The geopolitics of the first British expedition to Egypt – IV: occupation and withdrawal, 1801–3

Abstract

When the British ambassador, Lord Whitworth, was recalled from Paris on 13 May 1803 and the British government declared war on France, they fought for the reason they had fought in 1798, to head off a French invasion of Egypt. Although Napoleon Bonaparte was not planning a second invasion of Egypt, he had convinced the British that he was, and had convinced the Russians that he was planning to partition the Ottoman Empire. Thus, even if the terms of the peace of Amiens expressed Great Britain's willingness to accept French hegemony in Western Europe, as Paul W. Schroeder suggests in his masterly new study of the European international system,' the British were not willing to allow the French to renew their challenge in the wider world. The Egyptian Expedition had revealed the price the British would be willing to pay to defeat such a challenge, and the terms of peace revealed the price they would have to pay, once they failed to head it off. The British accepted French hegemony in Western Europe only as the necessary price for the abandonment of the French challenge in Asia. How surprising, therefore, that Schroeder should echo the view of the British foreign secretary in 1798, Lord Grenville, that the French invasion of Egypt 'was a strategic blunder and that the French army should be trapped and allowed to die on the vine'.2 For armies are not grapes, first ripening and then shrivelling up in the sun, and the very fact that this was Grenville's view, who 'has never yet looked beyond the Rhine'3 and whose comments on Central Europe Schroeder rightly dismisses, should have been warning enough for him, given his preference for examining the world from a standpoint at Vienna.4 Better to heed the warning given to Grenville by the secretary for war and president of the Board of Control for India, Henry Dundas: 'I deprecate an over-confidence in the destruction of Bonaparte such as to lose sight of the importance of its being in some shape accomplished.' In an accurate portrayal of the war of the Second Coalition in Europe as a series of demands made by Britain and Russia on Austria to fight for their interests and suffer their losses,6 Schroeder fails to allow for the price paid by Britain in the wider world for her failure to anticipate the French invasion of Egypt.