Imagined Empires (21 page)

Another stunning example is Muhammad ‘Umar Bey, a Parliament member from 1896 to 1901. He came from a large clan in the village of Abu Manna‘; and his clan was part of the precolonial co-opted elite, clients of the deposed khedive who had served in his army and bureaucracy. Members of
this family held various prestigious positions under the ancien régime, including as army colonels, members of the Supreme Court in Cairo, vice-governors of Qina and Isna Provinces, and governors of Girga and Asyut Provinces.
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As for Muhammad ‘Umar himself, he was the son of a former province governor and was heavily involved in moneylending to small peasants, forcefully confiscating their lands when they defaulted. Through this, ‘Umar managed to expand the agricultural properties of his influential family. Peasants complained to the Cabinet of Ministers in Cairo about his unjust deeds and illicit representation of them, but their desperate voices met with silence on the part of the colonial regime.
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The reformed Parliament resumed business as usual, primarily discussing issues pertaining to cotton and agricultural development in the Delta. The laws and decrees that the Parliament passed favored the north with public projects, ignoring the south and even muting the voices of its representatives. In irrigation, for example, under the supervision of the British inspector general of the Ministry of Public Works, the government undertook extensive projects in the Delta to transform the irrigation system from the traditional basin method to the modernized perennial method during the 1880s.
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Meanwhile, the Delta elite sabotaged calls to implement the same system in Upper Egyptian provinces, including Qina. In 1893, a representative from Upper Egypt finally raised the irrigation issue and submitted a proposal to extend public works to Upper Egypt, insisting that southern provinces were deprived of water for summer cultivation and their annual income was not anywhere near that of the cotton-producing north. The northern members not only unanimously vetoed the proposal but also decided not to inform the government about them on grounds that the state's budget would not cover the projects' high costs.
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Projects of modern irrigation in Upper Egypt were limited only to the plantations of the khedive and the royal family. In 1895, Lord Cromer received a report revealing the impact of the uneven irrigation policies of his regime on the peasantry of the south. The report stated, “The peasants cannot raise cotton or sugar-cane except to a very limited extent by means of irrigation by hand (shadoofs) because their lands are not embanked; they are however tantalized by seeing splendid crops of both these profitable staples grown in their neighborhood on the Daira estates [the khedive's plantations] and where the farms are embanked, and where steam pumps furnished plenty of water.”
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Cromer did not make significant attempts to improve the situation, and Qina Province was particularly neglected. In 1904, the peasants of
the Isna, one of the province's towns, petitioned the government in Cairo, complaining about the lack of water pumps in their villages, which was causing great hardship for farmers and plunging their lives into misery.
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Another example of how the new Parliament ignored the needs of Upper Egypt in public works can be seen in the development of the railways, primarily to transport goods. While railways were widely expanded in the Delta, Alexandria, and Port Said throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Qina Province went without railroads until nearly the end of the century. From the mid-1800s on, railways were heavily used in the north to ship cotton from the Delta fields to the port of Alexandria, where it was exported to Britain by way of the Mediterranean Sea. The peoples of Upper Egypt, however, would not see this modern transportation technology for a long time. In addition to the main railways, which the government extended in the north and paid for with public funds, the Delta Parliament members promulgated a Railways Law that allowed the construction of short private railroads at the expense of the plantation owner.
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The law meant nothing to the elite of Qina Province. They could not build their own railways, because they lacked capital—provinces like theirs did not enjoy the cotton profits that the north did.

