Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  In 1820, Louis Michel, a French scientist, suggested to Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha that he should search for soft coal in Upper Egypt. When Michel had come with the French expedition to Egypt more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1798, the scientist had heard that there were potentially soft coal deposits there. At the time, Muhammad ‘Ali powered his modern manufacturing only with oxen imported from the Sudan, so he welcomed the idea. The pasha hired Michel as the chief commander of a search mission in the deserts of Qina Province and supported him with the facilities needed to launch mining. Initially, the project was rather limited, as Michel was sent to the excavation sites with only one assistant. The project did not yield fruit for many years, yet it continued to receive the state’s support through more funds, miners, and tools. Some Austrian engineers came to join the project but they were discouraged from journeying to Upper Egypt by the excessively hot weather. The state kept hiring one French commander after another with no satisfying results, until the pasha died without ever seeing one good piece of soft coal from those mines.43

  In 1858, the project gained new momentum that brought it to life again under Sa‘id Pasha. Rather than merely hiring foreign experts to manage the mine, Sa‘id made the khawajas (Europeans) the state’s business partners.44 The purpose of the enterprise was to search for soft coal in the eastern desert between the province of Qina and its port of Qusayr. Employing about one hundred people, including foreign experts, clerks, mining workers, camel drivers, and water carriers, it grew into a relatively big enterprise for its time and place. Khawaja De Francis was the state’s main partner, but he stayed in Cairo and hired a deputy miner, khawaja Barbarous, to manage the site. Although the terms of the contract of this “company” are not clear in the records, it seems that De Francis contributed only his expertise, without a share of the capital. The state granted a small steamship to De Francis so he could go to Qina Province to inspect the mine. The workers were recruited from the villages and towns of Qina, and the chief camel driver, Shaykh Zayid Khamis, was responsible for hiring camel drivers to deliver laborers to the excavation site in the desert. The governor of Qina was officially the highest authority in the enterprise, as he allocated all the needed funds and resources to the mine from the storehouses of the province.45

  The taxpayers of Qina Province carried the financial burden of this costly enterprise. All the provisions were supplied by Qina’s storehouses, where peasants, artisans, merchants, and other social groups had to submit their dues to the state treasury in-kind or in cash. The mine administrators requested their daily provisions from the governor of Qina, who ordered them from the reserves or collected them from the people of the province according to strict deadlines. Such provisions included bread, butter, lentils, baskets, mining tools, wood, water skins, cash for wages, transport fares, and so on.46 Camel drivers regularly carried shipments of provisions to the mine and were paid twelve piasters per qantar. A group of camel drivers had to write a petition to the governor of Qina in order to receive allowances of food supplies for the trip in addition to their wages. The governor agreed to this request but subtracted the food they received from their wages or from the transport fares the state paid.47

  Qina residents formed the workforce at the mine. Although the number of workers in the mine at any given time did not exceed a hundred, the mine affected the lives of thousands of laborers throughout its years of operation. A system of regular replacement substituted new laborers for fatigued ones, making it almost impossible for the laborers of the province to escape serving in the mine. Through forced conscription builders, blacksmiths, carpenters, and water carriers were all sent to the mine. They received wages along with food and transportation supplies. Each subdistrict in Qina had to contribute its share of laborers. Conscription took place through the guild chief, or shaykh al-ta’ifa. For example, when there was a need for carpenters, the chief carpenter, or shaykh al-najjarin, in each subdistrict was officially ordered to send an assigned number of carpenters from the area under his chiefdom. Individual artisans in each guild were registered by name in the official state files, area by area. This meant that each artisan was requested by name when it was his turn to serve in the mine. According to the applied labor law, workers in state enterprises and public works had to be replaced every given period, usually a fortnight, before they lost their energy and became too fatigued to work. Workers in the mine were replaced at regular intervals, but not all at the same time. Some workers preferred permanent wage labor at the mine and expressed their wish to stay for full-time jobs, which they were mostly permitted to do.48

  After the guild shaykh conscripted him, a mine worker had to undertake a long, hazardous journey to reach the excavation site in the middle of the eastern desert, carry out the assigned tasks, and, if he was lucky, return home safely. First, he had to carry his own work tools, if required, and deliver himself to Hamad Muhammad, the camel driver of the mine from the ‘Ababida tribe, who was officially responsible for delivering him and was acquainted with all the routes in the desert due to his Bedouin origins. The worker was provided with food for the road, namely one qantar of crackers (buqsumat). He had to sign a receipt upon receiving this snack in order to have it deducted from his wages. When the worker arrived at the mine, the camel driver handed him to the chief miner, who then would send a letter to the governor of Qina confirming the delivery. The chief miner then assigned the newly arrived worker his tasks at once. After that, there were two possible scenarios: he either stayed to finish the job and, in rare cases, liked it and applied to be hired full-time, or he ran away. Running away was a fatal decision if it was not arranged with secretive help from an expert camel driver. It was easy to get lost and die in the vast desert. Even the most skilled camel drivers sometimes got lost in the desert on their way to or from the digging site. If the worker had enough luck, he would be replaced after a reasonable period before his physical condition deteriorated. Eventually, he returned home to his family with his small wage in hand.49

