Imagined Empires (25 page)

USAID also partnered with a gigantic food corporation, Heinz, in funding a five-year agribusiness project targeting small farmers in Qina and other provinces, beginning in 2008. According to its managers, the project “applies a market-driven value chain approach. It invests in the vast but largely unrealized potential of thousands of Upper Egypt's small farmers to meet modern-day market demands.”
¹⁴
It was designed to target a large number of peasants—nearly eight thousand—and to foster continuous contact between them and the global market.

Aside from the fact that a large percentage of these programs' budgets were allocated to the high salaries of foreign employees and payments to American experts, local peasants in Qina asserted that the projects had little impact. One could barely notice any change in the mode of production and the lives of the inhabitants of the province's numerous villages. In an interview with an older farmer from Armant in the fall of 2010, he told me that peasants were unable to compete on the international market with their
minute plots and without state subsidies. He explained that the European Union granted subsidies to its farmers, who worked with advanced machinery and technology, and gave Qina's farmers limited access to their markets. Economic liberalization eliminated subsidizes for fertilizers, seeds, and machinery. Thus, with ever-increasing rents, small-plot tenant farmers—who were often targeted by USAID-funded NGOs—found it almost impossible to enter the highly competitive global market.

In the meantime, the sugarcane cultivators of Qina Province went on strike. The government purchased their harvest for the province's state-owned sugar factories at unfairly cheap prices, and corrupt officials assisted private businesses in doing the same. In 2008, the farmers of Armant and Ruzayqat refused to deliver their harvest to the state factories unless the government raised prices. One of the province's Parliament members, ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Ghul of Qus, who had held his seat for thirty years as a member of the northern ruling party, the National Democratic Party, condemned the strike. He characterized it as an illegal action of public disobedience that the people of the province were not naturally inclined to commit, asserting that it was incited by oppositional groups and human rights organizations.
¹⁵

The same sugarcane farmers were also losing their lands to the old elite families of the colonial era, since the new legal codes of market reform reversed the Arab socialist codes and introduced private property laws anew. Thousands of Qina's peasants had been evicted, or were awaiting eviction, from their plots in order to cede their land back to the large old families. These were the same families that were the co-opted local elite and propertied class during the period of British colonialism, before the 1952 military coup and subsequent socialist reforms. Under Mubarak, these families were co-opted by the northern authoritarian regime through membership in the ruling party and allocation of parliamentary seats.
¹⁶
The Washington Consensus preached market reforms as the only way for promised economic and human development. However, in reality these reforms worked for the benefit of the business and rural elite, who controlled the ruling party and the Parliament, at the expense of the peasants and laborers of Qina.

When widespread bread riots swept the province in 2007, there was a huge USAID wheat silo in the fields bordering the city of Qus. The struggle to purchase subsidized bread killed many people in the villages of Qina during the months preceding the outbreak of a national crisis in Cairo. In the long lines in front of state bakeries, Qina's villagers shot each other to get a share of the cheap bread, while preachers in mosques called upon them
to consume less and not to waste leftovers.
¹⁷
Egypt is “traditionally the largest U.S. wheat consumer,” through the USAID aid program.
¹⁸
The annual influx of US aid to Egypt mostly takes the form of imported American products, and wheat makes up a considerable portion of these goods. Despite its calls for global free trade, the US government has pressured the Egyptian state to buy the more expensive American wheat instead of the cheaper alternatives from other countries, such as former Soviet states. Concurrently, economic liberalization measures have compelled the Egyptian government to eliminate its subsidies to peasants, including wheat cultivators, while the US government gives generous subsidies to its wheat cultivators.
¹⁹

