Arabs (20 page)

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed massive state investment in building projects and public works throughout the Ottoman Empire. Two Ottoman vassal states—Egypt and Tunisia—enjoyed sufficient autonomy to pursue their own development programs. Having adopted Enlightenment ideas, the Ottoman world began to acquire advanced European industrial technology in a wild spending spree. Industrial goods and products reached Arab markets in ever-increasing diversity as the Ottoman world was drawn into the global economy of the late nineteenth century.

E
gypt led the way in modernization initiatives in the nineteenth century. Muhammad’Ali had invested heavily in industry and technology, though his projects were always undertaken with the military in mind. It fell to his successors to invest in Egypt’s
civilian
infrastructure.

Abbas Pasha (r. 1848–1854) made a modest start when he granted a concession to a British firm to build a railroad between Alexandria and Cairo. Concessions were the standard contract by which a government encouraged private companies to undertake
major investments in its domains. The terms of a concession would set out the rights and benefits accruing to both the investors and the government for a fixed period of time. The more generous the terms of a concession, the easier it was to attract entrepreneurs to one’s country. However, governments had to be careful not to concede too much to foreigners if they hoped for the enterprise to generate some profit for their own treasury. With governments in South America, Africa, and Asia vying for new technology, industrialists drove hard bargains. Abbas Pasha was a conservative man who preferred not to make many commitments to foreign investors.

The next ruler of Egypt, Said Pasha (r. 1854–1863), committed the country to far more ambitious plans. He laid a second railway line between Cairo and Alexandria and awarded a concession for a new line from Cairo to Suez, completing the overland link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea route to the Indian Ocean. He fostered Euro-Egyptian partnerships to bring steam shipping to the Nile and the Red Sea. Yet nothing could compare with the 1856 concession Said gave his former French tutor, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to construct a waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: the Suez Canal. It was to prove Egypt’s greatest development project, and the biggest drain on Egypt’s treasury, of the nineteenth century.

The granting of concessions was not in itself an expense to the treasury. If all of the ventures established by Egyptian concession-holders had succeeded, investors and governments alike would have profited. Unfortunately, many of these ventures were very risky and failed. This would have been bad enough for the host government, which had hoped to build stronger domestic economies through investment in European technology. Its losses were compounded by the demands of European consuls for indemnities when their citizens’ investments failed.

As a matter of national pride, each consul took note of the indemnities received by the consuls of other states and sought to outdo them. Thus, when the Nile Navigation Company went bankrupt, the Egyptian treasury had to compensate European shareholders to the sum of £340,000.
¹⁶
The Austrians set a new benchmark for individual claims when their consul managed to squeeze 700,000 francs from the government of Egypt to compensate an Austrian investor on the spurious grounds that twenty-eight cases of silk cocoons had been spoiled by the late departure of the Suez-to-Cairo train. Said was reported to have interrupted a meeting with a European businessman to ask a servant to close the window. “If this gentleman catches cold,” he quipped, “it will cost me £10,000.”
¹⁷

The Suez Canal project generated the greatest indemnity bill of all. The British had objected to French plans to create a canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Given its empire in India, Britain would inevitably be more reliant on the canal than any other maritime power. The idea of placing such a strategic waterway under the control of a
French
company was completely unacceptable to the British.
They had no right to prevent the government of Egypt from offering concessions to its sovereign soil, but they could object to the terms of the concession. Specifically, the British objected to Egypt’s promise to provide free labor to dig the canal as tantamount to slavery, and they demanded that Egypt rescind those articles conferring rights on the Suez Canal Company to develop both banks of the canal in a colonization scheme. The Egyptian government was too reliant on Britain’s goodwill to refuse its objections, and it therefore notified the Suez Canal Company that it wished to renegotiate key terms of the original 1856 concession. The company turned the dispute over to the French government to defend its rights as a concession holder against British pressure.

Said’s successor Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879) inherited the dispute and had to suffer the arbitration of the French emperor Napoleon III—hardly a disinterested party. In his settlement of 1864, Napoleon III demanded that the Egyptian government pay 38 million francs to the Suez Canal Company to compensate it for the loss of free labor, and 30 million francs for the land along the banks of the canal that was to be returned to Egypt. Additionally, he found reason to charge the Egyptian government an additional 16 million francs, making for a total indemnity of some 84 million francs (£3,360,000, about $33.5 million in 1864)—an unprecedented sum.
¹⁸

In spite of its heavy losses to development projects, the government of Egypt remained optimistic about its economic future. Egypt’s most important export crop was long-staple cotton, prized by European weavers. In 1861 the supply of American cotton was cut by the outbreak of the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, cotton prices quadrupled. Egypt’s annual income from cotton rose dramatically from around £1,000,000 in the early 1850s to reach a peak of £11,500,000 by the mid-1860s. With cotton money flowing into Egypt’s coffers, Ismail Pasha believed he could honor his commitments to the Suez Canal Company and still undertake ambitious new projects.

Ismail aspired to turn Egypt into a great power and to gain greater personal recognition as its ruler. In 1867 he sought Ottoman permission to change his gubernatorial title of “pasha” to
khedive
, a more impressive Persian title meaning “viceroy.” As khedive, Ismail sought to remake his capital city—Cairo—and took Paris for his example. With an eye to the ceremonies marking the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Ismail put Cairo on a course of rapid, radical transformation. Modern quarters with European-style buildings lining broad, straight streets were built between Old Cairo and the Nile. A new bridge was built across the Nile, and Ismail built himself a new palace on the main island in the Nile (it would later be converted to a hotel when the Egyptian government went bankrupt). The streets were paved and lit with gas fittings. Landscape architects turned the old Nile flood ponds, such as the
Ezbekiyya pool, into public gardens with cafés and promenades. A national theater and an opera house were built.
¹⁹
The Italian composer Verdi was commissioned to write an opera with an Egyptian theme to inaugurate the opera house, but he took a bit too long to complete
Aida
, and the hall was opened to the strains of
Rigoletto
instead. The flurry of construction climaxed with the visit of the French empress Eugènie to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869.

