Imagined Empires (20 page)

FIVE

Rebellion in the Time of Cholera

1882–1950

In 1885, three years after the British colonization of Egypt, an incident that appeared to be an ordinary theft in a village market revealed the existence of a gang of audacious bandits. It was a period of dark, hard days in Qina Province, deep in the south of Egypt, as signs of a serious cholera breakout were spreading throughout the villages of the region. ‘Ali Effendi Ibrahim—the province's Parliament member—was on his plantation when he received the bad news: money and jewelry had been stolen from his house, along with the precious state medal bestowed upon him by the khedive in Cairo. The police arrested two bandits by the names of Sa‘id and Ahmad in the market of the village of Armant, where they were trying to sell the stolen goods, but the khedival medal was still missing. Sa‘id and Ahmad denied the charges and insisted that they were only poor peasants. They asserted that it would have been impossible for them to reach the parliamentarian's house for a raid, as it was a long five-hour trip between their village and his town and numerous police guards fortified the road. Furthermore, they added, they did not even know where the house was. Days of investigation passed with no results, but the mystery was finally resolved: the missing medal resurfaced and provided indisputable evidence against the two bandits. They had taken it to a textile store and mortgaged it for garments. At the recently modernized legal council of Qina, they were sentenced to two years in jail.
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It was under colonial regimes, postcolonial theorist Benedict Anderson asserts, that myths of “national identities” were created and “nations” forged. The capitalist interests of the colonizer and the colonized elite entailed such a project, the nation-state, to emerge in different places in the world. They built it by unifying near and far local markets into what Anderson calls imagined communities.
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This process succeeded in various regions under the
hegemony of one modern empire or another, and the historiography of Egypt under the British Empire has long celebrated the birth of the nation-state during this period. Nonetheless, British colonialism in Egypt, this chapter argues, marked a period of failed empire and an unfinished nation. The colonial administration and the co-opted native ruling elite attempted to unify the Delta with Upper Egypt—the north with the south—into a single consolidated market, the basis for a modern state. However, the empire's capitalism in Upper Egypt proved utterly incompetent, faced bailout crises, and generated environmental catastrophes, including the cholera epidemic. The south was constantly simmering with subaltern rebellion, in which ruthless bandits assumed leadership roles.

When the British colonizer arrived in 1882, a modern nation did not exist in Egypt, despite the intense endeavors of several centralized governments throughout the nineteenth century. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha's and his successors' attempts to unify the south with the north—or rather to subjugate Upper Egypt to a regime based in Cairo—were met with massive separatist revolts that emerged from Qina Province. The nation lacked a unified market to assist its evolution, thanks to European interference in the northern economy. For four decades before the British military occupation, industrial Britain inflicted extensive influence on the khedives of Cairo in order to secure supplies of cheap cotton from the Delta in the north. Upper Egypt was not invited to participate in commercial agriculture, and the fact that the south was a rebellious region and relentlessly resented ventures of economic penetration by the informal empire did not help ease its growing marginalization. As soon as the British occupied Egypt, the colonial regime embarked on a new attempt at incorporating Upper Egypt, mainly through capitalist means. It would work with Cairo's elite to assimilate the south into the northern market, and hence solidify a nation.