  In one incident, workers protested the irregularity of their pay. Wages were suspended on some days because of long pauses in digging. It was not possible for the miners to find side jobs to make up for the lost wages; there was nothing around them but desert. Thus, they complained and requested that they get paid for all weekdays regardless of the current state of work. The governor of Qina affirmed that it was the responsibility of the enterprise to find them tasks to do on a daily basis and to pay them regular wages. He established new rules for regular payment and sent them to the khawaja. The rules entailed paying wages for all weekdays, except for the weekly holiday, Friday. Eventually, the mine’s administration decided to pay the workers on a monthly basis, probably to discourage them from running away.50

  As at all mining sites in the world in the nineteenth century, safety measures were a crucial problem. Rates of injury and accidental death were high among mine workers. In Qina’s coal mine, the foreign miners chose a specific point to excavate and they trained the workers to carry out the digging. One day, a disaster almost happened when the walls of the pit collapsed on the workers. Luckily, nobody was injured. This accident disturbed Sa‘id Pasha, and he issued strict orders to the khawaja to find a safe method of digging. Interestingly, the khawaja was asked to study the issue with the workers in order to reach the best technique. He was ordered to agree with them on a secure method for their own safety as well as for expediting the work. The governor of Qina directed khawaja De Francis to “think with them [the workers] about the appropriate technique until you reach an easy one . . . that will not delay the course of work or cause any harm to the workers.”51 They decided to build wooden walls for the pit during the digging process to prevent the collapse of the sand walls. De Francis confirmed to Sa‘id Pasha that the construction of such walls was the best method reached by his deputy, Barbarous. European mines commonly applied it during this period. Wood was shipped from Cairo to Qina’s storehouses specifically for this purpose, with firm i
nstructions to Barbarous to use it for ensuring workers’ safety.52

  As time passed with no signs of progress, Sa‘id Pasha showed his dissatisfaction with the work of De Francis, who was asking for more time and state support to finish the search for soft coal. A few weeks after the collapse of the pit’s walls, and without waiting for the work at the site to be finished, the khawaja began digging another pit. The governor of Qina requested an explanation for the waste of resources. The difficult search for coal eventually failed to yield any fruit. Sa‘id Pasha finally issued a royal decree giving De Francis a deadline: before the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan of 1858, he was directed to present satisfying samples or terminate the search. The decree stated that the government would neither accept the allegations of De Francis and his accompanying Egyptian miners that soft coal existed in the province, nor respond to their request to continue the search at the state’s expense.53 The venture was closed down six months after the pit collapse incident. The only losers in the entire venture were the people of Qina Province, who had to pay for the failure of foreign experts and the wrong decisions of a liberalized state.

  The coal enterprise was not the only failed capitalist enterprise in Qina. The Egyptian state ran a sulfur mine in the mountains close to the Qusayr port, and the product of this mine was processed in the four state-owned gunpowder factories in the province. This mine was also managed by European experts, namely the notorious Monsieur Monier, who owned large plantations in Qina’s villages, jointly with Italian miners. Foreign experts were state business partners and, according to the company contract, they enjoyed the right to a quarter of the mine’s revenue. The sulfur mine also hired Qina’s local laborers, who endured hazardous conditions similar to that of their fellow workers in the coal mine and who resented these conditions just like them. In the late 1860s, when the sulfur mine project showed signs of failure, European consuls and newspapers harshly attacked it because its product lacked quality. The failed Italian miners gradually deserted the site and returned to their country.54

  A “COMMUNIST” REVOLT

  As the discontent of peasants and laborers in Qina Province accumulated, a massive revolt broke out in the province. In 1864, one year after Sa‘id Pasha died and Isma‘il Pasha came to the throne, the uprising erupted. Although the revolt seems almost identical to the 1820 revolt that had occurred under Muhammad ‘Ali, particularly in having religious leaders who used spiritual rhetoric to mobilize the subalterns, it had completely different conditions and causes.

  Two new conditions in the global market galvanized the uprising. First, the years of the American Civil War (1861–65) tremendously increased British demand for Egyptian cotton. Sa‘id and Isma‘il both capitalized on this opportunity to maximize their profits in European markets. The war raised cotton prices in Alexandria, and exports surged to 2.5 million qantars in 1865. As a result, the state placed its focus on cotton cultivation in the north, the Delta, and economically marginalized Upper Egypt in the process. Although Qina Province was traditionally a cotton producer, the cultivation of this cash crop shifted to the Delta due to the latter region’s proximity to the world’s hegemon in Europe.55

  Second, wheat, the other main cash crop of the country, which largely came from Upper Egypt, was facing fierce competition from the rising producers in Europe and the Americas. The grain of Europe and the Americas generally witnessed a boom due to the application of modern technologies in agricultural machinery, including steam engines used in irrigation. More important, despite preaching laissez-faire policies, Britain and other unhappy European countries applied protectionist policies instead to rescue their agricultural producers from outside competition.56 Thus, many European governments, including Britain, introduced so-called Corn Laws that closed the door to grain imports.57 ‘Ali Mubarak, the Egyptian statesman and chronicler, lamented this reality: “Farming in European, American, and other countries advanced and their grain production grew. They fulfilled their needs and their demand for Egyptian wheat decreased . . . which would harm the people of Upper Egypt.”58

