Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  In fact, it was the French who killed Murad—albeit indirectly. The French troops carried the plague to Upper Egypt. It was a wave of “imperial plague.” Contemporary European physicians affirmed that the south of Egypt had been immune to outbreaks of the plague for hundreds of years under Mamluk and Ottoman rule. European observers largely reported that the healthier and hotter air of Upper Egypt made it difficult for the plague to infiltrate the south, whereas Cairo and the Mediterranean coast of Egypt were more susceptible.65 A French physician asserted that the plague was a natural phenomena “almost unknown” in Upper Egypt.66 “It was well known that there was a line of demarcation which cut off Upper Egypt, beyond which the plague never passed,” an early 1800s British report indicated.67 The plague had not visited Upper Egypt for five centuries, ever since the great epidemic of the 1300s had spread throughout Egypt and most of the Mediterranean world. But in the last few years of the 1790s, imperial interventions by the Ottomans led to the spread of this disease from Cairo and the Delta to Upper Egypt, and then the French Empire introduced a second wave of this imperial plague.68

  The great numbers of French soldiers transmitted the disease. They, along with the fighting Mamluks coming from the north, contaminated the environment of Upper Egypt. The plague broke out first in Cairo and the north in February 1801 after the Nile inundation, and later it had a devastating impact in Upper Egypt.69 Al-Jabarti, a well-informed eyewitness, chronicled the epidemic’s repercussions using a letter that he received from his friend Shaykh Hasan al-‘Attar, who was at the time residing in Upper Egypt. Dated May 1801, al-‘Attar’s letter asserted that it was an enormously sweeping wave of disease, “never heard of.” It started in mid-March and ended in mid-May. “Plague raged in all Upper Egypt,” he wrote, “but especially [in] the city of Asyut, where more than 600 persons died every day. Such a scourge has never been seen in the memory of man. I think the country lost two-thirds of its population. The streets are deserted; friends or relatives only learn of the death of those near to them long after the event for everyone is absorbed in his own family’s misfortunes. Corpses remain in the houses for days on end, for only after a great deal of trouble can one find biers, washers, and porters.”70

  In addition, Sir Robert Wilson, a contemporary British general who came to Egypt with his country’s troops, reported that one of the unusual characteristics of the disease was that “persons who remained stationary were liable to it, and that those who passed rapidly through various currents of air escaped.”71 The French troops passed through northern Egyptian lands and communicated in the most intimate manner with the natives in Alexandria, Cairo, and the villages of Lower Egypt, where numerous natives were afflicted with the epidemic and died. The soldiers then landed and settled in Upper Egypt with their contaminated bodies and luggage. Around 60,000 inhabitants perished during this wave of plague, out of the estimated 750,000 population of Upper Egypt. Whole villages were wiped off the face of earth. The French administration attempted to treat the plague by applying lime, draining off all stagnant waters, whitewashing the walls of houses, paving city streets, using coal fire to burn objects, and using burnt brick instead of mud in building. Nothing worked to stop the devastating epidemic.72

  In the wake of this massive environmental destruction, and by the time the French troops departed from Upper Egypt, any images that the French had of themselves as liberators or competent managers of other countries’ resources had vanished. In a similar vein, any images of the natives as inferior barbarians awaiting liberation and progress had become, painfully, much more complex. The French Empire’s occupation of Upper Egypt, as proven in Qina Province, was a relationship of mutual manipulation between the colonizer and the colonized, in which the former suffered the illusion of intelligently and correctly representing the latter and being a clever administrator. Other world empires would continue to fall prey to the same mistake for the following two centuries, until the present day.

