Imagined Empires (22 page)

The Société Générale des Sucreries was not the only capitalist enterprise working in Qina. The Agricultural Bank of Egypt was also operating in the province and bringing about similar effects. Lord Cromer founded this bank himself at the turn of the twentieth century, working closely with influential capitalists in London. When Cromer arrived in Egypt, part of the general debt crises that he had to resolve was the indebtedness of thousands of peasants to European creditors and their inability to repay their debts. Applying strict principles of the market economy, the Cromer administration refused to bail out the peasants, asserting that this was a matter of private capital in which it should not intervene; the government promised “de ne s'immiscer en aucune façon dan le réglement des affaires privées” (not to involve itself in any fashion in the regulation of private business).
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Throughout the rest of the 1880s and in 1890s, the issue of the “indebtedness of the peasants [
fellaheen
]” continued to appear frequently in Cromer's annual reports, until he finally suggested that foreign private capital should play a role in resolving their problems.
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Because the debt crisis mainly originated from high-interest credit, Cromer proposed establishing a bank to give peasants new loans but at lower interest rates so they could pay off their old debts. In 1899, he tested the idea first by opening an agricultural loan department in the National Bank of Egypt, founded only one year earlier by British capitalists. In 1902, Cromer
registered this department as a separate company, the Agricultural Bank of Egypt. British capitalists were the main shareholders of this company, particularly Sir Ernest Cassel, who maintained good connections with British bankers, such as the Rothschilds, and foreign bankers in Egypt, such as the Suarés brothers. The supposedly liberal administration directly intervened in the economy to assist the bank taking off. Cromer approved a government guarantee that investments in the bank would receive a minimum return of 4 percent. He also authorized the use of government tax clerks to manage the bank's branches in villages throughout Egypt.
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When the Agricultural Bank arrived in Qina Province, thousands of peasants mortgaged their lands to it, hoping that the new inflow of European capital would ameliorate their deteriorating living conditions.
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But the great expectations of the province's peasants were soon shattered when they once again lost their lands on a large scale. For example, for many years, farmers in the village of Hasanat suffered from various crises, including the flooding Nile that drowned their houses and harvests in 1887. After the colonial administration had ignored them for so long, the bank seemed to be the last venue of hope. In their urgent petition to Cairo, Hasanat's peasants said, “The bank appeared, with the government partaking in its administration, and we were under the illusion that if we dealt with it, we would . . . see good financial results.”
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The Agricultural Bank did grant loans to these peasants, as well as in many other villages in Qina, but within five years the bank was already confiscating peasants' lands and evicting them.

The bank took peasants who defaulted to the mixed court in Cairo, where many European judges heard cases that involved Europeans and Egyptians.
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The court ruled for the company to seize the land and evict the peasants. In these modern courts, European and modernized Egyptian judges heard the cases of Qina Province's villagers and applied new civil laws and banking regulations. The southern peasants were, without a doubt, unfamiliar with these foreign legal codes and probably had never before been to Cairo—the big capital where their cases were heard without their presence. After seven thousand farmers from Hasanat lost their small plots to the bank, they complained in a petition sent to the government in Cairo:

The bank's treatment of us was harsh to the worst extent. . . . We mortgaged our land to the Agricultural Bank at an interest rate of 9 percent. . . . As for our delay in paying, it is because of the aforementioned reasons [low Nile inundation and bad weather]. . . . When the bank started to dispossess us of our land, it made us pay fees in court that exceeded half of what we originally
owed. It already confiscated the land and took hold of it, and the people are now landless and have nobody to rescue them. . . . The entirety of the village's fields, 1,300
faddan
s [acres], are now confiscated by the Agricultural Bank . . . and in the meantime God afflicted us with another distress, that is, the existence of the [foreign] water and the sugar companies in Naj‘ Hammadi. . . . We suffer from hunger, our children become orphans, we lose our honor, our houses become ruins, and we are forced to migrate.
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The farmers of the villages of Armant, Khuzam, Nagada, and Isna had an even worse experience with the bank. While carrying the burden of their bank loans, they faced recurring years of low Nile inundation that left them with poor harvests, as well as high taxes, huge crop shortages, dramatically higher seed prices, and a sugar company that purchased their harvest at unfairly low rates. Furthermore, two foreign water and fertilizer companies had established monopolies in these two commodities in the province. While the water company was intolerably late in installing irrigation machinery, the fertilizer company provided peasants with services at excessively high prices. Qina's peasants lamented that these conditions, coupled with being evicted from their land by the Agricultural Bank, had left their families and children in a state of complete misery.
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The Agricultural Bank soon showed signs of failure and collapse, but the colonial administration immediately stepped in to bail it out—unconditionally. The number of peasants borrowing from the bank declined precipitously, likely due to a creeping lack of confidence in the institution. While the bank had 106,373 borrowers in its first few years, this number drastically declined, reaching only 47,081 in 1907. During this crisis, the bank's shareholders in London gratefully asserted that they relied, “not only [on] the financial guarantees of the Egyptian Government, but also on the definite support and encouragement given by that government to the enterprise.”
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In 1906, the Egyptian government guaranteed 3.5 percent of the debentures issued by the bank and allocated 6,570,000 British pounds from the state budget for that purpose. In fact, it was only the large shareholders, holding more than 150,000 British pounds, who would benefit from these advantages.
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Meanwhile, the government applied a strict free-market policy of nonintervention when it came to the Egyptian peasantry. Cairo's offices received numerous collective petitions from Qina's farmers protesting their evictions but did nothing to help them.
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Finally, in 1910, the Parliament suggested that the government initiate negotiations with the Agricultural Bank and other lenders to assist the debtors. The government responded, “The government
has made sure that the bank uses its authority moderately against the debtors. The bank is now studying whether there is a way to decrease the debtors' burden relatively. As for the government, it is now working on improving the agricultural conditions in the country, upon which its economic welfare is based, and believes that this is the best cure for the current conditions rather than its interference in the private deals of the banks.”
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The bank's shareholders in London blocked the only legal exit for the peasants of Qina. In 1912, the government was considering a proposal to modify articles in the civil and commercial code of the mixed courts that would ban the seizure of indebted small properties. From their headquarters at 57½ Old Road Street, London, the committee members of the Agricultural Bank sent an urgent letter to the colonial administration in Egypt with a long memorandum attached opposing the proposal.
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They argued that they had initially embarked on this enterprise because of the government guarantees and support and declared, “We believe that the proposed legislation would be detrimental, rather than beneficial, to the interests of the Egyptian fellaheen.”
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The efforts of the shareholders in London met with great success. For several years to follow, hundreds more female and male peasants in the impoverished villages of Qina Province lost their small plots to the almighty bank.
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IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

