Imagined Empires (15 page)

Interestingly, fleeing sometimes turned into a method of negotiating with the government to improve one's conditions. During the first few days of the holy month of Ramadan in 1844, several workers ran away from the state's textile factory in Isna and from other government jobs. The factory workers fled unjust treatment—they were paid small daily wages and state taxes were directly subtracted from these wages. Most puzzling to the workers, these taxes often exceeded their wages. Thus, a few days after the workers fled, and probably also inspired by the generous spiritual atmosphere of Ramadan, the governor of Isna decided to raise the daily wages of workers, “for their comfort,” and to end the
problem of flight. Furthermore, the governor decided to reform the entire system of payment regulations, obliging only workers who served for twelve months and ten days to pay taxes and levying a tax equal to the wage of only one month. The governor had to make such a decision when the factories needed to recruit more workers from villages.
⁸⁴
This was not the first or last incident of workers running away in which the officials responded by raising their wages; the Nagada runaway laborers were granted the same benefits when the district chief decided to modify their taxes in accordance with their wages.
⁸⁵

Finally, the
falatiyya
(bandits) emerged in Qina Province during this period, carrying out the most radical and audacious form of resistance. They formed small lawless groups in almost every village and town in the province to attack government bureaucrats, disturb the province's security, and prevent the colonial ruling elite from enjoying their wealth. One of the most prominent topographical characteristics of Qina is that mountains border its villages and towns along the eastern and the western coasts of the Nile. Where the village ends, mountains begin, and it was in these mountains that the bandits found refuge and planned their operations. Bandit communities were fed by the fugitive peasants and factory workers who had escaped to hide in the mountains, where no village shaykh could capture them and return them by force to do the work they had run away from.

One night in 1846, a gang of bandits attacked the house of a tax collector and his brothers and stole government treasury money along with the property of the attacked family. The house was in the center of Samhud East, a big town located close to the western mountains with a large elite community and a weekly market. The gang killed one person, and some villagers were injured by accident in the process.
⁸⁶
Meanwhile, the
falatiyya
of Karnak made the state-owned plantation managed by Salih Bey their constant target. They took advantage of the Luxor area's geography, which included Pharaonic temples and people's dwellings located in the heart of the mountains. This made it easier for people to vanish through the labyrinthian alleys of ancient ruins and houses and to disappear in the mountains after their attacks on the plantation. For public safety reasons, the plantation's watchmen were ordered to shoot at the gang only after sunset in the caves where they hid.
⁸⁷
Some bandits from Qina even joined forces with fellows from other Upper Egyptian provinces and co-plotted operations against bureaucrats outside their own localities. This was the case when the state-owned plantation managed by Hasan Bey and the house of the tax collector in Asyut were attacked by a gang from Qina and elsewhere in the southern provinces.
⁸⁸

Because bandits were a high-profile security matter of utmost urgency, in 1846 the regime had all the governors, department heads, district chiefs, shaykhs, and other bureaucrats of Qina Province sign a pledge in shari‘a court. It legally bound them to shoot the
falatiyya
and arrest them wherever they were found, dead or alive. The pledge exempted the signatories from the blood money, owed according to shari‘a law, to the murdered bandits' families. If caught alive, the bandit was to be crucified or sent for hard labor to Alexandria, and those villagers who granted them refuge were to receive the exact same punishment.
⁸⁹

For many dark years, Haridi al-Rujayl, or Haridi the Petite Man, posed the most disturbing threat to the province's officials with his armed group of dozens of bandits, who largely targeted the properties of Turkish bureaucrats. Haridi gathered his group of rebels and felons in an audacious fashion: whenever he passed by corvée laborers doing public work, he would call out and take a few of them before the very eyes of the village shaykhs. In this way, he added about thirty-five men from different villages to his group, largely from the village of al-Samata, and equipped them with guns. He was often seen with his armed fellows, and he stole cows and donkeys from villages and sold them in the north to purchase the guns. Village shaykhs feared his name and did not dare to approach his men to capture them; they could only inform the Turkish governor of the province that his power was increasing. Wherever he went, Haridi was followed by orders from the vice general inspector of Upper Egypt for his arrest. Haridi once claimed that he met with Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha himself during his visit to Isna and that the pasha pardoned all his old crimes, exempted him from any obligations toward the government, and gave Haridi continued permission to do whatever he wished in the province. This was a fabricated story that the vice general inspector furiously rejected, still insisting on his capture.
⁹⁰
In 1846, Haridi and his gang mounted a big operation against Muhammad Agha, a bureaucrat working for the state plantation in the village of al-Samata, home of many of Haridi's men. At night, they attacked the bureaucrat's house, stole furniture, weapons, money, and more. Upon reporting the incident, the government summoned Haridi, his younger brother, and five of their fellow bandits for interrogation.

