Egypt

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EGYPT

the french invasion and the reign of mehmet ali pasha
the khedives and british occupation
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A province of the Ottoman Empire since 1517, Egypt had been dominated since the early eighteenth century by a cluster of largely autonomous Mamluk beys (provincial governors in the Ottoman Empire). The Mamluks were members of a politically powerful military class in Egypt. In 1786 the Ottomans sought to reassert their authority by installing a new governor. The attempt failed, and the Mamluks Murad Bey (1750–1801) and Ibrahim Bey (1735–1817) took power instead. In European eyes, late-eighteenthcentury Egypt appeared to be beset by internal political disorder, and the Ottoman Empire seemed to be in decline, following a major defeat by Russia in 1774.

the french invasion and the reign of mehmet ali pasha

These factors encouraged European powers, especially France, to contemplate invading and colonizing Egypt. On 2 July 1798, a French army commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte landed at Alexandria, with the twofold intent of making Egypt a French colony and threatening British interests in South Asia. The French quickly captured Alexandria and marched south toward Cairo, defeating the Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids on 21 July. Ten days later, however, the British navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758–1805) demolished the French fleet, in what became known as the Battle of the Nile. Now marooned in Egypt, Bonaparte attempted to save face by cultivating fraternal relations with the Egyptian Arab elite and by marching into Syria. Turned back at the walls of Acre, Bonaparte abandoned his army and left for France in August 1799. French occupation of Egypt continued under the command of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber (1753–1800), who was assassinated in June 1800, and followed by General Jacques-François de Menou (1750–1810), a widely unpopular figure and a convert to Islam. In early 1801 a joint British-Ottoman force launched a counterinvasion of Egypt, capturing Cairo; the French surrendered in September, and by mid-1803 all French and British forces had withdrawn.

Bonaparte had failed to establish an enduring French colony in Egypt, but he had managed to topple definitively the old Mamluk establishment. In the ensuing power vacuum, an Albanian-born general named Mehmet Ali (1769–1849), who had come to Egypt with the Ottoman army, skillfully outmaneuvered a series of rivals to assume power himself. He was appointed pasha, or governor, of Egypt by the Ottoman sultan in 1805. He secured his authority in part by weakening the landed elite, through revisions to the tax system and expropriation of land. In 1811 he dealt a deadly blow to his Mamluk rivals, luring them to a ceremony at the Cairo Citadel and having them murdered to a man.

Neither Britain nor France had abandoned their imperial interests in the region. Convinced that Mehmet Ali was a pawn of the French, Britain attempted a misbegotten invasion of Egypt in 1807—an episode that underscored the key place that Egypt now occupied in European imperial politics. Mehmet Ali Pasha shrewdly played British and French interests off each other to pursue a series of reforms and modernizing schemes. Notably, he built up his army using European military advisers and technology. Long-staple Jumel cotton was introduced in the early 1820s, and power looms were imported for industrial textile production. Mehmet Ali also pursued educational reforms, creating professional schools and sending Egyptian students to France to study. He paid for British and French aid partly by granting rights to excavate and export Egyptian antiquities, which had become all the rage following the publication of the twenty-four-volume Description de ?Égypte

(1809–1828), compiled by the savants who had accompanied Bonaparte's army.

In addition to "modernizing" Egypt, Mehmet Ali Pasha's ambitions included ensuring dynastic power in Egypt and building an empire beyond it. Using his European-style army, Mehmet Ali helped the sultan suppress the Wahhabi rebellion in the Hijaz (1811–1813). In 1820–1822 he conquered northern Sudan, where he briefly tried to form an army of Sudanese askaris (native soldiers); and in 1831 his son Ibrahim (1789–1848) invaded Syria and Anatolia, in hopes of securing Egyptian rule over Syria. But Mehmet Ali's intervention in wider Ottoman affairs brought him into conflict with European powers. This became sharply evident during the Greek War of Independence, when the pasha sent Egyptian forces to help the Ottomans suppress the Greeks. British and French sympathies sided strongly with the Greeks, however, and in 1827 a joint Anglo-French squadron sailed into the bay of Navarino and destroyed the Egyptian navy.

Of larger concern was the fact that Mehmet Ali's conquests in Syria and elsewhere threatened to upset the stability of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, and with it the European balance of power. European diplomats, concerned to protect Ottoman integrity, met in London in 1840 to find a way of scaling back Mehmet Ali's territory. Working in the face of French opposition, the British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston; 1784–1865) hammered out a treaty that granted Mehmet Ali hereditary title to Egypt but deprived him of all his conquests except Sudan and curtailed the size of his army. Palmerston then forced the pasha into submission in 1841 using his preferred tactic of gunboat diplomacy. Egypt would never be an empire; nor, for the rest of the century, would it be truly independent.

the khedives and british occupation

Mehmet Ali Pasha died in 1849 and was succeeded by his relatively pro-British son Abbas I (1813–1854), who granted Britain a concession to build a railroad linking Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez. With the accession of Said Pasha (1822–1863) in 1854, the pendulum swung in favor of France. Said Pasha's childhood friend Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps (1805–1894) successfully won permission to build a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. When the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez went public in 1858, 44 percent of the shares were foisted on the pasha himself, who could ill afford the liability. This marked the start of Egypt's rapid slide into insolvency. Construction on the Suez Canal began in 1859, initially using forced corvée labor (unpaid labor often in lieu of taxes).

