Imagined Empires (16 page)

In 1858, an uprising led by
falatiyya
broke out in Isna and forced Sa‘id Pasha to reform the entire administrative system in the province. The bandits apparently threatened or directly attacked many Europeans, who reacted by randomly shooting at the inhabitants. As usual, after completing the operation the rebels escaped to the mountains, where they hid from the government. The police failed to arrest them, and the governor of Isna lost his job for such incompetence. Sa‘id Pasha became so concerned about political unrest in Qina that he reformed the province's administrative system by merging Qina and Isna Provinces under one governor and replacing all Turkish district chiefs with Egyptian ones. To ease his task of inspecting for disobedience inside the newly created province—extending in great length along the two banks of the Nile—the new governor was granted a steamship for his own personal use. In addition, a special army was brought from the
north and put under the new governor's command. Sa‘id Pasha affirmed that the primary task of the new governor was ensuring the safety of Europeans and guarding public security. As for Europeans who might commit crimes, such as shooting at the province's inhabitants, the pasha added that they should be handled gently and escorted to their respective consuls.
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The story did not end here. The pasha's new system would not entirely succeed at subjugating the rebels. Subaltern resentment against European merchants would continue, reaching its peak moment in the 1864 revolt.

PRIVATE PROPERTY, LOSING PROPERTY

The second pillar of the alleged market modernity that Qina Province encountered was the reformed law of private property in agricultural land. The advent of these modern codes in the province only helped elites to win property rights, while peasants lost them. The codes expanded the propertied class in Qina to include Turkish and native government bureaucrats, Europeans, Coptic agents of European consuls, village notables, and shari‘a law scholars. These beneficiaries accumulated vast plantations at the expense of thousands of dispossessed peasants, who were in the process turned into seasonal laborers on these plantations. The village of Salimiyya, where the 1864 revolt later erupted, fell under the grip of many prominent members of the growing propertied class.

Sa‘id Pasha promulgated the new land code of 1858, presenting it as a great step toward the country's modernization. Before this law, the lands of all villages were theoretically the property of the state. After Muhammad ‘Ali died, and under the idle, decentralized regime of his grandson ‘Abbas Pasha, provincial bureaucrats seized state-owned lands from peasants and grew as a new class of large landowners.
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Sa‘id's law, known as al-La'iha al-Sa‘idiyya, was the product of internal pressures by provincial bureaucrats and village notables to consolidate and legalize their properties, coupled with the empire's advocacy of private property as a sign of modernity.
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In drafting the new law, Sa‘id Pasha, in fact, consulted with the governors of Upper and Lower Egypt and with high-ranking bureaucrats, who were mainly interested in consolidating their new properties. The law was finally issued, regulating ownership of three main categories of land:
kharajiya,
or common peasants' land;
ab‘adiyya
plantations, or the previously uncultivated state-owned land leased to government officials for reclamation at a reduced tax rate; and
‘uhda
plantations, or land that the state confiscated from runaway peasants who had fled after failing to pay taxes or to escape corvée labor.

