Imagined Empires (3 page)

Timothy Mitchell applies existing theories, especially the postcolonial framework, in order to point out the inefficiency rather than the almightiness
of empire. Mitchell is a leading critic of “modernity” as introduced by British imperialism to Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his
Rule of Experts
particularly deconstructs one facet of failed colonial modernity: the empire’s market economy. Mitchell asserts that the economy is just another social construct produced by the modern social sciences—similar to class, nation, gender, race, and so on—yet it is neglected in postcolonial critique because of the general perception that statistics and figures constitute “universal” and “neutral” truth. Mitchell deploys Karl Polanyi’s criticism of the free economy, which insists that the idea of a “self-regulating market” is a myth: such a market existed in European history only for a very short period and was never the norm. Mitchell argues that although the colonizer introduced the market economy—the conventional wisdom in today’s liberal and neoliberal theories—to the colonized as an imagined universal model for reaching economic progress, this market never functioned in the ideal way that the empire claimed. The European colonizer brought this myth of a proficient laissez-faire economy to colonies like Egypt, only for it to fail and bring about environmental destruction. Instead of delivering the allegedly long-awaited modernity, European free market experts left the natives with diseases and biological catastrophes.
³²
This book is heavily informed by Mitchell’s critique of modernity and its market economy.

Using the insights of the above theoretical approaches, each chapter in this book closely deconstructs a historical myth that an early modern or a modern empire invented about itself. It attempts to undermine these myths through new Arabic archival evidence from Qina Province. As the book investigates issues of colonial modernity, market transformation, and environmental destruction in the province, it particularly adopts Mitchell’s work to analyze these matters.

A word is due here about this book’s adoption of the theoretical term
subaltern
to analyze low-class rebellion against the empire in Upper Egypt. Like the above theories, subaltern studies—an offshoot of the postcolonial theory—attempts to restore the voices of marginalized groups, such as peasants and women, and grants them greater and effective agency vis-à-vis the imperialist.
³³
This theory takes Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern, which he coined in
Prison Notebooks,
from its original Italian context to the study of colonial India. Subaltern studies also looks beyond conventional Marxist theory—beyond factory workers in uniforms—to forge a new notion of lower classes engaged in resistance against power structures, such as silenced peasants. Ranajit Guha insists that the historiography of anticolonial struggles has
been a subject of a “bourgeois-nationalist elitism,” one that celebrates only upper-class, urban, nationalist activism, led by the wealthy and Western-educated groups in the city, and almost ignores the narratives of the countryside and the underprivileged. This bourgeois monopoly is mainly a product of the British mind-set that granted respect and consideration only to the clean, rich elite—whether on the side of the colonizer or colonized.
³⁴
Guha adds that “during the colonial period in India subaltern politics constituted an ‘autonomous domain’ which ‘neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend upon the latter.’” He attributes the roots of these resistance politics to precolonial practices that reemerged under imperial rule, taking forms such as riots and popular movements.
³⁵

This book invites subaltern studies to investigate nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against the empire and its co-opted ruling elites in Qina Province and southern Egypt. Furthermore, it places a significant emphasis on the social bandits of Qina and their rebellious operations against elite figures and properties, considering them an integral part of subaltern resistance.
³⁶

ON ARCHIVAL SOURCES

In order to tell a five-hundred-year story of incompetent imperialism, environmental destruction, and revolt in Qina Province, this book taps into a wide range of newly discovered archival and primary sources. It relies on sources that were not produced in the imperial center or even in Cairo: sources written in an unnoticed place and revealing unexpected truths. The book utilizes, for the first time, Arabic archival collections concerning Qina Province from the National Archives of Egypt (Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya) that were only made available to researchers in the last few years.
³⁷
This study complements this archival material with Arabic manuscripts and published books, documents from the British National Archives (formerly Public Record Office), military records, and various French travelers’ accounts. Arabic documents about the province include collections from Islamic court records, official correspondence between the central government in Cairo and provincial bureaucrats, thousands of individual and collective petitions submitted by the lower classes to provincial and central authorities, minutes of the Supreme Court, parliamentary minutes, and much more.

