For Ferdinand de Lesseps, the events in France led to a posting as minister plenipotentiary in Madrid. As ambassador with extensive powers, Lesseps was supposed to help keep the peace in Madrid and prevent, if he could, similar revolutions from overthrowing the Spanish royal family. There was, in fact, a revolt in Madrid, but it fizzled before it could seriously threaten the monarchy, and Lesseps was able to call his mission a success. During these months, he also developed a warm relationship with his young cousin Eugénie de Montijo.
But the situation was rapidly shifting in Paris, and the rising fortunes of Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Louis-Napoleon led to Lesseps’s recall. Louis-Napoleon had run for the new office of president at the end of 1848, and had, much to everyone’s surprise but his own, won by an overwhelming margin. Doling out rewards to his supporters, he made his brother the new ambassador in Madrid, and that meant that another position had to be found for Lesseps. He was on his way to take up a post in Berne when he was suddenly redirected to Rome. Berne would have been dull but safe. Rome was to be his downfall.
CHAPTER FIVE
EGYPT AND ROME
AT THE SAME time that Lesseps was heading into a trap, the pasha of Egypt was descending into senility. Nearly eighty years old, Muhammad Ali clung to power until he no longer realized that he possessed it. By the middle of the 1840s, his son and the general of his army, Ibrahim, had assumed day-to-day responsibilities of governing the country. By 1848, Muhammad Ali could barely carry on a coherent conversation, and though Ibrahim died in the spring of 1849, the pasha registered no awareness of the fact. He lasted several more months and then quietly passed away.
He left a vastly different Egypt from the one he had first glimpsed in 1801, and his role in determining the shape of modern Egyptian history is impossible to overstate. Egypt may have been at a strategic crossroads for the Europeans, and it almost certainly would have come under pressure from France, Britain, and other powers, later if not sooner. But Muhammad Ali set a particular course, one that simultaneously embraced European culture and rejected the idea of European superiority. Early on in his career, he realized that the French and the British had better armies, better organization, and better education than could be found anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. And early on, he decided that the only way to keep the French and the British from overwhelming the Ottoman Empire was to adopt their methods.
Easy enough in theory, this proved a challenge in practice. Muhammad Ali was hardly the only non-European to come to this conclusion in the nineteenth century, but he was one of the first to see which way the winds of history were blowing. Instead of blindly resisting the changes heralded by the rise of European power, he elected to bend and to borrow. That he didn’t succeed in remaking Egypt quickly enough to prevent the European incursion is not surprising. That he came so close is extraordinary.
His military campaigns, which so alarmed the English in the 1830s, were only possible because of the reforms he had instituted in the decades before. It was not just a matter of reorganizing the government in order to generate more revenues, though that was vital. With one foot in the old world and one in the new, Muhammad Ali tried to transform Egypt into a country capable of competing with the more technologically advanced Europeans, without unleashing the forces of revolution. He admired the French military and their bureaucracy, but not their ideology. He built an Egyptian army of tough, disciplined soldiers who learned the latest stratagems but were not encouraged to think for themselves. As Enfantin had discovered, Muhammad Ali was an absolute monarch. If the pasha did not wish something to be done, it would not be done. He allowed no one to challenge his will, and he used the time-honored methods of kings and tyrants to suppress dissent: violence and the threat of it.
What made him different was an unusual degree of intellectual curiosity and a willingness to experiment with new ideas. Much like the first Hanover king, George I, who spoke only German yet ruled an English nation, Muhammad Ali spoke Turkish and Albanian but no Arabic in a country that consisted mainly of Arabs. Though he never mastered Arabic, he did learn to read and to write, and he commissioned translations of the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Machiavelli. He also studied the careers of Alexander the Great, Julius Caeser, and Napoleon, looking for clues to successful empire-building.
