Imagined Empires (19 page)

Copying British inheritance laws, the Sa‘id's 1858 code ruled that the land of a deceased father should be registered only under the name of the eldest male in the family who lived in the household. The law was intended to keep properties under the control of older men and prevent the division of land among heirs. It allowed women to benefit from land inheritance but deprived them of having land registered under their names. The eldest male (
arshad al-‘a'ila
) was responsible for farming the land, sustaining the family, and paying the tax. He was required to keep listings of the assigned land shares of the family members, male and female, and their respective revenues. The code also compelled women who already had agricultural land titles to change the status of their properties in accordance with the new law, even if they had fulfilled their tax obligations.
⁸²

Finally, in 1869, the newly founded Parliament of Isma‘il Pasha issued a law that completely deprived women of inheritance rights to agricultural land. In fact, the modern legislature was little more than an institution created to consolidate the power of plantation-owning families and entrench a paternalist regime. This Parliament was called the Council of Consultation of Representatives (Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab), and its members were high-ranking bureaucrats and village notables, almost all of whom were the males of elite propertied families. Qina Province's members of Parliament, for example, included Shaykh Muhammad Abu Sihli, a large landowner of two thousand acres of sugarcane in Farshut. Abu Sihli also served as the mayor of the villages of Salimiyya and Abu Manna‘ and the president of the provincial council. Another member from Qina, Mahmud ‘Abd Allah, was the mayor
of Dishna and owned sugarcane fields, a sugar mill, and a big palace in his home village. The interests of the male elite influenced the law-making process in this legislature.
⁸³

Some parliament members proposed a law to allow women to inherit only real estate and other properties, rendering the male members of the family the only heirs entitled to inherit agricultural land. The rest of the Parliament did not take long to discuss this law. After brief consideration, all the members who commented on the proposal and voted for the code. The rationale behind it was twofold: agricultural property in a family should be kept intact and women were not capable of farming. The Parliament members argued that this law would enhance the economic and social status of the patriarch of the family and work best for his welfare. An heiress, the eldest female member of the family, was allowed to control the land only if no male heirs were alive, and the law compelled her to appoint a male agent, such as her husband, as the farm manager. The pasha approved the proposal and promulgated this law the same year, in 1869.
⁸⁴

For many years following, the eldest male of the family that lived in the same household (
fi ma‘isha wahida
) took control of land, whether he was a brother, uncle, cousin, nephew, or an in-law. It was a traditional social practice for extended families to live in one household, and the 1869 law further subjugated women in these households to male relatives. Some women in the villages of Qina Province refused to comply, but taking their cases to court only affirmed the authority of the male landholder over them. Women who tried to claim their rights faced violent attacks by their male relatives, who sometimes escalated to shooting at them. While she and her sister were sleeping in their late father's house, for example, the nephews of Sitt al-Ahl bint ‘Awad shot her because she had established control over the inheritance of the family.
⁸⁵

During these dark years, mysterious cases of deaths of female peasants surfaced with unprecedented frequency in the province. Although these cases were recorded in state files as honor killing crimes, their high frequency suggests that other causes were behind them, which probably had to do with disputes over land inheritance. The state usually registered honor killings as accidents of women catching fire or drowning in a local canal, in order to close the case without investigation and leave the killers unpunished, respecting local customs that did not consider these murders crimes. During this period, in recurrent cases, dead bodies of women were found floating in canals or burnt inside their houses, and the family insisted that the deaths
were accidental.
⁸⁶
These women were probably killed by their male relatives in land conflicts, and their families made them appear to the state as honor killings to evade punishment.
⁸⁷

A manifest goal of Western modernity was to rescue native women from patriarchal oppression in their societies, especially if they were Muslims. Obviously, the women of Upper Egypt would argue the opposite. The market did not deliver what it claimed it came for.

BITTER SUGAR

When he expanded his numerous sugarcane plantations and founded several modern sugar refineries in Qina, Khedive Isma‘il introduced more market measures to the province. By the 1870s, Isma‘il had turned whole villages in Qina into the private sugarcane farms of the royal family, in order to secure for himself a place in a transforming global market. Thousands of Qina's peasants worked on those plantations, and the sugar factories attached to them employed thousands of other landless workers. The stories of daily suffering and discontent of those subalterns exposes new faces of the market reality.

After the end of the American Civil War, cotton exports in Egypt experienced a period of bust but still constituted half of the country's revenue. To compensate for losses in the cotton market, Khedive Isma‘il envisioned making sugar for Upper Egypt what cotton was for the Delta, or making the economy of the south market-oriented based on commercial agriculture in sugar.
⁸⁸
While Isma‘il left the majority of cotton fields in the Delta to the local elite families of large landowners, the khedive established a monopoly over the sugarcane fields in the south—especially in Qina Province, where this crop was most concentrated. The plantations of the royal family annexed more thousands of acres to their existing properties in the province and constructed modern sugar mills on them. As a result, public works in Qina were in the service of the khedive's sugar.

