While the French saw the Canal as an opportunity to recover lost influence in Egypt, the British saw it as a threat. Their foreign policy centered on the defense of India, and the Canal complicated the picture. Britain already had an impregnable “India Route”: around the coast of Africa. She also had the “Overland Route” through Turkey and Persia. Why divert British shipping through a narrow canal that could be easily blockaded?
The Conservative premier Lord Palmerston derided de Lesseps as a con artist, tricking “small people into buying small shares.” All Britain wanted from Egypt, said Palmerston, was “mutton chops and post horses” along the road to India. A patriot to the wisps of his sideburns, Palmerston believed in Free Trade and gunboat diplomacy, not territorial conquest. He saw the Canal as a French conspiracy, “founded on intentions hostile to British views,” and a step toward “the future severance of Egypt from Turkey.”8
As if to confirm Palmerston’s suspicions, the French emperor Louis Napoleon stepped in as the Canal’s patron. When the first shovels of sand turned in 1859, Britain realized that its greatest rival would soon sit astride the fastest route to the East. This forced a sudden revision of strategy: For the sake of British India and the balance of trade, Egypt and the Suez Canal must be prevented from falling under hostile influence, Arab or European. In turn, this produced a second strategic creep. As in ancient times, Egypt’s stability rested on the annual Nile flood. Therefore, the River Nile was integral to the security of the Canal. So were its sources, although it was not yet clear where exactly in central Africa they lay.
APART FROM BEING MEDITERRANEAN, Egypt was also an African country, and in 1869 Britain had no African policy. It had strands of interest—strategic, moral, and economic—and a sweeping ignorance. Britain possessed several ports on the African coast, but they all faced outward; they were stations on the India Route, or bases for the interdiction of slavery. Luxuries from the African hinterland arrived through Arab intermediaries. For centuries, Europeans had found this arrangement so congenial, and the climate so terrible, that they showed little interest in the African interior.
Three factors disturbed this casual arrangement. The first was strategic: the Canal, Egypt, and the India Route. The second was moral. Britain had turned from one of Atlantic slavery’s most enthusiastic practitioners to its most earnest scourge. The Royal Navy blocked the Atlantic trade so successfully that in 1868, the court established at Cape Town for the trial of slaver captains closed for lack of business. Having triumphed over the Christian-run trade from West Africa, British abolitionists turned on the other great slave trade, the Muslim-run trade from East and North Africa.
The abolitionists were overwhelmingly Evangelical. They attributed Africa’s poverty, ignorance, and slavery to the “degraded” state of the Africans and the “false religions” of paganism and Islam. The answer was the “Three Cs”: Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization. British history showed that an economy geared to slavery could be redeemed by a simple appeal to self-interest. Once the Africans had been converted, clothed, and incorporated into Britain’s global economy, slaving would naturally give way to “legitimate trade.” The abolition of slavery, and its sister cause, the conversion of Africa, would be enabled by Free Trade.
The third factor blended economic optimism and Evangelical urgency with another aspect of the Victorian mentality. Africa was a mystery, and this, the age of Darwin, Sherlock Holmes, and the crossword puzzle, was the great age of problem solving. Even the Africans had no idea how many Great Lakes their continent contained, which mountain was the highest, which river the longest. This blankness was an affront to science. For, apart from being the age of popular religion, this was also an age of popular science.
Pious explorers walked into the steaming forests and disappeared for years. They emerged skeletal wrecks, bearing the tablets of a national drama: tales of months lost to fever dreams, of native porters evangelized in forest clearings, of natural wonders never seen by a white man. They also reported the devastation of slavery: children chained like animals in convoy for the coast, highways littered with bleached bones, the weak dying by the road.
Each report caused a fresh burst of interest and outrage. Never before had a public been so literate, so deluged in newsprint, so connected to the outside world. Britain’s industrial and military power already reached around the globe. Now its citizens took part in the march of civilization without leaving their armchairs. The adventurers and evangelists became a familiar cast of favorites, their names coupled like music hall double acts: Burton and Speke, who argued in public about who discovered what; Sam and Florence Baker, who most certainly did not; Henry Stanley, the American self-publicist, and David Livingstone, his Scottish straight man.