Recognizing that Europe possessed knowledge that Egypt could use, he sent hundreds of young Egyptians abroad in the 1820s and 1830s to study in France, England, and Italy, with the largest contingent in Paris. They were selected for their intelligence and curiosity, but Muhammad Ali made it clear that he did not want them to become too fond of Europe. Though they were to learn new languages and digest innovative ideas, they were not to apply them to life in Egypt. Only those ideas that enhanced his power and did not threaten his autocracy were acceptable. As he instructed one student who returned from Paris offering his services to reorganize the administration in some provinces, “It is I who govern. Go to Cairo and translate military works.”1
And it was he who governed. After he appropriated the lands of the Mamelukes that he had slaughtered in 1811, he doled out parcels to his retainers and family members. But it remained his land, and he could revoke those grants whenever he wished. Though the years before Napoleon’s invasion had been a period of decline, for most of its history Egypt was a centralized state. Muhammad Ali took that centralization one step further. Traditionally, Egyptian rulers collected revenue from the farmers along the Nile and from the merchants in the cities and then left daily life alone. Muhammad Ali changed that, and took an aggressive role in determining what crops were grown, by whom, and where. He also dictated to merchants what they should sell and what they should buy. It would have been less complicated if he simply left the system that had prevailed for millennia intact. But he could not, for one simple reason: he needed more income.
In Egypt as it was before Muhammad Ali, there had been a strict limit to how much revenue any ruler could extract. The economy of Egypt in the early nineteenth century remained much as it had been for thousands of years. The country was mostly barren, and less than 5 percent of the land supported the population of three or four million people. The other 95 percent of the country was desert, ranging from the dunes of the Sahara in the south and west to the high desert of Suez and Sinai in the east. Christian hermits and camel-trading Bedouins made these deserts home, but they were few and far between.
In the villages scattered along the banks of the Nile, from the cataracts of Aswan in the Nubian south to the alluvial delta where the Nile opened to the Mediterranean in the north, there had been few changes over the centuries. Egypt had been invaded many times, but rarely had armies penetrated beyond Cairo or Alexandria. Village life revolved around a local headman, or shaikh, and religious life around the Sufi lodges that dotted the countryside. The tombs of holy men became shrines, places where locals gathered to pray for fertility, both for their crops and for their daughters. Religion was not a dogmatic force, though it wasn’t progressive either. The mosque was a place of worship, but it was no more important in people’s existence than the local church was in eighteenth-century France. In fact, the only appreciable difference between the daily life of Europe and Egypt until the nineteenth century was the temperature, the food, and the clothing. In every other respect, most parts of the world consisted of landed peasants growing crops, getting married, cleaving to parochial superstitions, having children, and growing old.
True, the color of Egypt was different from that of Europe. People wore long robes, rode camels, smoked water pipes in Cairene coffee shops, chanted the Koran in Arabic, and prayed to the same God of Jesus and Moses in a different way. Snake charmers charmed snakes, merchants of the bazaar grew rich from the trade of silks and spices from the East, and crowded alleys in city streets wrapped around each other in impenetrable mazes. Slaves were sold in open-air markets, and weddings paraded through the streets accompanied by a cacophony of reed pipes and drums. Palm trees swayed along the banks of the Nil
e, and small boats plied its currents. And here and there, an ancient mound of sand and stone in pyramid shape reminded the inhabitants that people had lived in the Nile Valley far longer than anyone could remember.
These picturesque qualities of Egypt were all that most Europeans noticed. They saw differences and overlooked similarities. Centuries earlier, when travelers such as Marco Polo reported back, Europeans had admired what they saw in the cultures of the East, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the attitude was often one of disdain. When Napoleon invaded, the French believed that Egyptian society was backward and in need of improvement. But Egyptian elites such as Jabarti regarded the French as rude and uncivilized, and they sometimes saw the French more clearly than the French saw themselves. When Europeans examined the cultures of the world in the nineteenth century, they avoided looking themselves in the mirror. When they encountered the streets of Cairo or Calcutta, they somehow forgot about the chaos of Paris and London. When they saw petty brutalities carried out by local potentates, they condemned the backwardness while conveniently eliding their own legacy of violence and autocracy. When they saw religious dogmatism, when they noted widespread illiteracy, they depicted these as symbols of Eastern regression, even as multitudes of their own countrymen suffered from the same problems.