Small landowning peasants lost more of their parcels to the khedive's plantations, called the Daira Saniyya, and many villages in the province became almost the private property of the royal family. For instance, Naj‘ Hammadi had 32,000 acres of the Daira land, some of which were leased out and the rest of which employed seasonal labor. The area of Farshut, meanwhile, had 12,000 acres farmed mainly by seasonal labor.
⁸⁹
In 1870, the khedive's mother
annexed a total of 3,531 acres in five villages in the province to the Daira plantations, and the peasants of these villages were forced to surrender their fields to the government. In the official papers, the state claimed that the farmers and shaykhs of those villages submitted a petition to the state to relinquish their property rights to Isma‘il's mother, who in turn agreed to purchase the land. Some peasants accepted the prices that the Mother Pasha offered them, and others requested that she replace these plots with others elsewhere. Bishara ‘Ubayd, a Copt who was an agent of the French consul and owner of several plantations, rented hundreds of acres of this land through an auction, after he outbid the shaykhs and mayors of those villages.
⁹⁰

The khedive annexed the peasants' land through legal strategies. He reissued a decree that his predecessor had promulgated about the small properties of runaway peasants (
mutasahhib
s). In 1865, that law had affirmed that
mutasahhib
s who left their lands for more than three years would lose their right to it; either heirs would take it or the state would declare it public property. In many cases the state confiscated the land from the legal heirs, declared it public property, and then annexed it to the khedive's plantations.
⁹¹
In addition, to consolidate the plantations in closer areas, the Daira exchanged fields with other large landowners. For example, Bishara ‘Ubayd gave up 950 acres of his fields in Armant in return for replacing them with land in another village.
⁹²

Qina Province had several large-scale modern sugar factories, which were designed and run by French experts. The French factories (
fabriqa
s), operated with steam engines and were fueled with coal, and the state recruited the province's villagers to construct them. The factories operated twenty-four hours a day, and the laborers worked according to a shift system and were harshly punished if they showed any negligence or were suspected of theft in the sugar mills.
⁹³
The modern factories of the khedive hurt the traditional sugar industry of the province, which used deep and wide melting pots. The older sugar mills could not compete and gradually disappeared. The modern mills relied on the traditional sector only for supplying pottery containers (
ballas
) for the storage of molasses.
⁹⁴

The government initiated public works in Qina Province for irrigation, drainage, steam pumps, and transportation projects—all powered by steam engines—mainly in order to benefit the sugar plantations of the royal family. The only place where steam irrigation pumps and short railroads were constructed in the province was on the royal plantations, leaving the small plots of peasants to traditional farming methods. Modern engineers designed
new canals, dikes, and embankment projects and the state recruited corvée labor to carry out work in the khedive's fields. In one incident, six thousand corvée workers from almost every single village in the province were drafted to finish one project in the Daira.
⁹⁵
Corvée laborers had no choice. They had to do the jobs assigned to them or the state would punish them. The only thing they could ask for—through submitting petitions—was to be assigned to nearby villages.
⁹⁶

Although the years that followed the termination of the 1864 revolt did not witness any new uprisings in Qina Province, the subalterns of the khedive's plantations exhibited constant resentment over their conditions. Sabotage to the telegraph was one manifestation of resistance. For the people of Qina, the telegraph was not a sign of an advancing benign modernity. Rather, it was the disciplining machine that brought the orders to recruit corvée labor and collect taxes. Through the telegraph, workers were recruited for the khedive's plantations. In 1870, only a few days after the sugar mill in Mata‘na sent orders to collect carpenters and construction workers, the inhabitants of Nagada damaged two wooden pillars carrying the wires of the telegraph line.
⁹⁷
In another example of resistance,
falatiyya
gangs launched occasional attacks against the boats of European merchants who carried out large-scale commercial transactions for the khedive's plantations.
⁹⁸

In 1873, three workers from Mata‘na attacked a shaykh with a knife and long, heavy sticks (
nabbut
s) before they ran away. The shaykh was collecting corvée labor with the help of a village watchman to work on the steam pumps in Armant when he was attacked. Investigations revealed that the three workers in fact had run away from jobs at the steam pumps, and the shaykh was looking for other laborers to replace them. As soon as the runaways saw him pass, they panicked, injured him, and fled again. Following the incident, the houses in the area were searched for weapons, and many knives and eight
nabbut
s were found and confiscated, to prevent similar incidents in the future.
⁹⁹

In the same year, Jahin and his three landless brothers were restless
falatiyya
bandits in the area of Mata‘na, where vast royal plantations, steam pumps, and mills existed. Their story began when their village shaykh attempted to conscript them for corvée labor. They refused to go. Instead, they shot at the shaykh and fled with other villagers, forming a
falatiyya
gang and hiding in the nearby mountains. They routinely raided the sugarcane fields, beat the watchmen there, and escaped back to their hiding places. When one of the brothers was killed—apparently during a raid—Jahin carried his corpse on a
donkey to the police station and accused the above-mentioned shaykh of shooting him. Jahin alleged that he and his brother had been carrying, on that donkey, a half
ardabb
of barley and were on their way to sell it to pay their tax. Once they arrived in the area of the Mata‘na steam pumps to the east of the canal, Jahin added, the shaykh killed his brother and stole the barley. The shaykh was put in jail for a prolonged period, but investigations proved that Jahin's story was fabricated; his family did not even own any land on which to cultivate this claimed barley. As the police always failed to find or arrest the bandits after their attacks, Jahin and his clever gang were never convicted or jailed for their crimes.
¹⁰⁰

After devastating the lives of the subalterns in the south and provoking their resistance, market arrangements in Upper Egypt failed once again. Using modern European technology and employing French experts did not help. By the end of 1870s, Khedive Isma‘il's capitalist sugar endeavors in Upper Egypt had incurred extensive debt; bankruptcy soon followed. The Daira Saniyya and mills were all put up for sale in the next decade.
¹⁰¹

In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was far from being a successful informal empire in Upper Egypt. Britain attempted but never penetrated Upper Egypt or was in any way close to domination there. The empire's main market measures failed because the discontented subalterns of the south fundamentally resented them. Western modernity, as the empire claimed to introduce through the market, was devastating to the peasants, women, and laborers of Upper Egypt; it altered their lives only because of its incompetent pretensions of superiority. In the following decades, when the informal empire turned into a formal one in the later part of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, Qina Province's discontent continued and took on new faces.