0.4 Analyzing symbols in artifacts: the souvenir of egypt  (Page 5/8)

You could locate any general work of history on either Egypt or Britain in the library and scan the index in the back ofthe book for words relating to the other nation. You're likely to find thousands of works on Britain and on Egypt, so you may want to narrow your search to a particular time period (such as the twentieth century) or topic (such as colonial policy).

You could also perform a subject search on your library's catalog for the words Egypt and Britain to see what is listed under both. Be sure to also try variations of the words, such asEgyptian and British. Our search at Fondren Library produced around eighty works in this subject category.

You could also work from the dates we have established already through our research on the flags and portraits and look for works of history onthe period we are dealing with, or for biographies of the political figures.

Should you need a quick, but necessarily limited glimpse into your subject, there is no faster way to get a general view of something thanthe electronic reference sources. If your institution has a subscription and you are connected to its network, you should be able to access a wealth of information. You can probably find alisting of all of the reference tools available from your library's home page.We will begin with Britannica Online , which is the web edition of the preeminent encyclopedia in English.

After attempting a variety of search options (Egypt Britain, british Egypt, Egyptian Britain, british egyptian, etc.), we find quite a variety ofinformation.Notice that in the articles we view, the words we entered are in bold, which helps us to quickly scan the text to determine its relevance.Here is an example from one entry that explains one aspect of British-Egyptian relations:

"The British occupation [in 1882] marked the culmination of developments that had been at work since 1798:the de facto separation of Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, the attempt of European powers to influence or control the country, and the rivalry of France and Britain for ascendancy in the country. Through the last minute withdrawal of the French,the British had secured the sole domination of Egypt. W.E. Gladstone's Liberal government was, however, reluctant to prolong the occupation or to establish formal political control, which it feared would antagonize both the Sultan and the other European powers;but the British were unwilling to evacuate Egypt without securing their strategic interests, and this never seemed possible without maintaining a military presence there."