Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  With the economy soaring and Ismail promising economic and political liberalization, foreign cash poured into Egypt like a Nile flood. Ismail used the money to remake Egypt in the French image. Cairo became a modern city almost overnight. Ismail hired Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps, official jardinier to Baron Haussmann’s Paris, to create the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens, a twenty-acre pastiche of Paris’ Park Monceau, complete with grottoes, artificial lakes, cafés, and a bandstand. Grand hotels and Gallic apartment buildings lined the road from the Ezbekiyyeh to Ismail’s seat at the Abdin Palace, which squatted behind a wide parade ground modeled on the Champ de Mars at Paris. Plots worth two thousand pounds were offered for free, creating a leafy suburb of modern mansions—called, naturally, Ismailia—where Turkish ministers and Levantine bankers rubbed shoulders with “Franks” like “Mr. Remington, the well-known arms manufacturer, who has armed the khedive’s troops,” and the duke of Sutherland, one of whose developments became the home of the English club. The European quarters of Cairo and Alexandria had better sanitation and street lighting than most European capitals.9

  A new infrastructure appeared: train stations, railways, telegraph cables, roads, ports, lighthouses, bridges, post offices, museums, libraries, hospitals, opera houses, and palaces. The countryside of the Nile Delta became cross-hatched with irrigation canals, cotton plantations, and sugar mills. Steamships sporting Ismail’s livery appeared on the Nile. Productivity and life expectancy increased, and the state planned the education of all children, girls included. The government welcomed European engineers and businessmen to the new suburbs, and soon the “Franks” composed a quarter of Alexandria’s population. Egypt became a giant building site, a modern state in the making, and an investor’s paradise.

  “SHADES OF THE PHARAOHS!” trilled the Levant Herald when the Council of Deputies assembled. “From Khartoum to Damietta constitutional rights are to be enjoyed by all, and a Parliament of seventy members, sitting under the shadow of the Great Pyramid, is henceforth to ensure to Copt, fellah and Bedouin liberty to an extent and with guarantees never before dreamt of in the East.”10

  At the council’s first meeting, the Speaker explained to the Turkish landowners and aristocrats on its benches that European practice required them to divide into two factions, one for Ismail’s government, another against it. The entire council gathered on the progovernment benches. They met twice more before Ismail tired of demonstrating that his whim was identical to the national will. The parliament had served its purpose as an advertisement of progress. He gave it a more potent name, the Chamber of Notables, and then mothballed it.

  The revolution had been Ismail’s idea, and he intended to steer it. To rework Egypt in the modern image was hard enough. Industrialization drew labor from the villages to the city. The growth of local government and its network of tax collectors devalued the traditional dignity of the village headman and the local sheikh. Foreign money and culture antagonized the Islamic clergy, and a peasantry hostile to its Turkish masters. Ismail could do without the complications of “constitutionalism” and mass enfranchisement. Building up the army and the bureaucracy, he concentrated on control. Like Haussmann, who planned the boulevards of Paris as a shooting gallery against the mob, Ismail fortified the state against its subjects.

  In 1865, the cotton boom slowed as America resumed its exports. The bubble had been pricked, but Ismail used loans from French, British, and German banks to keep it from deflating. Egypt’s modern facade enticed European investors to buy stock in the loans: If wild building was caused by wild growth, then fat dividends must follow. Ismail and his ministers ensured that Europeans received little accurate information about Egypt. Nubar Pasha gave European consuls and journalists preferential access to the government’s business initiatives, effectively putting them on the payroll. The Reuters news agency clarified its perspective with the help of an annual secret payment of one thousand pounds. One key source for investors, the correspondent of the London Times, was an intimate of Ismail and his ministers who earned more from his investments than his journalism. He promoted Ismail as “a thrifty saving landlord who looked after every piaster.”11

  Not all the foreign money went on canals and bridges. Corruption was systematic, the partition between state treasury and Ismail’s pocket hypothetical. Ismail and Nubar Pasha devised a scheme to divert millions of pounds into his campaigns for independence from the Ottoman sultan and the Suez Canal Company. The government set up a company, mostly funded by European bankers, but with enough of Ismail’s private cash to imply his personal interest in the company’s success. The government—Ismail again—engaged the company to perform services advantageous to the economy. When the company issued orders for material from Europe, its European directors received private commissions. In return for the monopoly and the kickbacks, the European banks allowed Ismail to borrow on open credit. Ismail guaranteed repayment from his earnings as a shareholder and from the revenues of the Egyptian treasury, which meant the same thing. By borrowing on open credit, he avoided commitments to fixed schedules of repayment and interest, and by doing it privately, he did not need the sultan’s permission. As Ismail both licensed the companies and held substantial shares as a private investor, he could control them and prevent them from becoming the instruments of his French and British partners. When the companies foundered, Ismail wound them up, selling their assets for cash and passing their bad debts to the Egyptian taxpayer.

