Imagined Empires
Page 14
The government exerted every effort to facilitate foreign business, while repressing the natives of Qina. When provincial officials were recruiting corvée labor for public works, they also recruited cheap workers to provide private services to the European consuls and consular agents. In one incident, a consul sent a request to the governor of Qina for four laborers to construct his ships. The governor responded immediately. He only had to confirm that the consul, not the treasury, would be responsible for paying their wages, lest those workers confuse this job with government tasks and turn to him for payments. Similarly, officials granted another European merchant a number of camel drivers for his trade with the Sudan. While European merchants enjoyed all the financial benefits that came with hiring cheap local labor, these laborers did not enjoy any financial privileges from employment by foreigners. Their wages were no higher than those paid by government or local employers, because their payments were determined by the existing local rates. The agent of the French consul hired workers from Salimiyya and other villages for his businesses, and, apparently due to low wages, they were late in paying their taxes to the government. The guild chiefs and shaykhs of the laborers’ villages were held responsible for collecting these overdue taxes.14
Similarly, European consuls and consular agents paid unfair prices for the grain they collected from the province. Thus, wholesale merchants sometimes organized strikes to negotiate fairer deals. In 1858, a huge dispute erupted between the agent of the French consul and the town of Farshut’s grain wholesalers, who refused to load his ships. In the local markets of the town, the agent had made a business deal with the wholesalers to collect the grain of surrounding villages, but they discovered that he had paid them a very low price and they refused to send the grain to his waiting ships at the nearby port. The agent insisted that the local merchants did not have the right to strike because local business customs specified that the payment made in the market at the time of the purchase should be irreversible. The local merchants still insisted that they had not received what they deserved.15
At times, exporting grain resulted in severe food shortages, which forced the Egyptian state to violate free-trade agreements and apply strong interventionist measures. In 1853, the government issued a decree that prohibited the export of grain to Europe when there was need for it inside the country. The decree stated that the people had recently suffered from grain shortage and a radical increase in prices because most of the harvest had been shipped to Alexandria to be exported. Thus, the decree banned European consuls and their citizens from purchasing any grain, either from the provinces or Cairo’s markets. The governors of provinces were ordered to prevent activities of European merchants in their respective areas of jurisdiction.16
The Egyptian state, in fact, was in fierce competition with European merchants for Qina’s grain. The state collected taxes from the province in cash or in the form of grain submitted to the state’s numerous storehouses in the province. The government relied on this grain for different purposes, including sustaining the supply to Cairo and the Hijaz and as partial payment of labor wages. Prohibited from pricing grain by the Anglo-Turkish free-trade agreement—as this went against the principles of the market economy—the state closely followed the rise and fall of prices in Qina’s local markets by preparing lists every ten days. The government attempted to encourage peasants to submit their grain as taxes instead of selling to Europeans by buying it at market prices. In other words, peasants used their grain to pay taxes because the government paid the rather high market prices, which covered a significant portion of the peasants’ tax burden but left them with little of the food staple.17
This competition between the Egyptian state and European commercial steamships over Qina’s grain did not benefit the peasants of the province. Coptic and Muslim wholesale grain merchants profited from credit arrangements with the peasant farmers: the merchants usually extended credit to peasants and collected the harvest at the end of the season, two to four months after the advanced payment. According to shari‘a law, this type of credit was permissible through salam contracts. Therefore, in most cases profit went to the moneylender rather than the peasant.18 At this time, grain was almost the peasants’ only cash crop in demand at a decent price in the global market, so they sold grain despite needing it for their own sustenance. The households of Qina were emptied of wheat, and wheat bread became precious—offered to guests as an expression of generosity—and baking a loaf of bread with a handful of wheat became a source of pride for affluent families. An ever-increasing number of peasant women sued their husbands in shari‘a court for not providing the family with enough staple foodstuffs.19
Political resentment soon grew in the province against the presence of foreign merchants. Raids on European steamships occurred almost every day. Some falatiyya bandits specialized in raiding the commercial boats of Greek merchants that shipped the grain of the province to the north. In one case from 1859, at midnight some Nile bandits shot at the commercial boat of a Greek khawaja by the name of Georgie Anton (at the time, khawaja was a title used for Europeans). They attacked the boat crew and stole money and goods from them.20 Similarly, as soon as it arrived at the town of Isna, the loaded commercial boat of another khawaja was raided on its way from Aswan to Qina.21 Nile boat captains, who lost their businesses to the steamships of European merchants, turned into falatiyya, raiding plantations of the upper class and stealing from government bureaucrats. At the coffeehouse of a freed slave in the city of Qina, a bandit by the name of ‘Uthman stole the attire and purse full of cash of a bureaucrat. ‘Uthman was a member of a gang of bandits who had been committing robbery and escaping from jail for years. He was, in fact, a former sailboat captain who apparently had lost his business in Nile transportation due to the dominance of steamers.22
In 1858, an uprising led by falatiyya broke out in Isna and forced Sa‘id Pasha to reform the entire administrative system in the province. The bandits apparently threatened or directly attacked many Europeans, who reacted by randomly shooting at the inhabitants. As usual, after completing the operation the rebels escaped to the mountains, where they hid from the government. The police failed to arrest them, and the governor of Isna lost his job for such incompetence. Sa‘id Pasha became so concerned about political unrest in Qina that he reformed the province’s administrative system by merging Qina and Isna Provinces under one governor and replacing all Turkish district chiefs with Egyptian ones. To ease his task of inspecting for disobedience inside the newly created province—extending in great length along the two banks of the Nile—the new governor was granted a steamship for his own personal use. In addition, a special army was brought from the north and put under the new governor’s command. Sa‘id Pasha affirmed that the primary task of the new governor was ensuring the safety of Europeans and guarding public security. As for Europeans who might commit crimes, such as shooting at the province’s inhabitants, the pasha added that they should be handled gently and escorted to their respective consuls.23
The story did not end here. The pasha’s new system would not entirely succeed at subjugating the rebels. Subaltern resentment against European merchants would continue, reaching its peak moment in the 1864 revolt.