During the early 1860s, Egypt enjoyed an economic boom thanks to the skyrocketing price of cotton brought on by the American Civil War. Said Pasha's nephew Ismail (1830–1895) ascended the throne in 1863 and poured money into transforming Cairo and Alexandria into European-style

cities, with gaslit boulevards, parks, public buildings, trams, and railways. The opening ceremonies for the Suez Canal, in 1869, were marked by exceptional opulence: Ismail Pasha built a lavish palace replicating the Tuileries for the French empress Eugénie and commissioned the opera A?da from Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) to inaugurate the new Cairo Opera House. Unfortunately his expenditures vastly outran his revenue. Cotton prices plunged after 1865, while both Ismail's debts to European creditors and his tributary obligations to the Ottoman sultan mounted. By 1875 Egypt's national debt had multiplied thirtyfold.

Ismail attempted to stave off bankruptcy by selling off his Suez Canal shares in 1875. The British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, who recognized the enormous significance of Suez to British imperial interests, pounced on the opportunity. With a loan from Lord Lionel de Rothschild (Lionel Nathan Rothschild; 1808–1879), the British government bought Ismail's controlling stake in the canal for a bargain £4 million. But the sale did not prevent Egypt from going bankrupt. In 1876 the international Caisse de la Dette Publique was established to oversee the repayment of debts. Egyptian finances were further regulated by a system of dual control, with a British agent to administer Egyptian revenue and a French agent to supervise Egyptian expenditure.

Ismail (who had earned the title khedive in 1867) resisted European-imposed changes, only to be forcibly deposed by the Ottoman sultan in 1879 and replaced by his nephew Muhammed Tawfiq Pasha (1852–1892). But a more serious opposition to European administration was fomenting in the Egyptian army, under Colonel Ahmad Urabi (1839–1911), an Egyptian of modest fellah (peasant) origins. Angered by European manipulation and khedival mismanagement, Urabi and his supporters set about forming a nationalist ministry. Faced with Urabi's rapidly increasing success, Tawfiq asked for British and French military support. In June 1882 Urabist riots broke out in Alexandria under the slogan "Egypt for the Egyptians." Britain responded by bombarding Alexandria in July; British forces landed in the Suez Canal zone, defeated the Urabists at Tel el Kebir in September, and occupied Cairo. Urabi was court-martialed and exiled to Ceylon.

British military occupation of Egypt was meant to be temporary; many Britons opposed taking on new imperial commitments. But Britain would not withdraw until its strategic and financial interests were secured. Events in Sudan soon provoked deeper entanglement. In 1881 a rebellion had broken out against Egyptian rule, organized by a messianic leader known as the Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad; 1844–1885). In 1883 an Egyptian army commanded by the British officer William Hicks tried to put down the uprising, only to be slaughtered by the Mahdists at El Obeid. Bowing to public pressure, Prime Minister William Gladstone sent General Charles Gordon (1833–1885) to Sudan to restore order. Gordon, a zealous Christian and imperial hero, proved insubordinate and intemperate; yet, besieged in Khartoum, his plight attracted wide sympathy in Britain. Again submitting to public opinion, Gladstone dispatched a mission to rescue Gordon. Chugging up the Nile on tourist steamers, the expeditionary force reached Khartoum on 28 January 1885, only to find that the Mahdists had stormed the city two days earlier. Gordon's body was never found. The Mahdists would control Sudan until their defeat by the British at Omdurman in 1898.

Britain's "temporary" occupation became what has been termed a "veiled protectorate." From 1883 to 1907 it was steered almost single-handedly by the consul-general Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer (1841–1917). Cromer endeavored to clean up Egypt's finances, promoted railway and canal construction, and reformed agricultural practice: whipping of fellahin and corvée labor were abolished. He also, however, epitomized "Orientalist" superiority, insisting on Egypt's need for paternalistic British stewardship. Meanwhile, nationalist sentiment coalesced around the young, anti-British khedive Abbas Hilmi (1892–1914) and found voice through intellectuals such as Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), the founder of the influential newspaper al-Liwa.

In 1906 anti-British feeling was further galvanized by the Dinshaway incident, when five British officers on a pigeon-shooting trip in the village of Dinshaway accidentally wounded a local woman. In the resulting fray two officers were wounded, one mortally. British authorities tried fifty-two villagers for premeditated murder; four were hanged. This disproportionate show of force outraged Egyptians and contributed to Cromer's resignation in 1907. With the outbreak of World War I, Britain ended its ambiguous position in Egypt to declare it a protectorate outright. But as the formal structure of British imperial rule hardened, Egyptian nationalism had already gained shape.

See alsoFrench Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Great Britain; Ottoman Empire; Suez Canal.