In 1890, the Department of Railways submitted a proposal to the Cabinet of Ministers requesting 3,000 Egyptian pounds to prepare a plan for railroad lines in Upper Egypt, one of which would cross through Qina Province and its town of Luxor, another from the city of Qina to the province's Red Sea port of Qusayr. The Ministry of Public Works rejected the Qina–Qusayr line, insisting that its profits would not match its cost. The ministry thought that the Luxor line would be more beneficial, given the foreign communities that had settled in this area of heavy tourism. But in the end, the ministry also rejected the Luxor line under the pretext that more research was needed to ensure the rail line's profitability. A British-led financial committee in the Department of Railways vetoed funding this research. The project never saw the light of day.
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Aside from a limited line for mail service, Qina Province lacked railways for many years to come. Ironically, the colonial administration approved a railway project only when a French-British sugar company proposed it for its private purposes in the late-1890s.
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As for taxation, in February 1886 the Parliament members from Upper Egypt proposed modifying the timetable of tax collection in their southern provinces, a proposal that was entirely ignored. According to the government's preset schedule, landowners paid the required annual tax in monthly installments, but two-thirds of it was to be collected over the three months
of the winter grain harvest. The Upper Egyptian parliamentarians' proposal argued that “the situation in Upper Egypt is apparent to the public: its crops are not sufficient to fulfill the required taxes and its population lives in extreme misery and poverty. The government should consider the comfort of the people and what benefits them in modifying the tax timetable.”
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At the same time, the Parliament members from the Delta made a similar request for Lower Egypt. The council submitted the two proposals to the colonial government, but the government considered only the Delta's and completely ignored that of Upper Egypt. It did not even refer to the southern request in its correspondence with the Parliament. A prominent Delta Parliament member, ‘Abd al-Ghaffar Pasha of Munufiyya Province, attempted to justify the colonial administration's position by suggesting that it might have thought it reasonable to collect the largest portion of taxes during the grain harvest time, because this was the main crop cultivated in Upper Egypt. In the meantime, Upper Egyptian members did not persist. Six months later, the Cabinet of Ministers issued its final decree: approving the Delta's request and rejecting Upper Egypt's. Moreover, two years later, the Parliament passed a modification of Upper Egypt's tax timetable that was exactly the opposite of what Upper Egyptians had requested: doubling the amount of tax collected during the winter harvest months. It was the prominent Delta Parliament members who voted for this decree, whereas Upper Egyptian members were totally silent.
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While he applied these conspicuously discriminatory policies, Lord Cromer nonetheless exclaimed in his 1889 trip up the Nile about the “remoteness” of Upper Egypt and the absence of European faces there—a problem that he would try hard to fix in the following years.

A FAILED MARKET TO BAILOUT

Lord Cromer lent considerable support to the bourgeois project of creating a modern nation-state in Egypt, but one fundamental problem impeded this goal: the lack of a unified market. The early colonial administration in Egypt tolerated the nationalistic rhetoric that the northern members perpetuated inside the reformed Parliament, and Cromer himself used the term
nation
to describe the Egyptians.
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The empire supported this project because a modern nation-state was a perfect mechanism for completely divorcing the new Oriental colony from the remaining influence of the Ottoman Empire, to
which Egypt had belonged for the previous three centuries. Thus, Cromer envisioned a non-Muslim identity for this state, in the hope of cutting old ties with the Ottoman sultan and also ensuring the incorporation of foreign communities residing in Egypt. He authoritatively argued, “I stated in the last Report I wrote from Egypt that it is well for . . . every nation to have an ideal. The ideal of the Moslem patriot is, in my opinion, incapable of realization. The ideal which I substitute in its place is extremely difficult of attainment, but if the Egyptians of the rising generation will have the wisdom and foresight to work cordially and patiently, in co-operation with European sympathizers, to attain it, it may possibly in time be found capable of realization.”
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It was still problematic for Cromer that Upper Egypt was not fully incorporated into the imperial economy, receiving significant influxes of foreign capital as the north did. Only a few years after Cromer's first visit to Upper Egypt did European faces start to appear in the remotest place in the south—Qina. Europeans were brought to Qina by two enormous capitalist enterprises that had found their way to the province: an agricultural bank and a sugar company. Neither of them was a success story.

In the last few years of the 1890s, agents of the Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffineries d'Égypte, a joint Anglo-French sugar venture, swept through Qina's villages and towns to buy thousands of acres of sugarcane and establish large mills equipped with the latest technology for refining sugar. The Anglo-French firm purchased land from the Daira Saniyya, plantations owned by the royal family in the province, after the colonial administration forced the khedive to privatize this land in an attempt to solve the foreign debt crisis. This resulted in one of the most dreadful episodes of widespread land loss in the province's history.

