Book excerpt: "Until relatively recently, scholars of Egyptian history tended to understand the modern period to begin with the flow of European people and ideas to Egypt's northern shores sparked by Napoleon's invasion in 1798. From this perspective, modern Egyptian history was animated by the diverse and sometimes--contradictory ways in which Egyptians responded over time to colonial power and modern forms of knowledge. This handbook adds to a growing literature that complicates the facile colonizer-colonized and modern-tradition binaries undergirding this view. Rather than reactionary, modern Egyptian history is a continuous process of translation and adaptation, invention and reinvention. Contributors to the handbook address both long-persisting themes in the field, though in new ways, as well as new themes reshaping how we understand modern Egyptian history, and thus Middle Eastern and global history"--