When the hero returned, a further burst of glory awaited: the packed lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, the newspaper editorial calling for more money and more discoveries, and the private audience with an admiring Queen Victoria. Then came the apotheosis of Victorian celebrity, akin to the raising of a monolith among the ancients: the book. Great bricks of memoir clad in red pigskin, they mixed flora and fauna with God and geography. Every reader could share the first sight of a new Great Lake. Folding out the soft linen map, he could trace the paths of slavery, the hut where the burning chill of malaria first struck and, discreetly, the village where batches of underdressed native girls had been offered as brides. In the 1850s, a best-seller sold 10,000 copies; in 1853, Dickens’s Bleak House sold 35,000 in its first year. In 1857 alone, Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Explorations sold 70,000.9
The missionaries and explorers agreed that a strong dose of the “Three Cs” would cure Africa. The values seemed universal, the debate limited to deciding how vigorously the light should be poured onto the Dark Continent. No one consulted the Africans.
This was Britain’s interest in Africa: abolitionism and mapmaking, Evangelism and strategy, the coastal ports and the India Route, the ivory that Britain coveted for the piano keys in the parlor and the billiard balls at the club, the slavery that it abhorred. Little seemed urgent, unless to evangelists accounting souls lost and saved, and little seemed significant, until the Canal arrived, and securing the Canal, and with it Egypt and the Nile, became so crucial. After 1869, these African threads began to tangle and knot, until they could cause the dispatch of armies and the death of a hero, the rise of a messiah and the fall of a government, the spread of the British pink across the map of the world and an arms race that threatened the peace of Europe, a Scramble for Africa and the subjection of millions of African Muslims to a Christian empire.
It was a long way from Port Said to Lake Victoria.
1
Ismail’s Dream
1869–73
Ismail, Khedive of Egypt.
Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly…. Rash enthusiast of change, beware! Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours?
—Thomas Carlyle, History of the French Revolution (1837)1
THE KHEDIVE’S RECEPTION ROOM was more the office of a secretary than a prince. Pink cotton curtains blocked the Cairo sun, muffling the sound of soldiers drilling on the parade ground below. The same material covered a divan floating on a Persian rug, and the family of chairs bobbing around it. The walls were bare but for half a dozen fine crystal sconces, trophies of hunting expeditions in the shops of Paris. In the rosy haze, Khedive Ismail, gourmet and visionary, sat behind a small gilt table like a dozing bear.2
Short, broad, and corpulent, Ismail wore the hybrid costume of a progressive Turk, a stambouli frock coat topped with a fez. His thick eyebrows, afterthought of a nose, and small mouth rested in a face soft with fat; his barber carved him a close-cut beard in memory of the jaw somewhere beneath his jowls. He spoke an elegant French, low and sonorous, and when he delivered his salon courtesies, his round mouth formed an ingratiating smile. His eyelids drooped. Sometimes his left
eye closed entirely, leaving his dull, brown right eye on solitary duty. Now and then, both eyes would widen and focus on his interlocutor, shooting a sharp stare like a python considering a mouse. His admirers compared him to the Sphinx.3
Ismail’s days were a taxing routine of paperwork, audiences, and fine wines. Rising early, at eight he received his sons, known to the public as the ministers of works, finances, and war, then passed the morning behind his gilt table receiving a stream of consuls-general, concession-seekers, and cronies foreign and domestic. At the firing of a noonday cannon from the ramparts of the Cairo Citadel, he broke for a light lunch, returning to his desk until early evening. Sometimes he left Egypt to look after itself for the afternoon. He took his constitutional in a modest two-horse carriage, identifiable as a monarch only by the doffed hats of European pedestrians, the slight royal wave with which he replied, and the dozen cavalrymen in crisp chocolate-brown uniforms who escorted him. Dinner was at seven, a blend of family supper and state banquet. His guests ate French food from silver plate, and drank Veuve Cliquot and Chateau Yquem from gold-rimmed crystal goblets monogrammed with a golden “I.” “The wines are abundant,” reported the American consul, “and of superior quality.” After the feast, Ismail repaired to a balcony for cigars and brandy. Then he returned to his office, to work until midnight.