Over the next century, European attitudes toward Egypt, toward the Ottomans, toward India, China, and the rest of the non-Western world became more complicated, and different prejudices developed for different regions. But most Europeans never strayed from the essential belief in the inferiority of the East. Elites of the East, on the other hand, despaired as their attempts to resist Western encroachments failed. Soon, just as the West dominated the East militarily and economically, it dominated culturally as well. Eastern societies, said the Europeans, were weak because they rewarded obedience instead of initiative, tradition instead of progress, and religion instead of science. To the victor, the spoils; and one of the spoils is the power to interpret events. This Western perspective of Eastern weakness and decadence has been both defended and excoriated over the years. It has been derided as “orientalism,” as a Western inability to grasp the sophistication of Eastern cultures.2 But at the time, the states of the West were expanding unchecked throughout the globe. They had no need to grapple with the cultural complexities of their adversaries. The same was not true on the other side.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Egyptians and Ottomans still had hopes of resisting the West and even challenging the Western powers. They could only do that, however, by learning from them. The trick was to borrow enough but not too much. Muhammad Ali respected Europe because it was strong, but he also saw himself as part of a world with its own traditions, mores, and culture. He was a member of the Ottoman mercenary class, which had a proud history. He was now part of the Egyptian ruling class, and as such, he had inherited a legacy that predated the upstarts of Europe. He believed that it was possible to redress the imbalance between East and West without sacrificing the essence of his own culture. To hold his own against Europe, he was willing to put his country through a difficult period of reform. There was only one thing he lacked: money.
To rectify that, he ordered the peasants, the fellahin, to grow specific crops. Rather than just growing the grains and fruits that had sustained the country and provided some food for export, he committed vast acreage to tobacco and a new strain of cotton. The cotton was a long-fiber variation called Jumel, after the Frenchman who invented the strain. By the late 1820s, Jumel amounted to as much as a quarter of the state revenues. In order to increase his income, Muhammad Ali had to tame nature. The Nile floods guaranteed regular inundation of the fields, but they were unpredictable and frequently destructive. It also took countless hours to construct the small canals and ditches that could transport the water to fields not directly on the riverbanks. Without some way to regulate the floods, Muhammad Ali would never be able to predict his revenue year to year, and that would make long-term planning difficult. So he began an aggressive campaign of building canals and barrages, and turned to Europeans, to the Saint-Simonians and to Linant de Bellefonds, to help with the engineering.3
The quest for money animated not just Muhammad Ali but his heirs. That insatiable need led to changes in Egyptian society, and it eventually led his successors to grant a concession for the Suez Canal and then go into debt in order to fund it. Without money, Muhammad Ali and his heirs could not purchase new weapons, build new schools, construct canals and railroads, pay for the bureaucracy. Without money, they could not re-create Egypt, and if they could not re-create Egypt, they knew that, sooner or later, the Europeans would do what great powers have always done: they would invade and conquer.
Though he rejected European political ideas, with each passing year Muhammad Ali became a more avid admirer of European power. That was also true of much of the Egyptian ruling class. The students who were dispatched to Europe wrote of their experiences with a mixture of admiration and revulsion, fascination and disgust. In 1826, a young shaikh named Rifa’ah al-Tahtawi went to Paris at the age of twenty-five. Though Muhammad Ali had issued strict instructions that the students were not to mix too freely in French society, his ability to control their activities was limited, and they inevitably went out and about. Tahtawi learned French, studied Napoleon, read Rousseau, and was a frequent dinner guest at the salons of leading writers and intellectuals such as the orientalist scholar Sylvestre de Sacy For all his immersion in French culture, however, Tahtawi remained skeptical of liberalism and suspicious of democracy. He also found the French a bit strange.