Haridi defended himself. He started by thanking and praising God and Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha. Then, he asserted that, first of all, his brother was too young to be involved in such a crime. He again repeated the fabricated story of meeting with Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, who pardoned his old crimes, and confessed that this was one of these old crimes that he had already repented
of and the pasha had already forgiven. He admitted that he did go to the village of al-Samata with the five bandits to steal things from houses, but they did not target the bureaucrat's house on purpose and did not realize that it was among the raided places. He added that they had already sold everything they stole and nothing remained to return. He concluded his confession by thanking God again for redeeming him from old sins and Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha for forgiving him. Only one month after the interrogation, Haridi and fifty to sixty armed men from Qina, Isna, and Asyut attacked the local market of Dishna, which was a large urban center where many state enterprises existed, and extorted tributes. The district chief had to go himself to the market to restore security. In a troubled colony, Haridi the Petite Man's name continued to show up in government papers in disturbing ways, where he remained the ultimate undefeatable threat to the province's settler and local elite and the government of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha.
⁹¹

For Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, Upper Egypt was no more than a perfectly exploited, yet well peripheralized, colony. It was indeed a part of a centralized government, but it was never a component of a homogenous state—a fact to which its massive rebellions and daily actions of subaltern resistance testify. After the pasha died, his successors kept the south in the same marginalized position. In the following decades, as hegemonic Europeans arrived in the scene, Qina Province's discontent expanded.

FOUR

A “Communist” Revolution

1848–1882

In 1864, a massive Egyptian revolt once again erupted from Qina Province. Ahmad al-Tayyib did what his father had done forty years earlier during Muhammad ‘Ali's reign: he led tens of thousands of peasants in an attempt to overthrow the government. The rebels attacked the steamboats of European merchants, Turkish plantation owners, and rich Copts and, more important, called for the redistribution of wealth. Originally from the village of Salimiyya, al-Tayyib, like his father, was a Sufi mystic and self-proclaimed messiah. He used religious rhetoric to mobilize the rural masses who were discontented, this time, over foreign commercial activities, massive land losses, and forced labor. An English traveler, Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon, was staying in the province to recover from an illness at the moment the revolt broke out and recorded the event:

[A] Prussian boat had been attacked, all on board murdered, and the boat burnt; then . . . ten villages were in open revolt. . . . A crazy darweesh has made a disturbance. . . . He did as his father likewise did . . . by repeating one of the appellations of God, such as “ya Lateef,” three thousand times every night for three years, which rendered him invulnerable. He then made friends with a Jinn, who taught him many other tricks. . . . He then deluded the people of the Desert [the mountain
falatiyya
bandits], giving himself out as “El-Mahdee” [messiah] . . . and proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Three villages below Kiné [Qina] . . . took part in the disturbance.
¹

The Englishwoman described al-Tayyib as “a communist.” Military steamships soon arrived from Cairo to terminate the rebels, chopping their bodies with the very axes that the rebel leaders had used as weapons.
²

Many world historians describe the mid-nineteenth century as a period of “informal” imperialism. Without military colonization, Great Britain
imposed its hegemony over vast territories of the world in the name of modernity, a main component of which was the market economy. The informal empire embarked on a mission to replace traditional economies with modern ones. It introduced free trade, private property, and foreign experts to lands that were eager to taste the trappings of civilization. Despite their fundamental disagreement on matters of global imperialism, liberal and Marxist theories agree on one presumption: the empire's market was a success. It altered peoples' lives, for better or worse, in the dominated regions long before the advent of armed occupation.
³
This chapter argues that empire's modernity did affect people's lives in Upper Egypt, but only because it failed. For the subalterns of the south, the success of the market during this period is a mere myth. Trade liberalization, reformed landownership codes, and foreign investments proved incompetent at achieving their professed goals in the south of Egypt. Moreover, they generated sweeping subaltern rebellion against any symbols of market modernity.