  They began with the Sudan Company, which proposed to launch river steamers and railways into Upper Egypt and the Sudan. The prominent Alexandria bankers Henry Oppenheim and Edouard Dervieu raised most of its £2 million capital, and both received seats on the board. Suddenly, its name changed to the Egyptian Trading & Commercial Company, lending money at high interest to the farmers of the Delta against the value of their crops.

  Then came the Agricultural Society, which imported and rented irrigation pumps to farmers, until Ismail, Oppenheim, and Dervieu took it over and turned it into a fund for speculating in urban real estate. Through Nubar Pasha, members of the society’s board privately obtained contracts for urban developments, then sold the contracts to the society at inflated prices, taking colossal profits.

  Next Ismail took to the high seas. Having inherited a batch of inactive steamers from one of Said Pasha’s failed ventures, he set up an Egyptian Steam Navigation Company, put his sons on the board, and sold it his steamers. The company cast off on the money of investors tempted by images of Egyptian steamers ferrying goods and businessmen around the Mediterranean, and Ismail’s promise of a 6 percent dividend on every share. When the company hit the rocks, the government paid the dividends and bought back the shares.12

  With the cash rolling in, Ismail sent Nubar Pasha to Paris and Constantinople to buy his independence. Or so he thought.

  “I AM MORE canaliste than Monsieur de Lesseps,” Ismail had promised the French consul in 1863. “I believe that no work is so grand, none will be so productive for Egypt. But at the present moment its bases are uncertain and badly defined. I will affirm them and then, surpassing my predecessor, I will push the works to their completion.”13

  Although Britain had become Egypt’s main export market and source of investment, France had more influence there. Said Pasha’s deal with the Canal Company made Egypt the junior partner of a French-run project. Said’s folly became more apparent as the Canal progressed southward. Said had committed Egypt to maintain a rotating workforce of twenty thousand forced laborers. Most came from the fellahin of the Nile Delta, whose agriculture suffered in their absence. Yet though Egyptian labor dug the Canal and its subsidiary irrigation channels, the Canal Company owned the two hundred thousand acres of lush agricultural land that the irrigation created. French investors stood to take all the profit. Ismail decided to reduce French influence in Egypt by switching to British patronage and playing the two countries against each other.

  Ismail chose the Corvée as the pivot of his European policy. Nubar
Pasha went to see the most influential foreigner at Constantinople, British ambassador Sir Henry Bulwer. How, asked Nubar, would the Palmerston government react if the progressive Ismail banned the Corvée, and the French tried to force him to keep it in order to finish the Canal as planned?

  The Corvée had always attracted humanitarian disgust in Britain; now France was forcing Egypt to enslave its own people. Moreover, the Canal threatened to create a web of financial dependency that would turn Egypt into a French colony and split the Ottoman Empire. Palmerston, presented with a scenario he relished—devious foreigners undermining the road to India—pressured Sultan Abdul Aziz, whose foreign minister duly wrote to Ismail, to protest the Corvée.

  Next, Nubar Pasha went to Paris and denounced the Canal Company’s unworkable contract. The company’s shares fell, its directors sued Nubar for libel, and Nubar countersued. Egypt’s divorce from the Canal Company was under way. A French court ruled that Ismail should pay £3.5 million to buy Egypt out of the contract, including £1.5 million for abandoning the Corvée and £1.2 million to recover 150,000 acres of irrigated land. The total figure happened to approximate the value of Ismail’s shares in the company; de Lesseps had suggested that, presented with the bill, Ismail would prefer to lose paper shares rather than pay hard cash. But Ismail preferred to buy his liberty.14

  Next Nubar returned to Constantinople, whose sultan-caliph was the greatest obstacle to Ismail’s dream of Egypt as the nexus of East and West. Abdul Aziz understood Ismail’s rebellious intentions but, deeply indebted to European banks, he was prepared to sell the elements of Egyptian sovereignty to Ismail. Abdul Aziz predicted that the British policy of holding together the Ottoman Empire at all costs would keep Ismail from full independence.

  Nubar Pasha became a regular visitor to Constantinople, dispensing cash to Abdul Aziz and his ministers. In 1863, a bribe of £50,000 bought Ismail the right to choose his own heir, effectively confirming his dynasty. In 1866, he doubled his annual tribute to £670,000, obtaining the title to the Sudanese territory south of Wadi Halfa, and the Red Sea ports essential for Sudanese trade. In 1867, further bribes allowed Ismail to conclude economic treaties with foreign governments and granted him the royal title he coveted. Ismail could not tolerate being a mere pasha, an honorific granted to any senior Ottoman administrator, but Abdul Aziz refused to dub Ismail a sultan or king. So he dusted off a mutually agreeable title from Persian history. In 1867, Ismail became the khedive of Egypt.

  When the khedive took his new title on an image-boosting European tour, his hosts lauded him as the foremost pupil among the sultans, emirs, maharajahs, and nabobs who had cut deals with Europe and opened their economies to its exports. Ismail le Magnifique was praised as a liberal constitutionalist, a modern industrialist, a beneficent visionary. With easy money waiting for the bold investor, the eccentricity of Egypt’s finances could be excused as a growing pain, curable by the march of progress. Egypt’s image in Europe acquired the slick gloss of a stockjobber’s prospectus.

