ABSTRACT
The dominating purpose of Mohammed Ah was to secure his personal position in Egypt, by making the country a formidable military and naval power, and to this end he consistently devoted one-half of the revenues of the state. The well-being of the people, to whom he was foreign, did not interest him in the slightest; but to provide the necessary finances for his military schemes, he had to raise the agricultural productivity of Egypt from the miserable state to which nearly five hundred years of misrule had reduced it, and to create industries which did not yet exist. By 1814 he had bought out or expropriated almost all the landowners of the Mamluk period, vesting the ownership in his own government, i.e. in himself, but leaving the use and cultivation of the lands in the hands of the existing tenants. From about 1820 he began the construction of numerous canals in the Delta for the purpose of cultivating that district by perennial irrigation in place of the artificial basins into which the annual Nile flood was admitted to fertilize the ground for the main winter crop. By superseding the age-old basin-irrigation by this new system, incomplete and imperfect though it was in its beginnings, two or three crops could be grown from a plot in one year, producing profitable yields of cotton, indigo, flax, or rice as well as the basic winter grain-crop. Thus it is estimated that between 1824 and 1840 the area under cultivation was increased by about a quarter, in spite of the heavy demand on man-power for military and industrial conscription. Agricultural
policy was closely centralized, as it had been under the Greek rulers of Egypt after the conquest of Alexander the Great. Mohammed Ah directed what crops should be grown, giving preference to those which were exportable at a good profit, especially cotton. Seeds were lent to the cultivators, and funds advanced to cover the cost of cultivation. A large staff o f inspectors was employed to ensure that the Pasha’s orders were faithfully carried out. Most classes o f crops were declared government monopolies, compulsorily purchased by the government at a fixed price which was sometimes a half or less o f their market-value. The goods were then either consumed for state needs, as supplies for the army or raw materials for the state factories, or they were sold abroad at a handsome profit. In 1836 it was estimated that 95 per cent, of Egypt’s exports, and 40 per cent, of her imports, were for the government’s account. In 1816 the existing manufactures had similarly been declared government monopolies. The government, at a considerable profit to itself, supplied the artisans with the raw materials it had purchased from the fellahin, bought back the finished articles at an imposed low price, and resold them at the highest prices possible. The Pasha established a number of new industries, mainly to supply goods for the public service or for export. They were conducted on the whole at a loss, on account of the high cost of imported machines and spare parts, the lack of suitable overseers and engineers, the apathy and discontent of the workers, dragged from their field and workshops to labour in ‘dark satanic mills’ , the waste of raw material, the breakage of machinery, delays, confusion, even deliberate sabotage and obstruction in the working of the factories. A British observer found in 183 8 that cotton cloth produced in Egypt cost 16 per cent, more than imported English cloth of the same quality. By 1840 the strain of the accumulated losses on these undertakings had become unbearable, and the ultimate failure of the industrial enterprise had become evident even to the Pasha. During the Second Syrian War many factories were closed to save expense, and thousands o f the workpeople were conscripted into the army. Orders were given that all factories that could not show a profit on their operations were to be closed down. Many o f them were closed immediately, others dragged on for a few years. Their ruin was completed in 1842 when, as part o f the settlement of the Syrian War, the British Government compelled the Pasha to accept the application to
Egypt of the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty of 1838, by which British merchants were given the right to enter any part of the Ottoman dominion and buy from the natives the products of the soil and of the industry of the country. A few years later all that remained of the vast industrial structure, which had cost millions to create, was a quantity of rusting machinery in old, deserted buildings, scattered throughout the country. The attempt to make Egypt an industrial country had failed.