PRIVATE PROPERTY, LOSING PROPERTY
The second pillar of the alleged market modernity that Qina Province encountered was the reformed law of private property in agricultural land. The advent of these modern codes in the province only helped elites to win property rights, while peasants lost them. The codes expanded the propertied class in Qina to include Turkish and native government bureaucrats, Europeans, Coptic agents of European consuls, village notables, and shari‘a law scholars. These beneficiaries accumulated vast plantations at the expense of thousands of dispossessed peasants, who were in the process turned into seasonal laborers on these plantations. The village of Salimiyya, where the 1864 revolt later erupted, fell under the grip of many prominent members of the growing propertied class.
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p; Sa‘id Pasha promulgated the new land code of 1858, presenting it as a great step toward the country’s modernization. Before this law, the lands of all villages were theoretically the property of the state. After Muhammad ‘Ali died, and under the idle, decentralized regime of his grandson ‘Abbas Pasha, provincial bureaucrats seized state-owned lands from peasants and grew as a new class of large landowners.24 Sa‘id’s law, known as al-La’iha al-Sa‘idiyya, was the product of internal pressures by provincial bureaucrats and village notables to consolidate and legalize their properties, coupled with the empire’s advocacy of private property as a sign of modernity.25 In drafting the new law, Sa‘id Pasha, in fact, consulted with the governors of Upper and Lower Egypt and with high-ranking bureaucrats, who were mainly interested in consolidating their new properties. The law was finally issued, regulating ownership of three main categories of land: kharajiya, or common peasants’ land; ab‘adiyya plantations, or the previously uncultivated state-owned land leased to government officials for reclamation at a reduced tax rate; and ‘uhda plantations, or land that the state confiscated from runaway peasants who had fled after failing to pay taxes or to escape corvée labor.
The new legal code finally granted the bureaucrats absolute property rights to the ab‘adiyya plantations. It also opened the door for sales of more of those plantations to government officials, Europeans, and whoever could reclaim them and pay taxes on them. Public auctions were held all year in Qina Province to lease or sell ab‘adiyya plantations, and bureaucrats won thousands of acres by outbidding peasants. In one auction in the village of Salimiyya, the governor of Qina won a plantation of about two hundred acres. Some peasants in the village bid against him, claiming that this land was originally theirs, but they lost the auction to the influential governor.26 More important, the new law gave bureaucrats and village shaykhs property rights to the ‘uhda state-owned plantations seized from runaway peasants. It decreed that if a peasant was proved absent from his land for three years, he would lose his property rights, and whoever held and cultivated it for five years would gain the right to keep it. Peasants returned to their villages to find their lands confiscated and registered under other people’s names, usually state officials. Whole villages were transformed into ‘uhda plantations, and the new code gave the administrators of those plantations absolute ownership rights to them.27
The governor of the city of Isna, ‘Abd al-Ghafur Effendi, owned three plantations of hundreds of acres each. The effendi maintained a religious and pious lifestyle, as he “abstained from mundane matters and sought charitable deeds” by funding the construction of the great mosque of Qus. Nonetheless, he was a corrupt official who took advantage of his position to employ local laborers and use slaves without paying them wages and also to delay, or completely avoid, paying taxes. For instance, he drafted slave workers from the neighboring gunpowder factory, owned by the state, to perform temporary jobs on his land.28 Furthermore, he acted as a moneylender, giving out loans to peasants and subsequently appropriating their lands and evicting them when they failed to repay their debts. Outraged by such actions, the farmers of Karnak, who had mortgaged four hundred acres to the effendi and had already paid back part of their debt in cash and in-kind, raised many petitions to the central government to stop his attempts to illicitly evict them. Other peasants avenged their lost properties by less legal means; Farshut peasants released their cattle and sheep to graze in the effendi’s fields and damage part of his harvest.29
As the owner of several plantations of thousands of acres, Bishara ‘Ubayd, a Copt who was the agent of the French consul for many years, was without a doubt the wealthiest person in the province. His medium-size and large plantations expanded in almost every village in Qina. In public auctions of only one year, 1862, Bishara purchased 1,654 acres in Qus, followed by another 1,166 in seven different villages. The village of Salimiyya strongly felt Bishara’s presence, as he purchased more than 500 acres there. State officials in the province authorized him to appoint new mayors (‘umdas) for the villages where he owned most of the land. The mayors’ primary job was to force the peasants to evacuate and deliver their plots to the new landlord. In Salimiyya, Bishara hired laborers to work the plantations for low wages, insufficient even to pay for their taxes. Furthermore, Bishara established control over a significant share of the province’s trade, as he owned commercial boats and collected grain from wholesalers to ship north.30