  Before the outbreak of the 1864 revolt, unrest in Qina Province simmered in various forms. In the year of the revolt, attacks against foreigners increased, leading an American merchant residing in Luxor to demand that the government enhance security in the town. Apparently he raised the issue after an assault took place in the area where foreigners lived. He complained that the watchmen (ghafirs) in the areas surrounding the town were insufficient, both in number and in effectiveness, to protect the inhabitants. The Supreme Court in Cairo—functioning also as a legislature—had issued a decree ordering provincial governors to assign capable watchmen and to have village shaykhs and watchmen sign legal documents making them fully responsible for maintaining public safety. The American resident called for a rigorous application of this decree.59

  Some villagers refused to vacate their land and give it over to new landlords—bureaucrats and foreigners—who bought it in auctions.60 Refusing to pay rent to the new landlords also became a common practice among peasants, so landowners resorted to asking the government’s help to collect rent.61 Another common practice was to block irrigation water from reaching the lands of the new landlords, especially Europeans or agents of European consuls, by damaging dikes and embankments. The peasants of the village of Marashda, for instance, blocked the canal that carried water to the land of the agent of the Prussian consul, so his land missed its turn in receiving irrigation water that season and remained fallow. The consul complained to the governor of Qina, who ordered peasants to open the canal, but it was too late.62 In addition, armed falatiyya gangs raided the houses of village shaykhs to steal cash, clothes, jewelry, and the like, and they did not hesitate to shoot at the shaykhs and their family members.63

  The governor of Isna Province, the notorious ‘Abd al-Ghafur Effendi, faced aggressive resistance from peasants. The peasants of a village where one of his plantations was located attacked his land to prevent the seasonal laborers he brought from other villages from farming it, and some of them damaged the crops. After Abd al-Ghafur died, the peasants of Karnak seized back their lands from his plantation and even refused to sign a lease and pay rent or enter into a sharecropping agreement. Moreover, they refused to pay the remaining taxes. The manager of the plantation had to ask for the help of the chief of the district of Qus to deal with this situation.64 In another case, peasants let their cattle and sheep graze on Bishara ‘Ubayd’s land in order to ruin his harvest. He lost the produce of eight acres this way in the village of Faw.65

  The coal and sulfur mines produced severe discontent among Qina’s families. Many workers did not come back from the mines, and their families never heard from them again. They either died of fatigue in the mines or got lost in the desert while attempting to run away. One way these families reacted was by filing lawsuits against the guild or village shaykhs who had recruited the workers. The brother of Ahmad Isma‘il, from the village of Kalahin, disappeared after he was drafted to work in the sulfur mine. Ahmad heard rumors about the death of his missing brother, so he sued his village shaykh in the Supreme Court in Cairo. The shaykh argued that this worker in fact had run away only two days after his arrival at the mine, and an intensive search for him had not yielded results.66

  The four state-owned gunpowder factories in the towns of Qina Province did not escape the wave of revenge, not only for their connection with the sulfur mine but also for oppressing workers. To make things worse, the gunpowder factory of Karnak was close to the plantation of Abd al-Ghafur Effendi. The angry landless peasants surrounded the factory, and some of them were made wage laborers at the factory. The workers frequently ran away, but the government always brought them back if they had not gone far and forced them to continue working. The government’s promises to pay their belated wages or even actually make payments did not always succeed in encouraging the workers to stay: many found a way to run off again despite all the efforts of the factory manager to monitor them
. The factory was also the target of other forms of villagers’ revenge. The cousin and land partner of the factory’s chief donkey driver—who ran a group of five other drivers—embezzled thousands of piasters, among other things. The donkey driver was arrested and jailed until his cousin returned what he had taken.67

  On the eve of the revolt in 1864, the village of Salimiyya was simmering with political unrest. The village was already one of the growing centers of the falatiyya gangs that attacked the watchmen of the village.68 The peasants of Salimiyya, who were losing hundreds of acres to high-bidding bureaucrats in frequent auctions, tried legal channels to redeem their properties without success. Murad ‘Abd al-Rahim owned only one acre of sugarcane, which apparently was not enough to sustain his family. He had to find a job as a construction worker on the irrigation steam engines of a state-owned plantation. One day, after he was late to work because he was finishing harvesting and pressing his sugarcane, the Turkish manager of the plantation, ‘Abd Allah Agha, ruthlessly beat him. On his way back, Murad ran into two other farmers from his village who were drafting a complaint against the same Turkish manager, protesting his numerous crimes. When the state held a public auction to rent out some of the plantation’s land, this manager collaborated with other partners to seize a medium-size piece of land in the village, winning it through fraud. The manager also supported many other village shaykhs in their efforts to seize lands and harvests from peasants. In addition, he beat some peasants, stopped their waterwheels to damage their crops, and put them in jail. Although Murad himself had nothing to do with any of these cases, he decided to put his signet on the complaint to take his own revenge.69