(London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1841).

SCARCE FIRST EDITION. An important and primary work on man who would Muhammad Ali[a] (1769 – 1849) was the Ottoman viceroy and governor who became the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, widely considered the founder of modern Egypt. At the height of his rule in 1840, he controlled Egypt, Sudan, Hejaz, the Levant, Crete and parts of Greece and transformed Cairo from a mere Ottoman provincial capital to the center of an expansive empire.
Ali was a military commander in an Albanian Ottoman force sent to recover Egypt from French occupation following Napoleon's withdrawal. He rose to power through a series of political maneuvers, and in 1805 he was named Wāli of Egypt and gained the rank of Pasha. As Wāli, Ali attempted to modernize Egypt by instituting dramatic reforms in the military, economic and cultural spheres. He also initiated a violent purge of the Mamluks, consolidating his rule and permanently ending the Mamluk hold over Egypt.
Militarily, Ali recaptured the Arabian territories for the sultan, and conquered Sudan of his own accord. In 1831, Ali waged war against the sultan, capturing Syria, crossing into Anatolia and directly threatening Constantinople.
After defeating the Ottomans multiple times, he accepted a peace brokered by European powers in 1842 and withdrew from the Levant; in return, he and his descendants were granted hereditary rule over Egypt and Sudan. His dynasty would rule Egypt for over a century, until the revolution of 1952 when King Farouk was overthrown by the Free Officers Movement led by Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, establishing the Republic of Egypt.
. Item #34772

First Edition. Illustrated with an engraved portrait frontispiece of Mohammed Ali. 8vo, publisher's original brown cloth, the spine lettered in gilt, the covers decorated and blocked in blind with fillet rules and inner decorations at the borders, the upper cover with gilt pictorial device showing a camel being led by a tender and with palms and pyramid in the background. xvi, 280 pp. A handsome copy in unusually pleasing condition, the binding in good order even as age is observable, the gilt bright, the text block clean, the hinges sound, a bit of offset to the plate, very well preserved and rare thus.