A small number of Europeans owned vast plantations in Qina and enjoyed immense authority in the province. The French administrator of the sulfur mine of Qina, khawaja Monier, was probably the largest foreign landowner in the province. In 1862, Monier bid at auction for a 3,318-acre plantation in a district rich in sugarcane fields. He paid a very low price of only three piasters per acre. He also made a small purchase of another 11 acres from the peasants of the same district, but he had problems with this transaction. The peasants apparently complained to the government that he forced or tricked them into selling the land. The state declined the peasants’ claim and deemed the Frenchman’s property deed valid.31 Monier resided in a palace in the city of Luxor, to the north of his plantations, and he appropriated a piece of land in the same city to build storehouses, horse stables, a garden, and a waterwheel. He drafted local construction workers and artisans to erect these buildings without paying them wages. Some of the city’s inhabitants disputed his possession, asserting that the land was their property. Investigations revealed that he had obtained a permit from local state officials. In the middle of the dispute, Monier contracted an illness and had to travel north to receive treatment. Probably happy with receiving this news, the inhabitants of the city thought that he had gone back to his country to die there, but he soon returned to the province to buy more land.32
The new law also allowed native village notables, particularly mayors and shaykhs, to join this new class of large landowners. As the village shaykhs and mayors seized the land of absent peasants and actively participated in public auctions, winning medium-size plantations, they also extended credit to peasants as an indirect way to eventually seize their plots when the chances came.33 The village of Salimiyya witnessed one of the most acute cases of conflict over mortgaged lands between creditors, who were village rulers, and indebted peasants. The village mayor, Hasan ‘Abd Allah, and his father and uncles held 337 acres that peasants mortgaged to them for cash and grain. The heirs of the owners now claimed their right to the land, as they were ready to pay back the mortgage. The mayor not only refused to return the land but also petitioned for guaranteed government support in his case.34
Shari‘a scholars also constituted a new class of medium-size landowners in this process. The regime rewarded them for their collaboration, after the government issued new shari‘a law provisions and fatwas supporting the new civil land code and bestowing legitimacy upon it.35 The same year the land code was promulgated, in 1858, Sa‘id Pasha granted Shaykh Muhammad Abu Shanab, a Hanafi jurist following the state’s school of Islamic law, a plantation of one hundred acres in Qina Province. Another shaykh, Shaykh ‘Uthman Taha, owned thirty-seven acres in Farshut that he rented to peasants.36 Corrupt shari‘a judges, particularly in Qina Province, were rewarded for their collaboration with the provincial bureaucracy because they registered new land titles in the Islamic court, as it was the only place to obtain property deeds.37 The wealth of shari’a judges in the province was second only to that of bureaucrats, and when the judges died they left their heirs great fortunes.38
The plantation owners managed their land by using dispossessed peasants as tenants or seasonal laborers. As tenants, these peasants held sharecropping contracts that stipulated that they give a set percentage of the harvest every year to the landlord, who sometimes provided them with capital and machinery.39 Also, hundreds of landless farmers in each village gathered every season, sought jobs on plantations near and far, and then returned to their villages with their small wages. The peasants in the village where Husayn Bey, the vice
chief of the district of Qus, had his plantation, boycotted the temporary jobs he offered because he frequently annexed their trees, waterwheels, and pieces of other farms around his properties. Thus, his plantation manager had to recruit seasonal laborers from nearby villages to work on the plantation. The peasant laborers tilled the land and also worked in the sugar mills attached to it. Some worked for the whole year, while others worked for only one or two seasons. The plantation manager paid them their wages in wheat, maize, and beans and in small amounts of cash, which they needed to pay the state dues. The cash wages the peasant laborers received never provided them with enough capital to save and buy back their lost lands.40
MINES, KHAWAJAS, AND WORKERS
Foreign experts and capitalist enterprises also quickly found their way to Qina Province, carrying the dream of modernity to the south. But their utter incompetence and inefficiency were only equaled by the misery they inflicted on the laborers of the province. The liberal market created by informal imperialism again failed here, breaking down the legend of an ever-successful European capitalism in the nineteenth century—a myth that many prominent economic historians present as conventional wisdom.41 The globalization of the informal empire pressed the Egyptian regime to search for sources of energy to operate new technologies, such as steamships, railways, modern factories, and much more. It was the age of coal. It was also the age of “trust” in “foreign experts” to deliver modernity.42 The coal mines of Qina Province were essential sites of venture capitalism, where European experts were entrusted with the passage to the modern. As the resistance of Qina’s oppressed workers in the mines mounted, the venture rapidly failed.