Liberal historians of British imperialism endorse the concept of informal empire and largely use it to praise the efficiency of English domination over the world economy. Niall Ferguson differentiates between “direct” and “indirect” rule of an imperial polity over other territories and asserts that Britain imposed successful indirect control in many parts of the world in the mid-nineteenth century and, thus, grew into an informal empire.
⁴
British liberalism assumed supremacy primarily through market means, in particular through free-trade agreements that it signed with subordinate polities.
⁵
Marxist theorists endorse the concept of informal empire, but for an entirely different reason: the critique of European capitalism. Marxist historians of the twentieth century adopted the notion of imperialism of free trade, ever since Ronald Robinson published his 1953 article that carried that title. Giovanni Arrighi—a Marxist and world-system theorist—asserts that in the mid-nineteenth century Britain was the sole world “hegemon,” and its most successful imperialist strategy was trade liberalization.
⁶
Dependency theory also has long asserted that free-trade treaties were the essence of European capitalist domination. Unequal exchange took place between Western industrial cores and peripheral suppliers of raw material, resulting in the economic dependency and underdevelopment of the latter.
⁷

Historiography of the mid-nineteenth-century Egypt asserts that the country fell under the hegemony of an informal British Empire, in a clear case of unequal exchange between an industrial core and an agricultural periphery. British textile industrialists sought raw cotton from Egypt and
demanded that the regime in Cairo allow laissez-faire trade in order to open the Egyptian market to their manufactured commodities. To meet these demands, Cairo promulgated new laws and regulations to promote commercial agriculture and facilitate movement of European merchants in the north and south. It also invited foreign experts to manage or invest in modern ventures, including the Suez Canal and some coal-mining projects. This situation of dependency started when Britain subjugated Muhammad ‘Ali to the Anglo-Turkish free-trade agreement of 1838. The succeeding regimes of Muhammad ‘Ali's dynasty—the governments of Khedives ‘Abbas (r. 1848–54), Sa‘id (r. 1854–63), and Isma‘il (r. 1863–79)—applied policies of economic liberalization under similar imperial pressure.
⁸

Whereas these important arguments are true for Cairo and the Delta, Upper Egypt has a different story to tell in this context. An informal empire never achieved full domination in the south, and its failure brought about a great revolution. This chapter tells six stories about a dysfunctional market and resented imperial modernity in Qina Province. These stories revolve around steamers, plantations, and coal mines and how these major players in market change devastated the lives of the province's subalterns. The protagonists of these stories are the peasants, laborers, and women of Qina Province. The village of Salimiyya—where the 1864 revolt broke out—is the stage where they mostly take place.

STEAMSHIPS ON THE NILE

The first aspect of market modernity that Qina Province encountered was free trade. From his first month in office, Sa‘id Pasha—son of Muhammad ‘Ali—showed a faithful commitment to opening Egyptian markets to European merchants. Sa‘id generally embraced liberal economic policies and applied them extensively in all aspects, but he started with commerce.
⁹
He urged his government officials across Egypt to strictly apply existing free-trade treaties and facilitate the activities of foreign businesses. In July 1854, immediately after assuming power, the pasha issued the following decree to his bureaucrats: “Despite the obligation of free trade as stipulated by the treaties, . . . problems arose in transactions in some districts that violated freedom and principles. From now on, it is [your] duty to ease transactions and [to prevent] dishonesty and difficulties between the buyer and the seller.”
¹⁰

Carried on their modern, fast steamships, European merchants quickly found their way to Qina Province in the age of open global markets. While passenger steamers carried tourists and mail past Qina every fortnight, commercial steamers uploaded and offloaded cargos all week long.
¹¹
European merchants turned the province into a big vendor of one main cash crop: grain. They also traded in the commodities of the Sudanese caravans that arrived in the province. British, French, Austrian, and American consuls and consular agents spread out through Qina's towns and villages to carry out their commerce, and they usually hired elite Copts to assist them. A community of Europeans soon settled in the towns of Luxor and Qus, where they bought large houses and employed cheap local laborers.
¹²
Greek merchants were the largest foreign community in the province, to the degree that they received special attention from the state; Cairo sent endless decrees to the governor of Qina to ensure their security and safety.
¹³

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