The outrageous spending was part of Ismail’s bid to secure Egypt’s place among the civilized states of the world. Though the ceremonies were by all accounts most impressive, the new Cairo was a vanity project built on borrowed funds that left Ismail’s government living on borrowed time. The irony of the situation was that Egypt had embarked on its development schemes to secure independence from Ottoman and European domination. Yet with each new concession, the government of Egypt made itself more vulnerable to European encroachment. Egypt was not alone. Another state in North Africa was also increasing its dependence on Europe through ambitious reforms and development projects.

Tunisia, like Egypt, enjoyed sufficient autonomy from the Ottoman Empire to pursue its own development projects in the nineteenth century. Its government, known as the Regency, had been headed by the Husaynid Dynasty since the early eighteenth century. Gone were the days of Barbary Coast piracy. Since 1830 the Regency had banned all piracy and sought to develop the economy of the country through industry and trade.

Between 1837 and 1855, Tunis was ruled by a reformer named Ahmad Bey. Heavily influenced by the example of Muhammad ’Ali in Egypt, Ahmad Bey created a Nizami army in Tunisia, along with a military academy and support industries to produce the weapons and uniforms needed to provision the new army. Among the military men trained for the new army was a young Mamluk named Khayr al-Din, who would prove one of the great reformers of the nineteenth century, eventually rising to be prime minister both in Tunis and in the Ottoman Empire itself.

As a Mamluk, Khayr al-Din was the last of his kind, a man who rose from slavery to the pinnacle of political power. In his autobiography, addressed to his own children, Khayr al-Din gave a rare insight into how it felt to be a Mamluk: “Though I know with certainty that I am a Circassian, I have no precise memory of my country or of my parents. I must have been separated from my family after some war or emigration, and lost trace of them forever.” Despite repeated attempts, Khayr al-Din never succeeded in his quest to find his biological family. “My earliest memories of childhood,” he wrote, “were in Istanbul, whence I passed into the service of the Bey of Tunis in 1839.”
²⁰

After learning Arabic and receiving an Islamic education, Khayr al-Din was enrolled in the military and trained by French officers. A brilliant young officer, he rose
to the top of the officer corps and reached the rank of general before entering into political life—all within fourteen years of arriving in Tunisia. Fluent in French, Arabic, and Turkish, Khayr al-Din traveled widely through Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the course of his career. His firsthand experience of European progress made him an ardent supporter of the Tanzimat reforms and of the need to draw on European experience and technology to enable Muslim states to realize their full potential. He set out his views in an influential political tract published in Arabic in 1867, and in an authorized French translation two years later.

Khayr al-Din addressed his reform agenda to both a European audience skeptical of the Muslim world’s ability to adapt to the modern age and to a Muslim audience that rejected foreign innovations as somehow contrary to the religion and values of Islam. Here Khayr al-Din was building on an argument first pronounced by the Egyptian advocate of reform, al-Tahtawi (Khayr al-Din had read and admired his book on France), to which later Muslim reformers would return increasingly across the nineteenth century: that Muslim borrowings from modern European sciences were but the return they were due from Europe’s debt to medieval Islamic sciences.
²¹

Although Khayr al-Din was an outspoken advocate for political and economic reform, he was a fiscal conservative. He wanted to see Tunisia develop its economic base to be able to support the expense of modern technology. He believed the government should invest in factories to process its own cash crops into goods for the domestic market. He regretted how Tunisian laborers sold their raw cotton, silk, and wool “to the European for a cheap price, and then in a short time buy it back, after it has been processed [into manufactured cloth], at a price several times higher.”
²²
Far better, he argued, for Tunisian factories to spin and weave Tunisian fibers to produce fabrics for domestic consumption. In this way, the prosperity of the country would expand, allowing the government to invest in more infrastructural projects. Such financial sound management required intelligent government. Khayr al-Din watched with growing dismay as he saw the rulers of Tunisia take their country down the road to insolvency through vanity projects and bad investments.

Tunisia is a relatively small country, and its expenditures on reforms were modest when compared to the projects undertaken in Egypt. The greatest expenditures undertaken during the reign of Ahmad Bey were related to the Nizami army. Because Ahmad Bey aspired to maintain an infantry of 26,000 men, he imported from France all of the necessary technology and work force to create support industries—arsenals, foundries, textile factories for uniforms, tanneries for saddles and boots, and so on. However, like Ismail Pasha in Egypt, Ahmad Bey also had his vanity projects. His most wasteful extravagance was a palace complex in Muhammadia, 10 miles south-west of the capital city Tunis, which he described as Tunisia’s Versailles. As expenditures increasingly outstripped resources, Ahmad Bey was forced to cut back on his ambitions. He ultimately abandoned many of the new factories at a total loss.
Ahmad Bey’s successors continued the reform process, combining high expenditures on public projects with dwindling resources. A telegraph line was laid in 1859 to improve communications, and an aqueduct was built to provide fresh water to Tunis. A concession was given to a British firm to build a 22-mile railway linking Tunis with the port of La Goulette and the seaside town of al-Marsa. Gas lighting was introduced to Tunis, and the city streets were paved.
²³
Like Ismail Pasha in Egypt, the rulers of Tunisia wanted to endow their capital city with all the trappings of European modernity.