History never exactly repeats itself, but certain features of it often seem recurrent, or even immutable. Christian countries and the world of Islam, for instance, have for a long time been testing their relative strengths. In the 19th century, Britain was the world’s leading power, and its empire absorbed lawless men and lawless states, many of them Muslim. Eventually, it was assumed, Muslim and other societies would become very like those in the civilization of the West, and therefore equal and fit for independence.

The costs of such an imperial policy proved high, however, and the rewards slight. Soon the British discovered that the people they were ruling preferred self-government, no matter how bad, to government by others, no matter how good. Imperialism, in short, generated the response of nationalism, and unscrupulous local politicians used it to perpetuate historic tyrannies and inequalities. Keeping the peace over lawless men and states, and drawing the wider political map today, American administrators and soldiers have to deal with Arab and Muslim nationalism much as the British once did.

Egypt was to the British in their imperial heyday what Iraq currently is to the United States. The country’s official ruler, the khedive, owed allegiance to the Ottoman sultan. By 1882, the khedive’s cruelty, greed, and incompetence had driven Egypt into debt and rebellion, threatening to destabilize the Middle East. Britain occupied the country, and from 1883 until 1907 Lord Cromer held the nominal post of British agent there. The scale was smaller than India, but effectively he was another viceroy. Subject only to the prime minister and foreign secretary in London, he could see to it that his word was law.

In his day, Cromer was considered an example of British imperialism at its enlightened best. Under him, Egypt enjoyed an unprecedented period of stability and economic expansion, acquiring a place in the international order. Known familiarly to the Egyptians as al-Lurd (“the Lord”), this large and supremely self-confident and capable man seemed unapproachable, not to say majestic. He insisted on the outward appearance of power, on the pomp and circumstance of military parades. In contrast, he also liked to stroll by himself in the Cairo bazaar of Khan al-Khalili, something that no previous Egyptian ruler, and certainly none of the presidents since, could possibly have risked.

Nationalists of course have been brought up to demonize the British and so to resent the idea that they might owe them anything. To those with this bias, Cromer’s achievements are what make him so particularly hateful; the implication is that Egyptians couldn’t have made such progress for themselves. Roger Owen begins his “Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul” (Oxford University Press, 480 pages, $35) with an anecdote about a party of Egyptian nationalists arriving in the small Norfolk town from which Cromer took his title and asking where his grave was, so that they could spit on it. A veteran Marxist economic historian, author of much turgid ideological stuff about capitalist exploitation of Egyptian sugar and cotton, Mr. Owen might have been expected to share their outlook and contribute to the anti-imperial orgy. Not a bit of it. Now a professor at Harvard, he seems to have had a welcome opening of the mind. Making the necessary effort to set Cromer in the context of the period, he sees much to admire in the career, he even quite likes the man, and his writing is direct and mercifully free from doctrinaire jargon. Spitting nationalists will have to make of this biography whatever they can.

Before earning his title, Cromer was plain Evelyn Baring, born in 1841, one of the many children of a branch of the Baring family of prominent bankers. His father was an elderly invalid who died when this son was still a child. In true Victorian style, a most unmaternal mother sent him off for a military education from the age of 11, culminating in a commission in the Royal Artillery. In 1864 he took advantage of a shooting trip in America to see action in the civil war and to interview General Grant. Duty took him to the colonies of Jamaica, Corfu, and Malta, suitable testing grounds for converting the soldier into a public servant. In Corfu, this apparently conventional man became the lifelong friend of Edward Lear, the artist and nonsense writer of genius, and he also had an illegitimate daughter, whom he supported until she grew up.

Another member of the Baring family, Lord Northbrook, had been viceroy of India, and he introduced his cousin Evelyn to the Marquess of Ripon, the next viceroy of India. Ripon promptly invited the future Lord Cromer to be his minister of finance. The work was mostly technical, to do with currency, taxation, and the financing of the continent’s railway system. Both men were Liberals, that is to say belonging to the party broadly opposed in principle to imperialism and any expansion of the British empire.

Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister, ordered the occupation of Egypt. At the time, and to the end of his political life, he liked to claim paradoxically that the occupation ran counter to his deepest wish, and British forces would stay only long enough to restore order. Taking up his appointment as British agent in Cairo, Cromer supposed that his task was indeed to devise what today would be called an exit strategy. The country was in a precarious political and economic condition. To the south, in the Sudan, the Mahdi led an Islamist insurgency. Unsure how to react, the Gladstone government sent out General Gordon but did not give him the necessary troops. When the Mahdi killed General Gordon, Victorian England reacted with an outpouring of dismay and anger comparable to that following September 11.

Cromer thought little of Gladstone, and even less of Gordon, and in the light of practical experience he abandoned his Liberalism. As he wrote to a friend, “If a civilized Power takes a quasi-barbarous country it must make up its mind quickly whether to go or stay.” Staying meant pressuring the khedive to control his profligate spending and authoritarian instincts, finding compliant Egyptians who would carry out Cromer’s policies as though these were their own, and finally recapturing the Sudan and putting an end to its Islamist fanaticism.

Elected to government in place of the Liberals, the Conservatives recognized that Cromer had come to share their imperialist beliefs and supported him solidly. He duly stabilized Egypt. His many great and lasting achievements included a fairer system of justice, relief of taxation for the oppressed Egyptian peasant, the ending of forced labor and the use of the gang-master’s frightful leather whip, suppression of slaving, a dam on the Nile to increase irrigation, sound finances, and the attraction of private capital. Under that forbiddingly remote appearance and those abstract administrative capacities, he was evidently a tenderhearted and thoughtful man, moved by the plight of the poor. Mr. Owen well presents Cromer’s humanity and the devotion he felt for his wife Ethel, who died of Bright’s disease while they were in Cairo.

Cromer had many Egyptian colleagues and friends, and he pays tribute to them in “Modern Egypt,” the classic book he wrote about his service there. Mustapha Kamil was the exception. Egged on by the khedive, who wanted to regain his absolute rule, Mustapha Kamil launched the nationalism that set the crowd against the British and their purposes. “Egypt for the Egyptians!” became the popular slogan.

Cromer was duly blackened by anti-imperialists in London. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt – an intellectual associate of Kamil’s and a prototype for Noam Chomsky – led a malicious campaign against Cromer. Blunt was the typical intellectual who thought his fellow British could do nothing right. Still, the British were to stay in Egypt for decades more, until a latter-day khedive, Gamal Abdul Nasser, seized power, exploiting nationalism to do with the country whatever he pleased.

Iraq was only one among other Arab countries to follow that same transition from imperialism to nationalism, all of them lawless states misruled by lawless men. American policy-makers unexpectedly find themselves in the Cromer position. Should the United States have no more success than Britain in establishing modern and equitable Arab and Muslim societies, then history must repeat itself as before.

Mr. Pryce-Jones’s “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs” is available from Ivan R. Dee.