At the end of the eighteenth century, the commander of a French army, Napoleon Bonaparte, led an expedition to Egypt. For many Europeans, Egypt was an exalted territory—the cradle of a once-great civilization, home to fertile lands along the Nile River, a land bridge to the Red Sea and trade with Asia, and a provincial outpost of an old rival, the Ottoman empire. Introducing the principles of the recent French Revolution, of liberty, equality, and fraternity, to distant lands would bring glory to France. Occupying the country would also represent a strategic victory over Great Britain for the control of trade routes to Asia. Most important to Napoleon, however, defeat of the Ottomans would catapult him to historic greatness.

But, the revolutionary crusade of 1798 did not go as Napoleon planned. After landing his troops in Egypt and defeating the Mamluk army of Egypt beneath the pyramids just outside Cairo, his troops bogged down in the country and faced the wrath of the local population. Eager to play a larger role in Europe, Napoleon returned to France a little more than six months after he had stepped on Egyptian soil, leaving his troops vulnerable to inevitable counterattacks. But the invasion of Egypt did shake up Ottoman rule as well as play a role in altering the European balance of power and the old European order. Indeed, more than any other event,
Napoleon’s actions in Africa, the Americas, and especially in Europe, combined with the principles of the French Revolution, laid the foundations for the era of the nation-state. What gave these political events added impact were a number of equally disruptive changes in social and economic arrangements around the world.

Chapter Objectives

•	To describe the spread of revolutionary ideas and models around the globe
•	To describe how economics changed, particularly in Europe and Africa
•	To demonstrate how some cultures began to decline while others began to expand