In May 1898, all thirty-five thousand farmers in the villages of Armant, Maris, Rayyaniyya, and Ruzayqat sent an urgent telegram to Cromer and the Parliament in Cairo to complain about the sale of the Daira farms where they worked. The peasants insisted that this was their own land, as the royal family had confiscated it from their ancestors, reducing them to mere tenants and even turning many into landless laborers in the royal sugar factories. The farmers heard the news that the foreign company had purchased the Daira's land, which meant that their leases would be terminated. The government also sold every asset the peasants owned on this land—including their cattle, houses, waterwheels, and machinery—to the foreign company. Peasants proposed instead to purchase this land at the prices the government set, but
by paying installments at a reasonable rate of interest. Cairo never responded to this proposal, and the Parliament ruled it outside its area of jurisdiction.
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The company finalized the deal and commenced work.

The Société Générale des Sucreries built a mill in the town of Naj‘ Hammadi, turning it into a rising urban center where numerous dispossessed laborers worked either for the company or in projects associated with it. The sugar company also developed basic infrastructure, financed by foreign and government capital, in order to facilitate its business. In 1897, the government in Cairo granted the company a contract to construct narrow railways to transport sugarcane to the factory's premises from surrounding farms.
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At the same time, a Paris-based construction company worked on building a bridge over the Nile for the railroad, which later became one of the largest bridges in the province.

Landless workers from the province were employed in this bridge-building project, but the construction company's safety and protection measures were so poor that many of them were injured or killed at the construction site. In one incident, the bridge's cylinder fell on thirteen workers, killing them instantly. Unfamiliar with European laws, the grieving families of the dead workers had to hire an expensive French lawyer to sue the company for compensation. The company had paid these families only 200 Egyptian pounds, but the lawyer negotiated to add another 600 Egyptian pounds. This was still much less than what they had hoped. The French company did not respond to the high amount requested, as its lawyer argued that these were low-wage workers who were worthy of little compensation. The dispute went on for months, until a telegram from Paris offered the families a small payment. They were forced to accept the offer after Cairo's intervention and pressure.
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Unexpectedly, in 1905, the sugar company declared bankruptcy only a few years after its formation. The colonial administration decided to bail it out, intentionally violating the basic rule of the liberal market—that the state should not interfere in the economy. The company, in fact, was rewarded for its bankruptcy. It “was given a new lease of life under fresh auspices, with diminished charges and additional working capital,” said an official report. “The Government redeemed its promise of assistance by taking over the company's railway system at a cost of 400,000
l.
”
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The colonial administration's support for a failing capitalist enterprise went on for the following decade. The government set low prices on sugarcane for the benefit of the company and at the expense of Qina Province's peasants. Suffering from poverty, food shortages, and debt during World War I, thousands of sugarcane farmers in
the villages of Armant, Maris, Mata‘na, and Dab‘iyya sent a petition to Cairo demanding an increase in prices. They cried,

Our houses are ruined, we lack the necessary food, and our debts are accumulating because of the government's oppression. We have been crying out to the government for more than a year but nobody listens to our cries. . . . While the prices of cotton and other crops multiplied . . . we grow sugarcane and the sugar company pays us the same old price, 3 piasters per
qantar
. . . . The war conditions force us to purchase farming necessities at high prices. The prices of coal for the irrigation engines, oil, iron, and fertilizers multiplied three and four times. The wages of seasonal laborers and [rents of] camels multiply because the military authorities [British Army] recruited many of them for its operations. We buy the grain to feed our children at a doubled price. Thus, how could it be fair that the company purchases our sugarcane at the same price set before the war? The company insists that it is the government that presets the price and it is not willing to pay more. The truth is that the price of sugar in Egypt now is half or even a third its price all over the world. . . . The current price of sugarcane is not sufficient to cultivate, and we have failed to pay the taxes and the rents of the lands to their owners.
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