Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"After Napoleon's defeat of the Mamluks, the resulting power vacuum in Egypt gave Mehmet Ali--and Albanian-born soldier in the service of the Ottoman Empire--the opportunity to gain supreme power. . . . His power was officially recognized by the Ottoman court, the Supreme Porte, and he was named viceroy of Egypt in 1805. Declaring a truce with the Mamluks, Ali invited the Mamluk Amirs to a feast in Arabia on March 1, 1811, and had them slaughtered. . . . Under British protection, the dynasty that Ali founded ruled Egypt for a further century, until the 1953 Nasserist republican revolution." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Mohammed Ali set out to establish an efficient and Westernizing despotism with foreign (mainly French) technical aid. European leftwingers in the 1820s and 30s hailed this enlightened autocrat, and put their services at his disposal, when reaction in their own countries looked too dispiriting. . . . They thus also laid the foundation for the Suez Canal (built by the Saint-Simonian de Lesseps) and the fatal dependence of Egyptian rulers on vast loans negotiated by competing groups of European swindlers, which turned Egypt into a centre of imperialist rivalry and anti-imperialist rebellion later on." [Hobsbawm: Revolution, p. 144]