The new legal code finally granted the bureaucrats absolute property rights to the
ab‘adiyya
plantations. It also opened the door for sales of more of those plantations to government officials, Europeans, and whoever could reclaim them and pay taxes on them. Public auctions were held all year in Qina Province to lease or sell
ab‘adiyya
plantations, and bureaucrats won thousands of acres by outbidding peasants. In one auction in the village of Salimiyya, the governor of Qina won a plantation of about two hundred acres. Some peasants in the village bid against him, claiming that this land was originally theirs, but they lost the auction to the influential governor.
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More important, the new law gave bureaucrats and village shaykhs property rights to the ‘
uhda
state-owned plantations seized from runaway peasants. It decreed that if a peasant was proved absent from his land for three years, he would lose his property rights, and whoever held and cultivated it for five years would gain the right to keep it. Peasants returned to their villages to find their lands confiscated and registered under other people's names, usually state officials. Whole villages were transformed into
‘uhda
plantations, and the new code gave the administrators of those plantations absolute ownership rights to them.
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The governor of the city of Isna, ‘Abd al-Ghafur Effendi, owned three plantations of hundreds of acres each. The effendi maintained a religious and pious lifestyle, as he “abstained from mundane matters and sought charitable deeds” by funding the construction of the great mosque of Qus. Nonetheless, he was a corrupt official who took advantage of his position to employ local laborers and use slaves without paying them wages and also to delay, or completely avoid, paying taxes. For instance, he drafted slave workers from the neighboring gunpowder factory, owned by the state, to perform temporary jobs on his land.
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Furthermore, he acted as a moneylender, giving out loans to peasants and subsequently appropriating their lands and evicting them when they failed to repay their debts. Outraged by such actions, the farmers of Karnak, who had mortgaged four hundred acres to the effendi and had already paid back part of their debt in cash and in-kind, raised many petitions to the central government to stop his attempts to illicitly evict them. Other peasants avenged their lost properties by less legal means; Farshut peasants released their cattle and sheep to graze in the effendi's fields and damage part of his harvest.
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As the owner of several plantations of thousands of acres, Bishara ‘Ubayd, a Copt who was the agent of the French consul for many years, was without
a doubt the wealthiest person in the province. His medium-size and large plantations expanded in almost every village in Qina. In public auctions of only one year, 1862, Bishara purchased 1,654 acres in Qus, followed by another 1,166 in seven different villages. The village of Salimiyya strongly felt Bishara's presence, as he purchased more than 500 acres there. State officials in the province authorized him to appoint new mayors (
‘umda
s) for the villages where he owned most of the land. The mayors' primary job was to force the peasants to evacuate and deliver their plots to the new landlord. In Salimiyya, Bishara hired laborers to work the plantations for low wages, insufficient even to pay for their taxes. Furthermore, Bishara established control over a significant share of the province's trade, as he owned commercial boats and collected grain from wholesalers to ship north.
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A small number of Europeans owned vast plantations in Qina and enjoyed immense authority in the province. The French administrator of the sulfur mine of Qina,
khawaja
Monier, was probably the largest foreign landowner in the province. In 1862, Monier bid at auction for a 3,318-acre plantation in a district rich in sugarcane fields. He paid a very low price of only three piasters per acre. He also made a small purchase of another 11 acres from the peasants of the same district, but he had problems with this transaction. The peasants apparently complained to the government that he forced or tricked them into selling the land. The state declined the peasants' claim and deemed the Frenchman's property deed valid.
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Monier resided in a palace in the city of Luxor, to the north of his plantations, and he appropriated a piece of land in the same city to build storehouses, horse stables, a garden, and a waterwheel. He drafted local construction workers and artisans to erect these buildings without paying them wages. Some of the city's inhabitants disputed his possession, asserting that the land was their property. Investigations revealed that he had obtained a permit from local state officials. In the middle of the dispute, Monier contracted an illness and had to travel north to receive treatment. Probably happy with receiving this news, the inhabitants of the city thought that he had gone back to his country to die there, but he soon returned to the province to buy more land.
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The new law also allowed native village notables, particularly mayors and shaykhs, to join this new class of large landowners. As the village shaykhs and mayors seized the land of absent peasants and actively participated in public auctions, winning medium-size plantations, they also extended credit to peasants as an indirect way to eventually seize their plots when the chances came.
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The village of Salimiyya witnessed one of the most acute
cases of conflict over mortgaged lands between creditors, who were village rulers, and indebted peasants. The village mayor, Hasan ‘Abd Allah, and his father and uncles held 337 acres that peasants mortgaged to them for cash and grain. The heirs of the owners now claimed their right to the land, as they were ready to pay back the mortgage. The mayor not only refused to return the land but also petitioned for guaranteed government support in his case.
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Shari‘a scholars also constituted a new class of medium-size landowners in this process. The regime rewarded them for their collaboration, after the government issued new shari‘a law provisions and
fatwas
supporting the new civil land code and bestowing legitimacy upon it.
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The same year the land code was promulgated, in 1858, Sa‘id Pasha granted Shaykh Muhammad Abu Shanab, a Hanafi jurist following the state's school of Islamic law, a plantation of one hundred acres in Qina Province. Another shaykh, Shaykh ‘Uthman Taha, owned thirty-seven acres in Farshut that he rented to peasants.
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Corrupt shari‘a judges, particularly in Qina Province, were rewarded for their collaboration with the provincial bureaucracy because they registered new land titles in the Islamic court, as it was the only place to obtain property deeds.
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The wealth of shari'a judges in the province was second only to that of bureaucrats, and when the judges died they left their heirs great fortunes.
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The plantation owners managed their land by using dispossessed peasants as tenants or seasonal laborers. As tenants, these peasants held sharecropping contracts that stipulated that they give a set percentage of the harvest every year to the landlord, who sometimes provided them with capital and machinery.
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Also, hundreds of landless farmers in each village gathered every season, sought jobs on plantations near and far, and then returned to their villages with their small wages. The peasants in the village where Husayn Bey, the vice chief of the district of Qus, had his plantation, boycotted the temporary jobs he offered because he frequently annexed their trees, waterwheels, and pieces of other farms around his properties. Thus, his plantation manager had to recruit seasonal laborers from nearby villages to work on the plantation. The peasant laborers tilled the land and also worked in the sugar mills attached to it. Some worked for the whole year, while others worked for only one or two seasons. The plantation manager paid them their wages in wheat, maize, and beans and in small amounts of cash, which they needed to pay the state dues. The cash wages the peasant laborers received never provided them with enough capital to save and buy back their lost lands.
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MINES,
KHAWAJA
S, AND WORKERS

Foreign experts and capitalist enterprises also quickly found their way to Qina Province, carrying the dream of modernity to the south. But their utter incompetence and inefficiency were only equaled by the misery they inflicted on the laborers of the province. The liberal market created by informal imperialism again failed here, breaking down the legend of an ever-successful European capitalism in the nineteenth century—a myth that many prominent economic historians present as conventional wisdom.
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The globalization of the informal empire pressed the Egyptian regime to search for sources of energy to operate new technologies, such as steamships, railways, modern factories, and much more. It was the age of coal. It was also the age of “trust” in “foreign experts” to deliver modernity.
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The coal mines of Qina Province were essential sites of venture capitalism, where European experts were entrusted with the passage to the modern. As the resistance of Qina's oppressed workers in the mines mounted, the venture rapidly failed.

In 1820, Louis Michel, a French scientist, suggested to Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha that he should search for soft coal in Upper Egypt. When Michel had come with the French expedition to Egypt more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1798, the scientist had heard that there were potentially soft coal deposits there. At the time, Muhammad ‘Ali powered his modern manufacturing only with oxen imported from the Sudan, so he welcomed the idea. The pasha hired Michel as the chief commander of a search mission in the deserts of Qina Province and supported him with the facilities needed to launch mining. Initially, the project was rather limited, as Michel was sent to the excavation sites with only one assistant. The project did not yield fruit for many years, yet it continued to receive the state's support through more funds, miners, and tools. Some Austrian engineers came to join the project but they were discouraged from journeying to Upper Egypt by the excessively hot weather. The state kept hiring one French commander after another with no satisfying results, until the pasha died without ever seeing one good piece of soft coal from those mines.
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