Whatever the setting, the 1890s – and its attendant label, fin de siecle – conjures bright hues and robust sensations, aesthetic daring, public discourses of fear, lassitude and possibility and, above all, manifold recognition of the New, from technologies to gendered behaviours to publishing. The capital cities of western Europe usually furnish the imagery we associate with the fin de siecle, but a distinguishing feature was the sense that, more than ever before, worlds were connected, if unevenly, and the appellation's resonance carries far. In Egypt, the 1890s were equally a time of expectation and anxiety, reordering and regrouping, though perhaps more quietly, for Egyptians were entering their second decade of occupation and British colonial rule.

In Cairo and Alexandria, cosmopolitan linkages were visually evident in new facades and broadened streets, while around them the older city remained home to most urban Egyptians. Emerging resistance to European political and economic dominance, but also a certain embracing of European lifestyles, were articulated through a newly vigorous press and an increasingly streamlined Arabic as an accessible language of public commentary, while periodicals in French, Italian and Greek – some of them bilingual – competed for the attention of readers. Technologies of communication and transportation offered greater mobility for some, and new industrial enterprises encouraged consumption, labour migration and, soon, activism for workers’ rights. Affiliations amongst members of Egypt's varied ethnic communities led to political and cultural collaborations and, at times, tensions, while a generation of elite sons trained in new government and foreign-run schools or in Europe formulated new ideas about family economies and national futures. Some women claimed new spaces, both physically and in print, while elite and middling-strata daughters were the focus of intense debate over the advisability and content of formal schooling for Egypt's female population. In novels, tracts and magazine articles, questions of marriage and divorce, child-raising and population management, gendered identity formation and intersecting dynamics of the family and the nation were defined, elaborated on and debated. Meanwhile, public officials and their colonial line managers grappled with how to order a large and diverse, still heavily rural, country, whose human margins were not always agreeably governable.