He was back at the gilt table the next morning, thirteen hours a day for three hundred days a year, a cross between a delinquent prince and a diligent clerk. Nothing escaped his notice. Nothing happened without his permission, from negotiating a foreign loan to fixing the price of wheat or planning the path of an irrigation canal. An autocrat in the twin tradition of Napoleon and Mehmet Ali, a bureaucrat on a golden tread wheel, and the first of the modern African kleptocrats, Ismail was a man possessed.4
KHEDIVE ISMAIL had a dream of Egypt. A great land had run to waste, and he would restore it. As in ancient times, the Nile Valley would be the spine of an Egyptian empire in Africa, and he would be its pharaoh, from the Mediterranean to the Mountains of the Moon. Ismail had been educated in Paris and Vienna. He admired the elegance and dynamism of Europe’s industrial cities, their manicured parks, grand boulevards, and smoking factories. He saw the machinery of technical civilization at work, and how the wealth it generated gave power to its owners. Intoxicated by the brute power of the machine age, he determined to import to Egypt the exotic European model of the industrial city at the heart of the nation-state. A potent, westernized Egypt could shake off the Ottoman sultan and claim its place among the Great Powers.
Ismail had also witnessed the failed liberal revolutions of 1848, and he feared the volatility of modern industrial society. He wanted the machines and their promise of economic vitality, but rejected their other creation, a meritocratic middle class who might want to turn their wealth into political power. He decided to import technical civilization selectively: Free Trade without the freedom. Modernity aside, Ismail was still the grandson of Mehmet Ali.
Ismail never expected to be khedive. A second son, until his twenty-eighth year his life was one of private wealth and country estates. Like the rest of the ruling family, he made an unlikely Egyptian. A Francophone “Turk” of Albanian extraction, he grew up in European hotels and returned to Egypt at nineteen with French tastes. Ostensibly Muslim, he prayed rarely, ate ham, and maintained an extensive cellar. During the reign of his uncle Said Pasha, he stayed out of politics and concentrated on getting rich. Inheriting vast estates, he used their revenues to buy further acreage, becoming the largest landowner in Egypt. As a member of the royal family, he diverted irrigation canals through his estates, used forced labor to dig them, and bought Sudanese slaves to work the fields. This variation on modern farming methods, combined with open intimidation of his rivals, ensured that Ismail’s wheat, cotton, and sugar commanded the highest market prices. The liberalization of government monopolies did not benefit the ordinary Egyptian fellah.
All this changed on May 15, 1858, one of the few occasions that Ismail had been known to miss a party. To mark the end of Ramadan, Said Pasha organized a lavish festivity at the Ras el-Tin palace in Alexandria. Ismail’s older and younger brothers, the princes Ahmet and Halim, attended, but Ismail was unwell, apparently on his mother’s advice. After the party, the two princes chartered a private train to carry them and their retinues back to Cairo. Midway, the railway crossed the Nile at Karf ez-Zayat, where a bridge was under construction; in the meantime, each carriage was pushed onto a barge and pulled across by tugboats. A crowd of loyal subjects gathered to push the carriages. The stationmaster neglected to close the gate leading down to the barges; three carriages slid down onto one barge; it cap-sized, tipping the carriages and their passengers into the Nile. The “fat and clumsy” Ahmet drowned with his aides. Only sprightly Halim survived, leaping clear as the train went under and swimming several hundred yards before escaping the current and crawling ashore.5
Ismail, overlooked and underestimated, was now the next pasha of Egypt. When he overcame his grief, he promoted the stationmaster of Karf ez-Zayat to a government ministry.