For the period before and during the Ottoman Empire, the records of the shari‘a court of the city of Isna and its rural vicinities in Qina illuminate
political and socioeconomic developments in the province. These records uncover facts about the independent southern government and its relation to Istanbul and to subaltern and elite subjects; the archives also illuminate regional commerce, the landownership system, gender relations, Christian Copts, and more.
³⁸
Classical works of history used here include al-Maqrizi’s
Al-Khitat,
al-Damurdashi’s
Al-Durra al-Musana,
al-Idfawi’s biographical dictionary of Upper Egyptian scholars titled
Al-Tali‘ al-Sa‘id,
al-Jabarti’s
‘Aja’ib al-’Athar,
and an unpublished manuscript about the Turkish governors of Upper Egypt with the title of “Risala fi man Tawalla al-Sa‘id.” Furthermore, Layla ‘Abd al-Latif’s study on the most famous autonomous ruler of Upper Egypt,
Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam,
is essential in understanding the period.

For the short-lived French Empire, this book uses accounts of French travelers, Egyptologists, military officers, and soldiers who landed in Qina Province. For the natives of Qina, the book relies on Isna Court records during the period of the Napoleonic campaign (1798–1801) to investigate the situation in villages and small towns. The same court records are also used to locate the Ottoman sultan’s decrees, or
fermans,
which were disseminated in the province during the campaign. This book uses Arabic books that analyze the French presence in Upper Egypt, particularly Nasir Ahmad Ibrahim’s
Al-Faransiyyun fi Sa‘id Misr,
in addition to French and Arabic translations of correspondence between the campaign’s generals in Upper Egypt and its headquarters of operations in Cairo.

As for Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha’s empire, several sources furnish vivid stories, making the voices of women and men from subaltern groups accessible and heard. Although shari‘a court records remain an important source for this period, they are surpassed by the enormous and rich collections of the daily official correspondence between the central government in Cairo and every district and subdistrict in Qina Province, such as Sadir and Warid Mudiriyyat, Qina and Isna, which provide details about the viceroy’s modern imperial institutions of hegemony, the provincial ruling elite, and how the subalterns of the province reacted to them. The people of Qina submitted thousands of petitions, or
‘ardhala
s, either individually or collectively, directly to Muhammad ‘Ali’s court, to the general inspector of Upper Egypt, or to other high-ranking officials in order to complain about the ramifications of modern imperial hegemony. In addition, the minutes of the modern representative body that the viceroy created, the Council of Consultation, or Majlis al-Mashura, serve as an important source for understanding
the pasha’s modern institutions of internal colonialism. Legal codes promulgated by this council, such as
La’ihat al-Fallah
for agricultural organization and the Syasatname for the bureaucracy, are analyzed here as discourses of hegemony.

Concerning the middle period of the informal British Empire, the same previous sources—shari‘a court records, official correspondence, and petitions—continue to provide the backbone of the narrative, but another source makes the story even richer and more vivid: the minutes of the Council of Rules, or Madabit Majlis al-Ahkam, an institution that served as both a supreme court and a legislature in Cairo. Cases that failed to reach a final verdict in local courts and civil councils in the province were referred to Cairo to be heard in the Council of Rules, which kept extensive minutes, sometimes tens of pages for each case. The lively details in these minutes show a province subject to the modernity of the market economy and uncover forgotten stories of rebellious bandits and other forms of subaltern resistance. Because there is a special focus on the legal codes in this part of the study, the minutes of the newly established Parliament, or Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab, show how both central and local ruling elites peripheralized the province through the promulgation of modern laws. Filib Jallad’s encyclopedia of modern Egyptian laws,
Qamus al-’Idara wa-l-Qada’,
is another essential primary source in this regard. Furthermore, ‘Ali Mubarak’s geographical and biographical encyclopedia,
Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya,
makes it easier for this book to follow modern transformations in the economic and social life in the provinces’ villages under the informal empire. Luckily, an Englishwoman, Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon, happened to live in Qina when the massive 1864 revolt erupted there, and she provided an interesting account of the revolt in detailed letters to her relatives back home.