  THREE

  * * *

  The Pasha’s Settlers, Bulls, and Bandits

  1805–1848

  Between 1820 and 1824, a series of unprecedented revolts erupted in Upper Egypt, all from Qina Province, aiming to overthrow the regime of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha. Throughout the long, rigid forty-year reign of Muhammad ‘Ali (d. 1848), Egypt had never witnessed such outbreaks, in either the country’s north or south. Ahmad al-Salah, an Arab shaykh, led the first and largest revolt, mobilizing about forty thousand followers for his cause, including peasants and Arab tribal shaykhs. From his home village of Salimiyya, al-Salah emerged as a Sufi mystic and self-proclaimed messiah and declared a holy war against the pasha, claiming that he had received orders from the Ottoman sultan to execute his mission. He seized the local government’s treasury and storehouses and hired his own administrators to rule over Qina for two months. A British eyewitness to this revolt, J.A. St. John, recounted, “The composition of the revolters, their hopes and the grounds of them, were eminently characteristic . . . . At their head was a Sheikh, who, having assumed the title of a prophet, promised them victory in the name of heaven . . . . It appeared, nonetheless, that they were by no means dazzled by his divine pretensions. They did not believe him to be inspired; and regarded the miracles related by his enthusiastic companions as so many pious frauds. Taxation, however, pressed heavily upon them; and what was wanting in credulity was compensated by discontent.”1

  Muhammad ‘Ali soon sent an army from Cairo to bring an end to the separatist state. Under the command of a young Turkish officer, the soldiers burned villages, destroyed houses, displaced women and children, and exterminated the rebels. Al-Salah fled, crossing the Red Sea to Hijaz, where nobody heard from him again.2 Two subsequent revolts followed, emerging from adjacent villages in Qina, and were similarly crushed.

  Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha—originally an ambitious viceroy of Ottoman Egypt—built a short-lived empire, carving away from his sultan’s territories to expand into the Sudan, Arabia, Yemen, and Syria. This chapter argues that in the empire of Muhammad ‘Ali in the Near East, Upper Egypt was the “first colony.” Before invading other territories, the pasha first fought fierce wars for many years to incorporate the south into a unified Egyptian state. As in other world cases of “internal colonialism,” such as that of Ireland in Britain, the pasha’s rising empire depended on the economic exploitation of the internal colony to support further external expansion. This process involved the implantation of imperial settlers and the creation of vast plantations in the colony. As his extended empire began to collapse, the pasha’s hegemony over the south also waned. Upper Egypt constantly simmered with both separatist revolts and acts of resistance in daily life, championed by peasants, women, laborers, slaves, and, most importantly, ever-ruthless bandits.

  Given the dominant position of nationalistic perspectives in the historiography of Egypt, the theory of internal colonialism has not been considered as a way to understand the place of Upper Egypt under Muhammad ‘Ali. Prevailing Arabic and English narratives alike traditionally assume that the pasha was the founder of modern Egypt or the creator of an Egyptian nation-state. He modernized the army, established bureaucratic state institutions, reformed legal codes, introduced European industries, restructured the agricultural organization, sent students to Europe, and so on, all of which allegedly contributed to the formation of a unified nation that encompassed the north and the south.3 Khaled Fahmy, a leading Egyptian historian, attempted to undermine these nationalistic narratives in his groundbreaking works, including All the Pasha’s Men. Studying the modernized army that Muhammad ‘Ali built based on conscription of native peasants and laborers, Fahmy used archival evidence to show that the pasha’s military institution was far from being a nationalist one working to develop Egyptian “citizens” in a “nation-state” per se.4

  There is no doubt that Muhammad ‘Ali introduced fundamental “modern” reforms to Egypt, but he was never able to build this alleged nation-state. Fond of copying modern European
methods of governance, the pasha learned from the experience of several contemporary Western empires that used internal colonialism to create centralized states before embarking on external expansion. The experiences of Britain in Ireland, France in Brittany, and Spain in Catalonia were either recent or still ongoing during the pasha’s time. In his book Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, Michael Hechter asserts that the political and economic expansion of the British Empire followed the internal colonization and exploitation of the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh regions. The empire made these peripheral cultures representatives of British national interests and then deployed them to expand its power.5 Muhammad ‘Ali followed a closely similar path in southern Egypt.

  For many centuries, from Mamluk to Ottoman times, Upper Egypt was an autonomous state governed by a native tribal regime. Economically, it was a prosperous region, not only due to its commercial production of cash crops such as grain and sugarcane or its lucrative industries in sugar and textiles, but also, more important, because of its integral role in the Indian Ocean world economy. This was the hegemonic global economic system up until the mid–nineteenth century. The Upper Egyptian Nile and Red Sea ports in Qina Province were a thriving link in a regional market that encompassed East Africa, the Arabian Sea, and the vast ocean beyond. When Muhammad ‘Ali came to power, the independent state of Upper Egypt had recently fallen to the Ottomans, and it was under the chaotic rule of some Mamluk factions (see chapter 1). For the ambitious new viceroy of Egypt, conquering and annexing the south meant supplying his treasury with immense economic resources and paving the imperial road to neighboring colonies in the Sudan and Arabia.