Years of peripheralization, dispossession, debt, and poverty soon brought about a devastating environmental effect in Qina Province: a cholera epidemic. Cholera had invaded Egypt in its modern history at least twice before, once between 1830 and 1840, during the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, and another time in the mid-1860s. During the first outbreak, Upper Egypt was spared. Some Cairo residents even fled the capital for the safety of Upper Egypt. The second time cholera hit Egypt, while the informal empire was at work in the north and the marginalization of the south had already begun, the epidemic reached Upper Egypt. Qina Province reportedly lost 250 persons in one day.
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Under the colonial regime, official reports stated that cholera invaded Egypt in 1895–96, but it had found its way to Qina years before that.

In 1884, Mustapha Agha, the British consular agent at Luxor, attempted to draw attention to several environmental catastrophes he foresaw in Qina. Lord Cromer's administration did not modernize the irrigation system,
which affected the subsistence harvest of the peasants and put them into heavy debt. Cholera completed their growing misery:

The majority of the natives here are suffering a great deal on account of their misery. They continually subsist on bread made of maize and onions. . . . The causes for all this are numerous: 1. The produce grown by them being barely sufficient for payment of the Government land-taxes and for their maintenance. . . . 3. The epizooty (cattle disease). . . . 4. Being dispossessed in former times of cash and cereals. . . . They borrowed money at high rate of interest for the payment of the monthly installment for taxes and refunded in cereals at low prices. . . . The feddan [acre] generally yields from 1½ to 2½ ardabes, of which a portion is given to the creditors and the other portion to the Government for land taxes. The produce of the lands irrigated by means of the Shadoof [wooden water lifter] and Sakeyehs [shaykhs] which the natives subsist upon, is not sufficient for the payment of land taxes . . . the cholera and the epizooty reduced them to the lowest ebb.
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The government, nevertheless, did not recognize the disturbing news, and the province went ignored. Cholera lingered in Qina throughout the following years. In 1902, the local administration declared conclusively that “the cholera epidemic is spreading in numerous villages of the province.”
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One major factor precipitated the appearance of the epidemic in Qina: a lack of clean water for the lower classes. British physicians and sanitary officials of the time had already detected a direct correlation between cholera and the quality of the water supply. One official report stated, “If further evidence were needed to prove that cholera is chiefly a water-borne disease, the late epidemic in Egypt afforded ample.” The report continued, in reference to solving the crisis, that “during the period since [the] 1895–1896 epidemic of cholera a certain amount of work has been done in the larger provincial towns to provide the water supply with as much protection as possible from pollution, and some have been supplied from deep tube wells. In none of these towns did the disease assume an epidemic form.”
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Unfortunately, the villages of Qina were not among the lucky areas saved by the colonial regime.

In 1880, the Egyptian government privatized water resources by giving a concession to the Cairo Water Company—a shareholding company managed by a foreign investor.
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According to the concession, the company was to install free public taps in urban areas in an attempt to provide clean water. The company installed the spigots and the Department of Public Works footed the bill.
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The company concentrated its work in Cairo, the Delta, and Middle Egypt but neglected Upper Egypt. Thousands of pounds were spent
from the country's budget to equip Cairo with free taps and improve the quality of drinking water, which paid off when cholera broke out. A 1902 report asserted that “the steps taken . . . to prevent the spread of the disease [cholera] in the town of Cairo, were especially successful.”
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The Delta received similar attention, followed by Middle Egypt, which reduced the severity of the epidemic in the north. For instance, the number of infected cases in Fayoum, south of Cairo, remarkably decreased between 1896 and 1902.
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The Cairo Water Company only started to pay attention to Qina Province after the epidemic had already spread. Even once the company did begin projects in Upper Egypt, it provided purified water only for the towns of Qina and Luxor, where state officials and Europeans resided, and ignored tens of surrounding villages. The local committee of the province, consisting of the corrupt landed elite, made most decisions about where to invite the company to undertake public works and install taps. Once the water company installed new systems in Qina, the capital city of the province, water quality finally improved and this successfully halted the disease: “At Keneh [Qina] . . . , which formerly drew its water from wells and stagnant back-water of the Nile, an engine, with pump, etc., was erected about eighteen months ago on the Nile. The result of this was very remarkable, only one case of cholera occurring in this town of 27,478 inhabitants whereas during the epidemic of 1896 no less than 422 cases were registered.”
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Elsewhere, the disease severely affected the neglected villages. As a 1902 report attested, “During the cholera epidemic, the inhabitants of Keneh enjoyed immunity from the disease, whilst the surrounding villages were infected.”
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