Finally, for the British colonial period, in addition to all previous sources in the Cairo archives, records from the British National Archives in London illustrate the failures of colonial capitalism. The annual administrative and financial reports of British high commissioners, consuls, and consular agents in Egypt are crucial for understanding British liberalism as a discourse of hegemony and how it functioned through allegedly democratic and capitalist institutions. Some confidential memoranda in the records of the British Foreign Office also reveal hidden facts about how foreign capital worked. The National Archives of Egypt also provide this part of the study with a new variety of sources, including the minutes of the Cabinet of Ministers, or
Maljis al-Wuzara
’; the minutes of the two bodies of the reformed Parliament, or
Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab
and
al-Jam‘iyya al-‘Umumiyya
; and a collection of a new kind of petitions sent to the viceroy’s court, called
iltimasat.
Furthermore, the annual provincial reports,
Majmu‘at Taqarir al-Mudiriyyat,
and published collections of decrees and orders,
Al-Qararat wa-l-Manshurat,
show new faces of mythical imperialism and rebellion.
³⁹

ONE

Ottomans, Plague, and Rebellion

1500–1800

In the 1760s, the Ottoman sultan received a report on the state of affairs in Egypt that revealed unpleasant news. Egypt, one of the shiniest jewels in the empire's crown, was not one intact province under the sultan's full hegemony. The eminent officer who compiled the report described the existence of an autonomous state in the south. Seemingly enjoying no access to this state, the Ottoman officer gave brief and incomplete information about its government. According to the report, the autonomous regime in Upper Egypt was ruled by its own Arab tribal regime that did pay an annual tax to the sultan, but Cairo's Ottoman governor exercised no authority over it. About one of its legendary leaders, the report stated,

The Arab named Shaykh Hammam is resident in . . . the province of Upper Egypt. He always has in his side four thousand Arab troops, and he controls by right of inheritance most of the villages of Upper Egypt. They [Hammam and his sons] never come to Cairo. . . . They always pay in full all the money and grains required for the treasury from their village, and they never oppose the tax collection. They themselves appoint and send twenty governors annually to the towns and provinces under their authority, and they collect approximately several thousand purses every year.
¹

Stories about this mysterious independent state recorded by other Ottoman officers reveal more surprises. Interestingly, the peasants who inhabited southern Egypt exercised a degree of leverage over their government to the extent that, on occasions of discontent, they could demand that the ruling elite pack up and leave. Highly impressed with this state, contemporary French observers and, later, Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth century called it a republic.
²
In one incident, in 1695, the ruling Hawwara
tribe formed an alliance with separatist military factions in Cairo and went to war against the Ottoman governor. Amid the conflict, plague broke out and was exacerbated due to severe food shortages throughout Egypt. The discontented peasants of Qina, the capital of the southern state, asked their Hawwara leaders to take their belongings and families and leave. “We are people of plowing and harvesting, and more than half of us died. We will no longer fight and disobey the sultanate,” said the farmers. The leaders of the tribe departed for the eastern mountains bordering the Nile, but they came back shortly afterward—despite local resentment—with the support of the Ottoman sultan and restored their regime.
³

The existence of this state without a doubt comes as surprising news to many historians of the Ottoman Empire. Ottomanists traditionally have viewed Egypt as a unified province, controlled centrally by Cairo's military elite and the efficient imperial bureaucracy in Istanbul. Recent theoretical trends add that the imperial “core” in Istanbul made Egypt, along with other provinces in eastern Europe and the Arab lands, into a dependent “periphery.” The entire new province was thus incorporated into a hegemonic Ottoman “world economy” that prevailed in the Mediterranean.
⁴
For Upper Egypt—a whole half of Egypt, in fact the richer half then—this is a mere myth. For three continuous centuries, ever since Sultan Selim's conquest of Cairo in 1517, an autonomous regime formed in the south under a local dynasty. Moreover, the south was a key part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy, the global hegemonic system of that period, of which the Ottoman Empire itself was a known dependent.
⁵