  Thus, Upper Egypt serves as another important example in world history of a failed attempt at internal colonialism. Qina Province’s enormous Arabic archival records reveal a problematic and unstable relationship between the central government in Cairo and the colonized peoples of the south. Daily correspondence between the province’s bureaucrats and the pasha (sadir mudiriyya) as well as registers of the general inspector of Upper Egypt (sadir mufattish ‘umum qibli), subaltern petitions (‘ardhalas), shari‘a court records, and more depict a clear case of an internal colony boiling with persistent unrest.

  Muhammad ‘Ali’s internal colonization of Upper Egypt went through various phases. Before turning to this, a few words are due about the chronology of the rise and fall of his empire in order to place his actions in the south in context. The pasha came to power in 1805, but he conquered the south six years later in 1811. Only one year after that, he embarked on a successful campaign to conquer Hijaz and terminate the authority of the Wahhabis and the Saudi family from Arabia. In 1820, he sent his troops to invade the Sudan and established full control over it. His vicious army helped the Ottomans crush Greek rebels in 1821, but he did not colonize Greece, instead returning it to the sovereignty of the sultan. In 1831, he took hold of Syria and the entire Levant. The next year the pasha’s army humiliatingly defeated the troops of the Ottoman sultan in the battle of Konya and almost invaded Istanbul itself. He established authority over the important port of Mocha in Yemen in 1837. As Muhammad ‘Ali was planning to finally declare independence from the Ottomans, his wild imperial ambitions came to an abrupt halt. Great Britain supported Istanbul in achieving this task. The imposition of the 1838 Anglo-Turkish free-trade treaty rolled back the pasha’s commercial monopolies—the main source of his economic power—and the 1841 London treaty forced him to relinquish all conquered territories, save for Egypt and the Sudan, back to the sultan. The sultan awarded Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha hereditary rule over these two countries as compensation.

  In Upper Egypt, the process and dynamics of internal colonialism varied between the early and the late days of the empire, and so did the modes of subaltern resistance. The pasha began his subjugation of the south in a traditional, or Ottoman, mode, coupled with the coercive transfer of resources to Cairo in service of external expansion. This period ended with the revolts of the early 1820s in Qina Province. After crushing the rebels, the pasha introduced a settler, plantation-based, and industrializing model of colonization, in which imported Sudanese bulls played a crucial role. He also adopted methods of modern-state hegemony, through institutions and manipulative discourse rather than coercion. As widespread revolts failed to take off during this period, subaltern rebellion took novel forms, sometimes using violence, devised by the audacious bandits of Qina’s mountains.

  “WHAT THE MONGOLS DID”: SUBJUGATION AND REVOLT

  Upon assuming power in Cairo, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha embarked on a long six-year war to conquer Upper Egypt, which was in the hands of military Mamluk groups. In 1811, the pasha’s eldest son and army leader, Ibrahim, finally conquered all of the southern provinces after winning the decisive, last battles in Qina Province—where the Mamluks maintained their seat. In the holy month of Ramadan in the same year, Muhammad ‘Ali rewarded his victorious son by appointing him the governor of Upper Egypt, calling the region Wilayat al-Sa‘id just as the Ottoman Empire had, in an indication of its independent status.6 Upper Egypt was, in fact, the lucky start of Ibrahim’s military career as his father’s imperial conqueror—later he would grow into the vicious victor of all the pasha’s wars of expansion across the region.

  Ibrahim settled in Qina Province, and he rapidly transferred the economic resources of the new colony to Cairo. In the meantime, he maintained the position of minister of finance in his father’s regime.7 Once the governor of Upper Egypt, Ibrahim “did to the peoples of the south what the Mongols did when they invaded countries. He humiliated the nobility and behaved in the worst manner with the people, robbing their harvests and money, taking their cows and sheep . . . and imposing unbearable taxes on them,” recounted the contemporary chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti.8 Ibrahim was younger than twenty years of age, and besides winning battles, his father taught him only one value: to extract as many taxes from the south as he could by any possible means. According to al-Jabarti, “He [Ibrahim] imposed enormous amounts of money [taxes] on them [the Upper Egyptians] that was impossible for them to pay, and urged them to pay soon. When they failed to pay, he applied different means of torturing, beating, hanging, and burning to them . . . . He once tied a man’s feet to a long board of wood that two other men held from the two ends and they rolled him over fire like kabab . . . . He humiliated the people of Upper Egypt and disgraced them.”9 When Ibrahim received his post, the size of cultivated land in Upper Egypt exceeded that of the Delta by at least 200,000 acres, so the taxes he extracted from the wealthier south exceeded those of the north by more than 150,000 pounds.10

