul-general in Egypt with that special object ; but his quarrel with Ainslie, the ambassador at Constantinople, hindered his success ; and in 1793, just when France re-established her consulate- general, Baldwin was recalled and his post suppressed, on the ground that so long as anarchy and tyranny prevailed in Egypt, it had neither com- mercial nor postal value. Such was the British position there at the time of Bonaparte's expedition. But, just as previous British efforts were the ultimate cause of that expedition, so it ' awoke and formed England's interest ' in Egypt. ' British policy ', as this cultured diplomatist writes, ' was innocent of the black machination and the Machiavellian design attributed to it.' It usually is. The book contains an interesting allusion to the appeal of an anony- mous Cretan, an ' obscure precursor of M. Venizelos ', to Louis XVI to free Greece in 1786 and be ' a second Minos to Crete ', and mentions the Russian offer of an island in the Archipelago to England in 1772 (pp. 23, 275). WILLIAM MILLER. Indian Administration to the Dawn of Responsible Government, 1765-1920. By B. K. THAKORE. (Bombay : Taraporewala, 1922.) IN spite of being abominably printed, marred by some solecisms in English, and disfigured by a terrible list of corrections and errata, which besides other obvious disadvantages has crowded out a much-needed index, this book is one of the most vigorous, interesting, and original volumes on India that we have lately read. The author modestly describes his work as ' a humble contribution to the creation of a living school of constitu- tional history and political philosophy trying to understand and appraise laws and institutions, events and movements historically, by going back- ward to their causes and forward to their actual effects '. His treatment of his subject is partly historical, partly analytic and discursive. He has, as he justly claims, neither sought nor avoided controversy. Disbelieving in a formal and insincere neutrality, which ignores the things that matter