This chapter argues that the Ottoman was an imagined empire in Upper Egypt. In the south of the country the core/periphery relationship was reversed: the consumerist imperial core was dependent on a capitalist periphery. Furthermore, when the empire attempted to make an actual appearance in the south, its presence only brought about environmental crises, including the onset of the plague, and eventually triggered subaltern rebellion. This chapter follows the formation of government and economic systems that existed under the independent tribal regime of the south. This state reached its maturity in the eighteenth century, under the government of the legendary Hammam that almost amounted to an early “republic”—as contemporary French observers asserted. Whenever the Ottoman Empire attempted to manifest itself in the south, the chapter demonstrates, its appearance only disturbed the political stability and disrupted an existing social contract between this state and its subjects, which generated subaltern rebellion that
the empire then helped to crush. More importantly, the empire's appearance in the south killed people, as it carried with it an “imperial plague” all the way from Istanbul.

ONE SULTAN, TWO STATES: WILAYAT AL-SA‘ID

Shortly after Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt, a “two-state” system was born in the new province. The official rulers of Egypt were the Mamluk officers of Turco-Circassian origin who took over Cairo's citadel after the Crusades in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, one fierce Arab tribe, the Hawwara, established de facto control over Upper Egypt beginning in 1380, when, after prolonged wars against the Mamluks, the tribe dominated agricultural properties, trade, and industries in the south. The sultan subscribed to the existing status quo as he concluded peace treaties with the Hawwara and was content to receive the tributes and generous gifts that the tribe sent to Istanbul annually. Meanwhile, the sultan kept the loyal officers of the former Mamluk elite in power in the north but under the authority of an appointed governor pasha sent from Istanbul.
⁶
Thus, two separate states immediately took shape out of this postconquest arrangement: a settler, military regime in the north; and a native, tribal regime in the south.

Soon afterward, this two-state system was written into law. In 1525, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued the first book of imperial decrees to organize Egypt,
Qanunname-i Misir,
he regulated the administrative independence of Upper Egypt from Cairo. Wilayat al-Sa‘id, or the province of Upper Egypt, was the official name the sultan used to refer to the southern state. According to the new imperial law, the appointed Ottoman pasha, Egypt's governor, in Cairo enjoyed no authority over the southern state's tribal rulers beyond tax collection, and he was not even authorized to punish them if they did not pay. The sultan reserved this right only for himself, and the Hawwara were to report directly to Istanbul. The imperial decree also laid out the Hawwaras' main administrative duties as rulers, including land reclamation, organizing irrigation, collecting taxes, sending annual gifts to the sultan, and crushing rebels from other Arab tribes.
⁷

Another imperial law would consolidate the autonomous power of the Hawwara: the landownership code. After conquering Egypt, Istanbul introduced tax farms, or
iltizam
s, as a system of both landholding and tax collection. Each tax farmer won his piece of land, which could amount to several villages, through public auctions. The farmer would keep the land for a period of only three years, during which he maintained its cultivation through local tenants. At the end of each year, the tax farmer collected the land's fixed annual tax, sent it to the Ottoman governor in Cairo, and kept the remainder of the revenue for himself. In the northern military regime, Mamluk officers were the tax farmers of the Delta villages.
⁸
Hawwara tribal leaders were by far the largest, and at times the sole, tax farmers of the south. More importantly, as a sign of their independence, they maintained lifetime, hereditary rights to their landholdings. On the eve of the seventeenth century, they controlled about 65 percent of the land in Upper Egypt, and the Ottoman governor in Cairo collected revenue from the rest.
⁹
From the second half of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, Stanford Shaw recounts, the Hawwaras' “rule was formalized by their appointments as hereditary
multazims.
”
¹⁰
In the mid-1700s, one Hawwara ruler, Shaykh Hammam, was the sole tax farmer in the entirety of Upper Egypt, from Asyut, through Qina, to Aswan.
¹¹

FIGURE 2.
A twelfth-century trade route between Qina Province and its Red Sea port of ‘Aydhab.