  The first thing that Muhammad ‘Ali ordered his son to transfer north was the famous grain of Upper Egypt that had sustained Istanbul’s imperial granaries for centuries. Ibrahim forcibly confiscated this crop, and the pasha exported it to a desperate Europe during the Napoleonic Wars at inflated prices. A few months after the invasion, the pasha established a monopoly over the southern grain trade: a decree issued in 1812 forbade local merchants from participating in this trade. Grain was also seized from peasants, even what they had stored for their own sustenance. The pasha’s officials broke into the peasants’ homes, seizing as little or as much grain as they found, without paying, claiming that this would be deducted from the following year’s tax bill. The pasha’s gigantic ships, built especially for shipping grain purpose, then carried the crop down the Nile to Cairo.11 In 1816, al-Jabarti observed one of these annually recurring scenes: “Ships from Upper Egypt come to Bulaq and Old Cairo ports. They unload huge cargoes very high into the air and then the ships come from the north to take them [the cargo] to Alexandria and in the morning you would not find any of it left at the site.”12

  Within only a few years, this very grain made Muhammad ‘Ali “the richest Pasha in the Ottoman Empire,” in the words of a French consul.13 The Ottoman ships now came to Alexandria in order to carry the Sublime Port’s grain, which Istanbul had received regularl
y for the previous three centuries. But these Ottoman ships returned empty, while British ships harboring adjacent to them were heavily loaded with Upper Egyptian wheat and setting sail to Europe. The sultan’s complaints did not stop the ambitious viceroy from accumulating immense capital.14 Europe was in dire need of wheat during the Napoleonic Wars, so the pasha sold it at exaggerated prices. Historian Fred Lawson writes that “these sales generated considerable income for the central treasury . . . . Sa‘idi [Upper Egyptian] wheat was being exported for between sixty-two and eighty piasters per ardabb at the beginning of 1811, a price some five times that in the local market; nevertheless, British buyers were not dissuaded from increasing their purchases.”15

  The wheat of Qina Province, particularly, sustained the troops of Muhammad ‘Ali during his invasion of Hijaz. The process of transferring wheat to the army was easy because Ibrahim’s base as the governor of Upper Egypt was in Qina, and from there he crossed the Red Sea to Hijaz. John Bowring, a British official, reported the impressive quantities: “Keneh [Qina] has gradually sent large quantities of wheat to Arabia; sometimes as much as 200,000 ardabbs, or a million bushels per annum.”16 One of the main tasks of the appointed Turkish governor of the towns of the province was to ensure a regular flow of grain shipments and secure them on their way to Ibrahim and his fighting soldiers in Arabia. Harsh punishment awaited any governor who did not fulfill this crucial duty. In their itinerary from Qina to the Red Sea port of Qusayr, these grain shipments were frequently raided by local Arab tribes and did not make it to the military camps, which greatly angered the pasha.17

  The equally famous sugar of Upper Egypt was the second resource to be transferred to Cairo and sold at high price, solely for the benefit of the pasha’s treasury. For centuries, significant shipments of this sugar also used to be shipped to Istanbul. Al-Jabarti reported that Ibrahim established a monopoly over the southern sugar trade as soon as he completed his conquest. Within a few years, he was already in control of all the sugarcane harvest and sugar mills of Upper Egypt. To expand the industry, he advanced credit to private sugar refineries and shared profits with them, which led to a tremendous increase in both the size of sugarcane fields and the number of mills. He established a large, new refinery near his vast plantation in Middle Egypt, and Upper Egyptian cane provided it with continuous supplies. To consolidate his monopoly, Muhammad ‘Ali later restricted sugarcane cultivation to Upper Egypt, issuing decrees prohibiting its cultivation in Lower Egypt.18