Colonial capitalism was a great success and beneficial to the colonies, many historians of the British Empire assert. Niall Ferguson, for instance, admits the many mistakes that the empire committed but insists that the British still introduced a “good thing” to their colonies by spreading efficient capitalism that enhanced global welfare. As a liberal economic historian, Ferguson claims that “the legacy of the Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance' . . . but the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization.”
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For completely different ends, in fact the critique of imperialism, Benedict Anderson supports the general presumption of the success of colonial capitalism. A leading figure in postcolonial
theory, Anderson says that nations were “invented” by the colonized elite, and he argues for the “primacy of capitalism” in fabricating national identities. To achieve his capitalist goals, the colonizer was heavily involved with the native upper class to unify local markets; these markets evolved into communities of peoples sharing the same imagined identity, and those communities were in turn another basic stage in the metamorphosis of modern nations. “Is Indian nationalism not inseparable from colonial administrative-market unification, after the Mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial powers?” Anderson inquires, with a predetermined answer.
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Theoretical narratives about efficient imperial capitalism upon which nations were effectively constructed apply to many places in Latin America and Asia, but not to Egypt, where the story was more devastating. The prevailing historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt perpetuates the myth of a nation. Traditional accounts in Arabic and English alike conventionally presume that, under British occupation, the south was happily integrated with the north, and one modern nation was heroically struggling for liberation. The patriotic champions of liberation, they add, were the northern bourgeoisie, or the female and male large landowners and capitalist entrepreneurs in the Delta and Cairo who materialized as the official representatives of the unified nation. Nonetheless, this nationalistic literature fails to recognize the essential role that British capitalism attempted to play in assisting the northern elite invent the nation for the interests of both the British and northern elite. This chapter illustrates that capitalism was devastatingly unsuccessful in Upper Egypt, and thus this alleged nation was never born. Moreover, the conventional narrative ignores the distressing dynamics of assimilating Upper Egypt into a Cairo-led market and centralized government. Similarly, it fails to see the fierce political resistance encountered in the south, leaving the subaltern women and men of Upper Egypt invisible and voiceless.
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Through a microscopic gaze at the villages and small towns of Qina Province, deep in the south of Egypt, this chapter narrates an alternative story of Upper Egypt, the empire, and the nation-state. It follows how the colonial regime first peripheralized Upper Egypt, through its liberal institutional and legal reforms, and then later sought to reintegrate it through market actions. It closely investigates the presence of British capitalism in Qina in the form of a sugar company and a bank and reveals the environmental destruction generated through the cholera epidemic. Furthermore, the chapter explores the nonnationalist, nonelite rebellion of female and
male peasants and laborers in the province, against both the empire and its alleged nation.

LEGALLY PERIPHERALIZED

After a short trip to the south in 1889, Lord Cromer—the British high commissioner of Egypt for a quarter of a century, from 1883 to 1907—reported that he “visited many
remote
villages of Upper Egypt in which the face of a European is rarely seen.”
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The “remoteness” of the south, or in other words its inaccessibility to foreign penetration, was problematic to Cromer. However, it was in fact Cromer's administration that persistently marginalized Upper Egypt, particularly during his first years in office. Upon arriving in Egypt from India, Cromer vowed to undermine the old “corrupt and oppressive” regime of Egypt's despotic ruler—to use his own language—and replace it with a new, liberal one.
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But British liberalism immediately gave birth to a state that was no more than a continuation of the ancien régime it purported to replace. And in the new nation-state that was created, Upper Egypt was, legally, peripheralized.