On the eve of the 2011 revolution in Qina, legendary bandits still hid in the mountains to show their discontent with the confused situation. Building on the traditions of two hundred years of subaltern unrest in Qina, stories of southern bandits took new trajectories. Many such bandits began their careers cooperating with the corrupt regime and its security apparatus, which then disowned them when they became a threat to the central government. Many years ago, there was a legendary bandit known as al-Khutt, whose name has become the title given to every other great bandit appearing in the province after him. Nawfal Sa‘d, who finally fell to police bullets in 2007, was another
khutt
who inherited the terrifying persona of his predecessor. Nawfal was an unemployed forty-year-old from the Hawwara clan that independently ruled Upper Egypt for centuries during Ottoman times. He started his criminal career in Qina in the 1990s, when he assisted the regime in crushing Islamic fundamentalists and in violently supporting the candidates of the ruling National Democratic Party during parliamentary elections. He became friends with high-ranking police officers, who protected him in return for a considerable share of his illicit income. In a village in Naj‘ Hammadi, his house was a huge fort protected from the back by the mountains, hidden in the front behind the high sugarcane fields, and guarded day and night by his heavily armed gang. The security apparatus soon came to view him as a threat, and the time came to terminate him. The police shot Nawfal in a fierce battle on account of many charges against him: aside from drug dealing, robbery, and murder, he was charged several times for resisting the authorities and threatening public security. For many months after he died, his wife attempted to avenge his death by murdering the village traitors who had assisted the police in reaching him.
²⁰

FIGURE 6.
Protesting women in Karnak, Luxor, during the 2011 revolution.

FIGURE 7.
The McDonald's sign appears next to a revolutionary crowd in Luxor, January 2011.

Finally, on 25 January 2011, the discontented youth of the province created their own Facebook groups to join Cairene compatriots in making the revolution. Youth coalitions quickly took form in every town in Qina, and they led thousands of lower- and middle-class groups to meet in every big and small square in the province to foster the spirit of Tahrir.
²¹
The Egyptian Revolution in the south and the north rendered America another “imagined empire.” Its neoliberal market stumbled just as the British liberal market before it, and the subalterns of the south revived their means to rebel.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.
Many world historians use the concept of “informal empire” to refer to indirect forms of imperial hegemony that do not include military occupation. See Niall Ferguson,
Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 10. On US aid in general, and USAID’s wheat aid in particular and Egyptian dependency, see Galal Amin,
Egypt’s Economic Predicament
(Leiden: Brill, 1995).

2.
Joseph Stiglitz’s
Globalization and Its Discontents
(London: W.W. Norton, 2003) insists that the United States spreads the neoliberal myth of development through market reform in the third world. On the impact of market reform policies on Qina’s peasants, see the reports of the Land Center of Human Rights, 2000–2008, Cairo,
www.lchr-eg.org
(accessed 11 February 2012).

3.
See UNDP (UN Development Programme),
Arab Human Development Report
2004 (New York: UNDP, 2005); World Bank, “Egypt Project and Programs,”
http://go.worldbank.org/C15AQ9EG50
(accessed 5 October 2008).

4.
Facebook group,
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8412576147
(accessed 9 March 2010). The movie’s title is
Al-Jazira,
and among the popular TV series on Upper Egyptian mountain-based bandits are
Hada’iq al-Shaytan
and
Dhi’ab al-Jabal.

5.
This book uses the term
microhistory
differently from its original meaning, proposed by historians such as Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg, and Macro Ferrari, which focuses on the peoples and internal dynamics of small European villages and towns. Rather, this book looks at small places while putting their internal dynamics and transformations into the larger context of the world economy and global imperialism.

6.
Qina in this book refers to a province that has consisted of many towns, such as Qina, Qus, Luxor, Isna, and Farshut, and numerous villages, including Salimiyya, Armant, Qammula, Samhud, Maris, and others. During the nineteenth century, the government sometimes split the province into two provinces,
mudiriyya
s of Qina and Isna, for administrative purposes. Today, the province is administratively
split into the two governorates of Qina and Luxor. Regardless of administrative divisions, this book deals with Qina as historically one province at all times.

7.
Edouard de Montulé,
Voyage en Amérique, en Italie, en Sicile et en Égypte pendant les années
1816, 1817, 1818
et
1819 (Paris: Delaunay, 1821), 2:271.