Aspiring to limit Hawwara power, the Ottoman pasha in Cairo appointed a governor—a Mamluk officer—in northern Upper Egypt. The city of Girga, closer to Cairo, was made into the seat for this new governor. Official records often referred to Upper Egypt as the province of Girga, or Wilayat Girga, in hope that the city's governor would impose control over the south. Nonetheless, the Hawwara not only established hegemony over incoming governors, they also controlled the very process of appointment in Cairo. When the Hawwara did not approve of a candidate, they blocked the grain tax intended for Istanbul. The Ottoman pasha and the Mamluk elite in Cairo were always forced to concede to the Hawwara. In one incident, in 1696, the Hawwara vetoed the candidacy of Mustafa Bey by threatening to forgo sending grain to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Hijaz, which would damage the sultan's image as the caliph of Muslims. Cairo's council thereafter excluded this candidate. Furthermore, when the Hawwara did not approve of a governor already in office, they simply terminated his tenure by ending his life. In general, the Mamluk governor of Girga stayed in power for an average of only one to three years. Around 1659, one governor, known for his despotic policies, managed to stay for five and a half years; however, his tenure ended abruptly with his murder. His successor faced a similar fate.
¹²

The secret behind the rise of the Hawwaras' regime, from the Mamluk through Ottoman times, was the geographic importance of their seat of power: Qina Province, deep in the south of Upper Egypt. The capitalist
commercial, agricultural, and industrial wealth of this province constituted the necessary material foundations for an independent state, as it allowed the Hawwara to rise first as an entrepreneurial and then as a political elite. Qina Province was an integral part of the Indian Ocean world economy, the old global system that encompassed the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, East Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. As Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu Lughod, and many theorists of world economy assert, this was the hegemonic economic system from the rise of Islam until the nineteenth century, after which it was disrupted and replaced by a modern European-led system.
¹³
Through the Red Sea ports of ‘Aydhab and Qusayr, the towns of the province (including Qus, Isna, Qina, and Farshut) were connected to Arabian and Yemeni ports and received important global commodities such as spices and coffee. The same towns also received East African trade, either via Nile sailboats or overland caravans, including luxury goods such as gold and slaves. These towns then served as Nile ports that reexported oriental and African commodities north to Cairo and on to the Mediterranean.
¹⁴

Within the Indian Ocean world system, Qina Province was itself a major center of commercial agriculture. As a sugarcane, grain, and cotton producer, the province exported its own refined sugar and abundant grain to the north and sold its textiles to the regional market in East Africa.
¹⁵
The Hawwara tribe had monopolized agriculture production in the province since the Mamluk period, and the capital the tribe accumulated allowed them to grow into a dynasty. In fact, the Hawwara initially rose to power as the owners of sugarcane plantations and sugar refineries, when sugarcane was the most important cash crop in Qina Province, especially in the area of Farshut. The Mamluk sultans granted Hawwara notables large lands in Upper Egypt as fiefs, or
iqta‘
s
,
and the Hawwara soon transformed them into lucrative sugar plantations.
¹⁶
Upper Egyptian sugar was consumed domestically and exported to Middle Eastern and European countries, including, Italy, southern France, Catalonia, Flanders, England, and Germany.
¹⁷

Evidently, there was a reversed core/periphery relationship between Istanbul and Qina, where the imperial core was actually dependant on the capitalist periphery to provide both sustenance and luxury consumption. After the conquest, the imperial granaries in Istanbul relied primarily on the Upper Egyptian grain tax, especially on wheat, to sustain its immense annual needs. As Shaw asserts, “most of the
muqata‘at
[districts] of Upper Egypt were obliged to deliver their land taxes entirely in grain, and it was these grain payments which provided the entire supply used by the Imperial
Treasury to maintain those depending on it for sustenance.”
¹⁸
In addition, it was the grain of Upper Egypt that the sultan—the caliph of Muslims—relied on to feed the inhabitants and pilgrims of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina each year. Grain from the south was shipped from Qina to the Red Sea port of Qusayr, unloaded at the port of Jeddah in Arabia, and shipped from there to Mecca and Medina.
¹⁹