Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali

312 Pages·1984·17.87 MB·English

by  Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot

Cambridge Middle East Library
Egypt in the reign of Muhammad Ali
Cambridge Middle East Library
Editorial Board
ROGER OWEN, EDMUND BURKE, SERIF MARDIN, WALID KAZZIHA, AVI SHLAIM,
BASIM MUSALLAM
Also in this series
Medicine and power in Tunisia 1780-1900
NANCY ELIZABETH GALLAGHER
Urban notables and Arab nationalism: the politics of Damascus, 1860-1920
PHILIP S. KHOURY
The Palestinian Liberation Organization: people, power and politics
HELENA COBBAN
Egypt in the reign of Muhammed Ali
AFAF LUTFI AL-SAYYID MARSOT
Women in nineteenth-century Egypt
JUDITH E. TUCKER
Egyptian politics under Sadat
RAYMOND A. HINNEBUSCH
Nomads and settlers in Syria and Jordan, 1800-1980
NORMAN N. LEWIS
Islam and resistance in Afghanistan
OLIVIER ROY
The Imamate tradition of Oman
JOHN C. WILKINSON
King Abdullah, Britain and the making of Jordan
MARY C. WILSON
The Ottoman Empire and European capitalism, 1820-1913
$EVKET PAMUK
The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949
BENNY MORRIS
Jordan in the 1967 war
SAMIR A. MUTAWI
War's other voices: women writers in the Lebanese civil war
MIRIAM COOKE
Colonising Egypt
TIMOTHY MITCHELL
Womanpower: the Arab debate on women at work
NADIA HIJAB
Egypt in the reign of
Muhammad AH
AFAF LUTFI AL-SAYYID MARSOT
PROFESSOR IN NEAR AND MIDDLE EAST HISTORY,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES
m CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
cambridge university press
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,
São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521289689
© Cambridge University Press 1984
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1984
Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1994
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data: 83-5241

isbn 978-0-521-24795-5 Hardback
isbn 978-0-521-28968-9 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or
accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel
timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at
the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee
the accuracy of such information thereafter.
Contents
Preface vii
Note on transliteration x
Note on money, weights and measures x
r Egypt under the mamluks
2 Muhammad Ali the man 24
3 A country without a master 36
4 Master in his own house 60
5 Family, friends and relations 75
6 Internal policies 100
7 Agricultural changes 137
8 Industry and commerce 162
9 Expansion to what end? 196
10 The undoing: Muhammad AH and Palmerston 232
11 The aftermath 249
12 Conclusion 258
Notes 265
Glossary of Arabic and Turkish terms 285
Select bibliography 291
Index 296
To AGM with love
Preface
This work is an attempt to write the history of Egypt from 1805 to 1848,
when the country was ruled by Muhammad Ali. There have been
countless works written throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries on that period, but no major work has appeared since 1961. In the
light of recent developments in scholarship in the last ten years, I have
undertaken this work as a means of opening research once again into
that period of history, for, while many books deal with the period, few of
them deal with it properly or even adequately. Many of them were
written either by supporters of the Egyptian royal family (indeed many
were commissioned by Egyptian rulers) or by detractors, so that we do
not possess an unbiassed record of the age; neither is there much on the
economic and social aspects of that period of Egyptian history. That is
why I call my work 'an attempt', for we need a generation or more of
researchers producing various monographs on different aspects before
we can claim to know the period. If one may level a major point of
criticism against most of the works of the past on the Muhammad Ali
period, it is that they were written without consulting the Egyptian
archives, except for the pioneering work of a handful of scholars, among
whom are M. Sabry, M. Fahmi, A. A. al-Giritly and A. Rustum. I have
tried to remedy that defect in a minor fashion, for the Egyptian archives
are an untapped gold-mine of information. There are 36,000 dossiers
dealing with the period, only one of which has been catalogued, and
there are several more sijillat dealing with land tenure and finances,
whose accounts and figures have not been deciphered or, when they
were deciphered, their conclusions were rejected in favour of material
deriving from some foreign source that was judged more reliable, when
in fact it was not. Even more, we need to learn about eighteenth-century
Egypt before we can come to valid conclusions about the situation in
early nineteenth-century Egypt. Andre Raymond has shown the way
with his magnificent two-volume study of Cairo, but we need more such
research before we can handle the mamluk period adequately.
When all the background work is done perhaps some of my claims
vii
Preface
will be contradicted, and perhaps they will be further substantiated, for
we each owe a debt to the work of our predecessors, even when we
criticize them. We all stand on each other's shoulders, an uncomfortable
position at best.
I have not touched on the administration of the country in great
detail, as this has been mentioned in a number of works, notable among
which is Deny's monumental work; neither have I gone into any detail
on the educational system and the foreign missions sent abroad, for
which information the reader can go to Heyworth-Dunne and Ahmad
Izzat Abd al-Karim; nor with the system of land tenure, save in so far as
it concerns major political trends, for that has been admirably covered
by al-Hitta and Barakat. What I have done is to analyse the history of
Egypt during the Muhammad Ali period, to account for the cause and
effect of events and trace them back to an earlier period and to an
economic and financial base in order to understand why certain steps
were taken.
The research for this work was carried out in the archives of Egypt,
England and France. In Egypt my work took me to Dar al-Wathaiq al-
Misriyya. I consulted a few of the sijillat but barely scratched the
surface, for it would need several generations of researchers to go
through the material in an exhaustive fashion. The rest of my material
came from a variety of boxes containing loose sheets, letters, orders and
communications of various kinds, translations of parts of sijillat which
had been used by previous researchers and left together as one lot. For
instance, the material used by Professor Asad Rustum for his corpus of
materials dealing with the Syrian campaign are kept in their entirety as
one unit, as is much of the material dealing with the campaigns in the
Sudan, the Hijaz and the Morea. Some of the boxes contain letters from
Muhammad Ali to various members of his family and from them to him.
Delving into these boxes and sijillat is both a delight and a source of
frustration: a delight because so much new material comes to light, and a
frustration because too much material needs to be catalogued and
indexed before it can be used. Some of the material is in Turkish,
although all Turkish items were translated into Arabic and recorded
before they were despatched. The dossiers bear different headings
depending on the administration they derived from, thus Bahr Barra
dealt with foreign affairs, Maiyya Turki and Maiyya Arabi dealt with
the pasha's entourage and acted as the executive branch of the bureau-
cracy, Fabrikat dealt with the industries, and so on. While the dossiers
are written in various legible scripts, those dealing with land tenure are
written in qirma, which is more troublesome to read. I have not
personally consulted the land records, but have relied on the works of
viii