ISMAIL INHERITED A kingdom of paradox. Egypt was neither an Ottoman province nor an independent state, but somewhere in between. The heirs of Mehmet Ali observed technical fealty to the sultan, each year sending £320,000 to Istanbul to prove it, but worked energetically to break that bond. Socially, Egypt suffered from the Ottoman legacy of sharp division between rulers and ruled. The rulers came from the international elite of soldiers and administrators who ran the Ottoman Empire, the mixture of Turks, Circassians, and Albanians known as “Turks.” Ruling from Cairo, they spoke Turkish, French, and English and carved up government concessions with their partners, the European businessmen and investors. Ismail’s three closest advisers were “Turks.” Nubar Pasha, a sad-eyed Armenian Christian with an herbaceous mustache, was an ambitious diplomat and adroitly corrupt financier. Mustapha Riad Pasha, his authoritarian protégé in the Ministry of Justice, was a “Mountain Jew” from the Caucasus. Nubar’s rival Mohammed Sharif Pasha was an elegant graduate of Mehmet Ali’s military academy who affected the manner of a retired French colonel and spent more time at his billiard table than his desk.
The most productive element of Egyptian society paid no tax. The urban middle class that made Alexandria the economic hub of Egypt were mostly Greek, Italian, or Maltese Christians. Even after the Ottoman sultans had reconciled themselves to the necessary evil of trade with infidel Europe, they had wished to exclude European influence. Under a series of treaties with European states known as the Capitulations, the Ottomans had allowed foreigners to reside and trade in their territories as resident aliens, subject to the laws of their native countries. This suited the traders, too: Apart from giving them tax exemption, it allowed them to evade Islamic social law, under which they were dhimmis, second-class citizens liable to extra taxation and random exploitation. In Egypt, the Europeans existed in parallel to native society, cohabiting profitably with the Turkish elite, while contributing little.
The majority of the population lived outside the cities. The fellahin were the real Egyptians: Arabic-speaking peasants, traditional farmers whose precarious methods—the waterwheel powered by a cow or donkey, irrigation through the annual Nile flood—had changed little since pharaonic times. A few of their most promising sons benefited from the educational and military innovations of Mehmet Ali, but all of them had to carry Egypt’s tax burden, and work in the Corvée, the rotating army of forced laborers who built state projects, including the Suez Canal.
At the bottom of Egyptian society were the substantial minority who did much of the work: black slaves from Sudan. Even the most humble urban home had its female slave. As much as a third of Cairo’s population was an invisible army of slave porters, janitors, cooks, cleaners, eunuchs, and concubines.
AT HIS ACCESSION in 1863, Ismail had no debts or mortgages, an income of £160,000, a dilettante’s expertise in the micromanagement of his farms, and no experience of
the governmental and fiscal systems that drove a modern economy. On the second day of his reign, he summoned Egypt’s foreign consuls and businessmen to a reception at the Cairo Citadel.6
“Gentlemen,” he announced, “I am firmly resolved to devote to the prosperity of the country which I am called upon to govern all the perseverance and energy of which I am capable. The basis of all good governance is order and economy in the finances.”
He listed his reforms. Egypt would have a constitution and a parliament, the Council of Deputies. Instead of dipping into the treasury, he would take a salary like any other civil servant. Government contracts would be opened to public bidding. The fellahin would receive free education, and fair courts to judge their complaints. The Corvée would be abolished. A modern and productive Egypt promised “greater facility in the relations of Egypt with the Western powers.”7
His program was timely. In 1863, the Egyptian economy was beginning a spectacular boom. With American ports blockaded during the Civil War, the price of cotton quadrupled from £65 per ton in 1862 to £270 per ton in 1864. Egypt’s cotton exports more than trebled, from 25,000 tons to 87,500 tons. Egypt became Britain’s prime source of raw cotton; in 1864, cotton alone brought in £23,625,000, ten times the total revenue for 1862. So much money washed into Egypt that some even trickled out of the hands of the elite and down to the fellahin, who began to buy their own slaves.8
Three Empires on the Nile Page 2