8.
Ibid.; ‘Ali Mubarak,
Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida li-Misr al-Qahira
(Cairo: Matba‘at Bulaq, 1887), 14:120.

9.
Vivant Denon,
Voyage dans le Basse et la Haute Égypte, pendant les Campagne du Général Bonaparte
(Paris: Imprimerie de P. Didot l’aine, 1802), 235–36.

10.
Mubarak,
Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya,
14:128–29. Also see Taqyy al-Din al-Maqrizi,
Al-Mawa‘iz wa-l-I‘tibar bi Dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-’Athar
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyya, 1987), 1:202–3. And also see Abu al-Fadl al-Idfawi,
Al-Tali‘ al-Sa‘id al-Jami‘ li Asma’ Nujaba’ al-Sa‘id
(Cairo: al-Dar al-Misriyya lil-Ta‘lif wa-al-Tarjama, 1966), 13, 18.

11.
W.J. Fischel, “The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt,” in M.N. Pearson (ed.),
Spices in the Indian Ocean World
(London: Ashgate Variorum, 1996), 56.

12.
Mubarak,
Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya,
14:129, 133–34.

13.
See Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Janet Abu Lughod,
Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D.
1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); K.N. Chaudhuri,
Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to
1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

14.
See Muhammad al-Maraghi al-Jirjawi,
Tarikh Wilayyat al-Sa‘id fi al-‘Asrayn al-Mamluki wa-l-‘Uthmani al-Musamma bi Nur al-‘Uyun bi-Dhikr Jirja fi ‘Ahd Thalathat Qurun
(Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda, 1997); Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad,
Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam
(Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1987).

15.
On the 1820s revolts, see J.A. St. John,
Egypt and Nubia
(London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), 378–81; and ‘Ali Mubarak,
Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida li-Misr al-Qahira
(Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1994), 12:116–17.

16.
On the 1864 revolt, see Lucie Austin Duff-Gordon,
Letters from Egypt
(London: Macmillan, 1865), 341–71.

17.
See, for example, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot,
A History of Egypt: From Arab Conquest to the Present
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Beth Baron,
Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and the Arabic books published by Silsilat Tarikh al-Misriyyin during 1980s and 1990s in Cairo by al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab.

18.
Peter Gran, “Upper Egypt in Modern History: ‘A Southern Question’?,” in Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad (eds.),
Upper Egypt: Identity and Change
(Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 81.

19.
See Martina Rieker, “The Sa‘id and the City: Subaltern Spaces in the Making of Modern Egypt,” PhD dissertation, Temple University, 1997.

20.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii, xv (emphasis in original).

21.
Ibid., xiv.

22.
Giovanni Arrighi, “The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism,”
Review,
Summer 1990, 366.

23.
Ibid., 365–408. Also see Giovanni Arrighi,
The Long Twentieth Century
(London: Verso, 2002).

24.
Arrighi, “Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism,” 399.

25.
See Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World-System,
vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank,
Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment
(London: Macmillan, 1978); and Samir Amin,
Imperialism and Unequal Development
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

26.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.),
The Post-colonial Studies Reader
(London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

27.
See Michel Foucault’s
History of Sexuality,
vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990);
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison
(New York: Penguin, 1979); and
The Birth of the Clinic
(London: Routledge, 1989). See also, for example, a postcolonial study that applies Foucault’s work to the study of the empire: Ann Laura Stoler,
Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

28.
Stoler,
Race and the Education of Desire,
4.

29.
See Judith Tucker,
Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 20.

30.
See, for instance, the collection of articles in Huri İslamoğu-İnan,
The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Joel Benin,
Workers and Peasants in the Middle East
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

31.
For example, see Omnia Shakry,
The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Eugene Rogan (ed.),
Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2002); and Leila Abu Lughod,
Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

32.
Timothy Mitchell,
Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–15.

33.
See Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin,
Post-colonial Studies Reader,
28–37.

34.
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Vinayak Ghaturvedi (ed.),
Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
(London: Verso, 2000), 1.

