Napoleon Bonaparte, Emir Ghalib and the British

Abstract

During his campaign in Egypt in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte contacted the Sharif of Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, the Emir Ghalib, with whom he exchanged several letters and tried to convince him of his goodwill. The contact and the emerging Mecca-French trade did not, of course, escape the attention of the British, who were keen to dissuade Ghalib from cooperating with the French. In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of a few sources, this British-French rivalry in the Red Sea region, in which Mecca played no small part.