Abstract :
In the last years of the eighteenth century, Egypt famously witnessed the practice of
European sciences as embodied in the members of Bonaparte’s Commission des sciences et des
arts and the newly founded Institut d’Egypte. Less well known are the activities of local
eighteenth-century Cairene religious scholars and military elites who were both patrons and
practitioners of scientific expertise and producers of hundreds upon hundreds of manuscripts.
Through the writings of the French naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and
those of the Cairene scholar and chronicler ʿAbd al-Rah
˙
ma¯n al-Jabartı¯ (1753–1825), I explore
Egypt as a site for the practice of the sciences in the late eighteenth century, the palatial urban
houses which the French made home to the Institut d’Egypte and their role before the French
invasion, and the conception of the relationship between the sciences and social politics that
each man sought. Ultimately, I argue that Geoffroy’s struggle to create scientific neutrality in
the midst of intensely tumultuous political realities came to a surprising head with his fixation
on Paris as the site for the practice of natural history, while al-Jabartı¯’s embrace of this
entanglement of knowledge and power led to a vision of scientific expertise that was specifically
located in his Cairene society, but which – as Geoffroy himself demonstrated – could be readily
adapted almost anywhere.