35.
Quoted in David Arnold, “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India,” in Ghaturvedi,
Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial,
34–35.

36.
Eric Hobsbawm authored an interesting account of social bandits in south Italy, arguing for the progressive nature of their actions. Hobsbawm’s approach greatly inspires this book. See Eric Hobsbawm,
Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the
19
th and
20
th Centuries
(New York: Free Press, 1960).

37.
The National Archives of Egypt, or Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, are undertaking an extensive project to create digital databases for millions of unknown, uncataloged documents. Researchers in this project informed me about thousands of documents, particularly concerning Qina Province, that were never discovered or touched before, which this book heavily relies on. Great thanks are due Emad Helal, a senior historian and supervisor in this digitization project.

38.
For Qina Province in the Ottoman period, the court of Isna is the only court whose records are accessible in the National Archives of Egypt. Despite references to them in Isna Court documents, court records of other towns and villages in the province are not present.

39.
This book uses these archival sources with an awareness of their limitations and biases as products of specific political contexts. Many of these documents, such as petitions, rulings of the Supreme Court, or parliamentary minutes, sometimes were recorded in a way that reflected the power structure in state and society. These records must be contextualized and, in some cases, perceived as state discourses rather than simple bearers of facts. Furthermore, this study is selective about the documents it considers as references to actions of political rebellion. While archival records deliver tens of thousands of stories that could fall in a vague area between regular crimes and political resistance, this study includes only highly politicized cases for analysis as subaltern actions of revenge. Specific criteria in making these selections include choosing only crimes targeting state bureaucrats, state buildings, government money, or the propertied politicians. The criteria also include selecting for certain characteristics of the person who committed the action, focusing on peasants, laborers, or women whose lives were hurt in one way or another by the regime.

CHAPTER 1: OTTOMANS, PLAGUE, AND REBELLION

1.
Ahmad Pasha Cezzar,
Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century: The Nizamname-i Misir
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 44 (Turkish transliteration replaced with Arabic transliteration).

2.
See George A. Haddad, “A Project of the Independence of Egypt, 1801,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
90 (2) (April–June 1970): 174. Prominent Egyptian intellectual Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (d. 1873) referred to the Ottoman-era southern Egyptian state as a
jumhuriyya.
See Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad,
Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam
(Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1987), 21.

3.
These events were observed by the contemporary historian and Mamluk officer Ahmad al-Damurdashi (d. ca. 1755) in
Al-Durra al-Musana fi ’Akhbar al-Kinana,
Abd al-Rahim Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rahim (ed.) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ma‘had al-Faransi, 1989), 40–60 (the quotation is from this source); the plague is discussed on 40–41. Also, late eighteenth-century historian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d. 1822) accounted for these events in
‘Aja’ib al-Athar fi-l-Tarajim wa-l-Akhbar
(Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1997), 1:136–39.

4.
On these recent theoretical arguments see, Suraiya Faroqhi,
Ottoman Empire and the World Around It
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 14–15; and Karen Barkey,
Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 93–98.

5.
On the three-century state see, Salah Ahmad Haridi,
Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyy,
923/1213–1517/1898 (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1984). On the Indian Ocean world economy and the place of the Ottoman Empire in it, see Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

6.
Stanford Shaw,
The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt,
1517–1798 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 14; Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad,
Al-’Idara fi Misr fi-l-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani
(Cairo: Maṭ-ba'at Jami‘at ‘Ayn Shams, 1978), 39.

7.
Ahmad Fou’ad Mitwalli (ed.), “Qanun Misr (Qanun-name Misr),” in al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-Athar, 1:557–59.

8.
The
iltizam
system was applied throughout the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after 1617. See Donald Quataert,
The Ottoman Empire,
1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29–30, 48–50; and Ariel Salzman, “An Ancien Regime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire,”
Politics and Society,
21 (4) (1993): 393–423.