The story of the British Empire's interaction with this divided nation started long before Cromer's arrival. In the years between 1840s and 1870s, Great Britain extended its influence over the khedives of Egypt—still viceroys of the Ottoman Empire, at least nominally—through free-trade agreements and close commercial relations.
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As the British textile industry demand for long-staple cotton from Egypt swelled, owners of cotton plantations in the Delta accumulated agricultural wealth and emerged as a new ruling elite, with both native Egyptian and Turkish origins. Sa‘id Pasha (r. 1854–63) and his successor Isma‘il Pasha (1863–79) reformed the landownership legal system, which led to consolidating the agricultural properties and political power of the northern elite.
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Left out of this new order of commercial agriculture, Upper Egypt failed to generate a considerable class of rich families to influence politics. A few large southern landowners—of sugar rather than cotton plantations—did join the ruling elite in Cairo, but only as a second-class elite.
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The legal peripheralization of the south began when Khedive Isma‘il decided to establish a modern Parliament in 1866. This Council of Consultation of Representatives (Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab) was conspicuously dominated by Delta plantation owners, and its law-making agenda
functioned mainly to serve their interests. The election law restricted the right to run for seats on the council only to males able to pay a high land tax of five hundred piasters or more.
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Although Upper Egypt was equally represented by some of its propertied families, northern members of the Parliament held the role of council speaker and headed every important committee, and—aside from a few occasions in which southern council members spoke—their voices were the only ones heard in every session. Cotton was the most important and most frequently discussed subject, as the council concentrated its attention on solving issues pertaining to digging canals, building barrages, conducting land surveys, controlling seasonal labor, and reorganizing villages, mainly in the Delta.
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The formation of this Parliament was a significant moment in the rise of bourgeois nationalism in the north. Khedive Isma‘il—an Ottoman, nonnative of his realm—presented and celebrated the council as a great step toward building a modern nation, or
watan
(fatherland), similar to European models. In his speech at the Parliament's opening session, Isma‘il vowed that the noble purpose of the body was to benefit
al-ahali,
or citizens, of Egypt, and he mainly emphasized the Muslim majority of them.
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The council soon became an ideal platform for the rising nationalistic rhetoric of the north, building on an existing intellectual discourse—in both press and books—of the fatherland produced by the Western-educated Cairene bourgeoisie. Cairo's regime determinedly integrated the south into the nationalist myth, no matter the south's marginalized representation in the council. “The council pleaded to the government to find a feasible method . . . [to protect] cotton, and it responded. . . . Thus, we should thank it . . . and may God keep the generous Khedive whose vision is bound for this nation and its citizens,” a Delta parliamentarian once stated, and the rest of the members answered, “Amen.”
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British troops occupied Egypt in 1882 after a debt crisis broke out in the north and the state failed to pay back its European creditors. The following year, London's liberal administration summoned Lord Cromer from India, where he had served as a finance member of the British viceroy's council, and sent him to Cairo to govern the new colony. It was not Cromer's first time in Egypt. From 1879 to 1880, he had been in charge of managing Egyptian finance after the onset of the Egyptian debt crisis and the takeover of the country's budget by a dual British-French committee. In September 1883, Cromer arrived with much confidence in his ability to replace the old, malfunctioning regime by applying the liberal recommendations of an important
report—prepared by Lord Dufferin and submitted to Her Majesty the same year—concerning reform of the legal system.
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Cromer started by abolishing the old Parliament and forming a new one. Taking a radical tone about the new election process, Cromer declared, “When we are liberal in Egypt, we do not content ourselves with half measures.”
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Two months later, in November 1883, when the results of the elections were announced, Cromer's legal reforms brought back almost all the members of the previous council to win their very same seats. According to the reforms in election regulations (the Organic and Electoral Laws of 1 May), the minimum land tax a candidate had to pay to qualify to run for a parliamentary seat was raised tenfold, from 500 to 5,000 piasters.
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The colonial regime evidently intended to structure itself around the wealthy class of cotton-plantation owners in the north. A glance at the list of newly elected parliamentarians shows that almost nothing changed. The council maintained its old speaker, Muhammad Sultan Pasha; its vice-speaker, Muhammad al-Shawarbi Pasha; and the same members from influential propertied families such as the Abazas, the Fiqis, the Shawarbis, and ‘Abd al-Ghaffars—all from the Delta.
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The elections also brought no change for Upper Egypt. The colonial regime co-opted the same wealthy families that the khedive had assimilated into the old Parliament, and many of them also won back their old seats. A striking example in Qina Province is Tay‘ Salama, a village mayor who continuously held a seat in the council from 1876 to 1890.
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A few months after Salama was elected to Cromer's new legislature, the people of Qus, one of the big towns in the province, raised a complaint to the Parliament asserting that Salama was an illegal, inadequate candidate. While he was a member of the previous council he had been convicted and sentenced to jail twice for violently seizing peasants' land. Many similar lawsuits were still pending. In the weeks leading to the election, people of the province had filed a petition against him with the Ministry of Interior, but they received no response. They raised another petition to the Parliament after Salama won, but the council responded that it was too late. He was already a member, and this matter was outside their realm of jurisdiction. In the end, Salama not only kept his seat but also won it again in the next election six years later.
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