He noticed that in Paris the streets were filled with a wide array of vehicles to carry goods and people. He couldn’t understand the need for such variety, and he was also unimpressed by the cleanliness of French streets. Paris in these years still had open-air graveyards near what is now Les Halles, and disease was common. Tahtawi did admire the French press; newspapers were unknown in Egypt, and the concept of people airing different views about politics he found both startling and exhilarating. And then there was the French postal service, which was so sacrosanct, he observed, that “letters exchanged between friends, colleagues and above all, between lovers abound, since everyone knows that his letter will be opened by no one but the addressee. When a lover declares his love to his beloved, he does so by correspondence. It is also by correspondence that they make their rendez-vous.”4
It was an innocuous observation, but the postal service was more than a convenient way to arrange lovers’ trysts. It was an integral component of Europe’s global expansion. Empires need to communicate with their far-flung outposts, and the modern mail was the way that the French and the British communicated with theirs. European empires of the nineteenth century were commercial behemoths, and merchants in Marseille and Manchester had to be able to contact their agents and counterparts in Alexandria and Bombay. The Mediterranean routes were well established, but it took many months for information and goods to flow between England and India. Even with the first steam-powered ships in the 1820s, it took at least 113 days to travel the six thousand miles from London to Calcutta around the Cape of Good Hope.
The best way to shorten that distance was to take the mail across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, and from there down the Nile to Cairo, then across the desert separating Cairo and the port of Suez, and then from Suez by steamer to India. One enterprising young English naval officer, Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn, knew a good business opportunity when he saw it, and after serving in the Napoleonic Wars and in various positions with the East India Company, he dedicated his life to organizing the Alexandria-to-Suez route. That was not a simple task. The port of Suez, for instance, was deep enough for large ships, but if it was to act as a port for steamers, Waghorn had to haul large quantities of coal there and create storage systems for it. It took years of careful politicking, in both Egypt and England. By the late 1830s, Waghorn’s overland route finally graduated from a dream to a fact, and he becam
e the official agent in charge of transporting mail from Alexandria to the port of Suez.
The Waghorn route, though primarily used by the postal service, also catered to passengers, though not with creature comforts. The journey entailed twenty-four hours of bumpy travel to cross the desert, and it was usually brutally hot. The lack of comforts had less to do with Waghorn than with the excessive cost of transforming the roads into more than outlines, and upgrading the steamers along the Nile. Instead, travelers were treated to a premodern version of planes, trains, and automobiles, complete with ornery camels, donkeys, and only intermittently cooperative Bedouins. In addition, though Muhammad Ali technically approved of the Waghorn system, the Englishman was forced to negotiate with the local Bedouins for safe passage across the desert from Cairo to Suez, and as with all protection rackets, this one needed frequent renegotiation.
Waghorn faced competition in the 1840s from other entrepreneurs, who built hotels in Alexandria and Cairo as well as guesthouses along the eighty-four-mile desert route. These competitors aimed at the passenger traffic, while Waghorn remained in control of the postal routes. He also had a stake in the railroad that was being constructed between Alexandria and Cairo, which would of course help his business and shorten and simplify the route. But by creating a system of regular transportation, Waghorn set a precedent. Lesseps, who was still consul when Waghorn’s route began, claimed in later years that Waghorn had shown the world that a shorter route between Europe and the Orient was both feasible and desirable. In 1870, to honor Waghorn’s memory and to placate English pride, Lesseps commissioned a statue of the Englishman to be placed near the canal. “He opened the route, and we followed him,” Lesseps said at the dedication ceremony. “When English navigators pass by this monument to Waghorn, erected by the French, they will remember the intimate alliance which should always exist between the two nations that have been placed at the head of world civilization, not in order to ravage the world, but in order to enlighten it and bring it peace.”5
Parting the Desert Page 7
