Under the Ottomans, Cairo expanded south and west from its nucleus around the Citadel. The city was the second-largest in the empire, behind only Constantinople, and, although migration was not the primary source of Cairo’s growth, twenty percent of its population at the end of the 18th century consisted of religious minorities and foreigners from around the Mediterranean. Still, when Napoleon arrived in Cairo in 1798, the city’s population was less than 300,000, forty percent lower than it was at the height of Mamluk—and Cairene—influence in the mid-14th century.
The French occupation was short-lived as British and Ottoman forces, including a sizeable Albanian contingent, recaptured the country in 1801. Cairo itself was besieged by a British and Ottoman force culminating with the French surrender on 22 June 1801. The British vacated Egypt two years later, leaving the Ottomans, the Albanians, and the long-weakened Mamluks jostling for control of the country. Continued civil war allowed an Albanian named Muhammad Ali Pasha to ascend to the role of commander and eventually, with the approval of the religious establishment, viceroy of Egypt in 1805.
Public scribe, Cairo, 1880
Cairo wedding in 1890
Rice and oil merchants, Cairo, 1860
Street in Cairo, Egypt, 1865
The Citadel Gate, Cairo, 1864
The Palace Gezirah, Cairo, 1873
Tombs of the Mamaluks, Cairo, Egypt, 1875
Water carriers, Cairo, 1864
Cairo, 1865
Water carriers, Cairo, Egypt, ca. 1880s
Water Vendor, Cairo, 1880
A Cairo man filtering water, 1880
A Street in Cairo, 1862
Cairo antique seller in the 1880s
Cairo coffee house in the 1880s
Downtown in Cairo, 1881
Cairo, 1881
Egyptian women in Cairo, 1880
Interior of Egyptian home in Cairo, ca. 1870s