  ISMAIL NEEDED MANPOWER for his factories and farms, money for his dreams and debts, and prestige to buttress Egypt against the sultan and the Great Powers. Imperial ambition and financial necessity drove Ismail south, where Egypt had an uncontested claim to the resources of the Sudan: ivory, rubber, hardwood, and, most valuably, slaves.

  The skeleton of Egyptian rule in the “Land of the Blacks” already existed. In 1820, Mehmet Ali had sent south a party of soldiers and French and British miners in search of Nubian gold and conscripts for his army. They found little gold, but plentiful ivory and slaves. In 1838, Ali established a capital for his colony among a handful of fishermen’s shacks on a proboscis of land at the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, its name derived from its fancied resemblance to an elephant’s trunk: Khartoum. This settlement, whose low-built mud-brick houses flooded when the river rose, became the heart of Egypt’s exploitation of the Sudan.15

  Sudanese slavery was ancient, entrenched, and endorsed by local custom and Islamic law. The first Europeans to venture upriver in the early nineteenth century found a society of Muslim masters and pagan or Christian slaves, and an economy distorted by cheap manpower and the profits of the transit trade. The economic life of the independent sultanate of Darfur consisted of little else. Its sultan licensed up to seventy slaving raids a year, partitioned his terrain between raiding parties, gathered their booty at a central camp, and took commissions from their sales. His neighbors the cattle-herding Baggara, who scorned manual labor as the province of inferior settled peoples, were almost outnumbered by their slaves. In a crude precursor of plantation slavery, the Baggara enslaved entire tribes, holding between twenty and two hundred male fieldworkers per farm, plus extensive collections of domestic female slaves. Among the settled agriculturalists of the Nile Valley, a quarter of the population were slaves. Along the caravan routes, town dwellers lived comfortably from the trade. In 1813, visiting the centers of the trade disguised as a Syrian sheikh, the Swiss pioneer Jean-Louis Burckhardt reported, “At Berber or Shendi there is scarcely a house which does not possess one or two slaves, and five or six are frequently seen in the same family; the great people and chiefs keep them by the dozens.”16

  The trade was run by Muslims and regulated by Islamic law. The Sudan was a frontier land, the border between Dar al-Islam, the Land of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the House of War. Under sharia, a Muslim could not enslave a fellow Muslim, but he could enslave an infidel captured in jihad to expand Dar al-Islam. So the slavers concentrated their operations on the pagans of the southwest, the Nubians of the southeast, and the Christians of Abyssinia, whose women were prized for their light skins and purported sexual appetite. The slavers justified their depredations by forcing their slaves to convert to Islam, and they masked their greed by using the Koranic term ghazwa to describe their raids, after the early battles of the Prophet Mohammed, who had taken slaves and concubines from the defeated non-Muslims of Arabia.

  The result was abduction, rape, mutilation, and murder on a gigantic scale. Raising private militias, the slavers would attack a village, killing those who resisted and enslaving the rest. Chained, whipped, and deprived of food and water, only the fittest survived the march to the markets. The elderly were left to die by the road, and infants too young to walk were simply thrown aside. The slavers prostituted their women prisoners at the towns they passed, and genitally mutilated prepubescent girls to raise their market value. Every year, each of the thirty thousand slaves sold at the coast represented as many as nine others who had been massacred in a ghazwa or abandoned on the road. In the early 1820s, the British explorers Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton found the caravan routes of the western Sudan “lined on either side by human remains,” with the ground around the wells “covered with whitened bones” and the desiccated corpses of children. “They were only blacks,” their Arab guides explained.17

  Like rain, the distribution of slaves divided between the watershed of the White and Blue Niles. Two caravan routes served the export trade. The White Nile trade pooled at El Fasher in Darfur. From there, the Forty Days’ Road, a thousand-mile trek through the desert, shadowed the west bank of the Nile north to Egypt, terminating at Asyut, where dealers sailed their cargo down the Nile to Cairo. Also at Asyut, two Coptic monks “said to excel all their predecessors in dexterity” prepared the eunuchs prized by Muslim potentates as gifts and harem guardians. Caucasian eunuchs were left with partial and occasionally functional genitals, but Africans were believed to have a higher libido that necessitated total excision. The monks cut off the entire genitalia at the abdomen and cauterized the wound with boiling butter. In 1815, Mehmet Ali sent the Turkish sultan a gift of 150 Sudanese eunuchs.18

  The Blue Nile trade collected at Sennar, then moved downstream via Khartoum to Shendi and Berber. Caravans then walked three hundred miles to the Red Sea ports of Suakin and Massowa, where they were shipped across the Red Sea to the giant Arabian slave market at Jeddah. From Cairo and Jeddah, Su
danese slaves were traded across the Islamic world. The most valuable slaves were whites from the Caucasus, eunuchs, and girls in their early teens.

  Demand was constant. Unlike the industrial societies served by the Atlantic trade, the preindustrial societies served by the Islamic world ran on domestic slaves: cooks, concubines, eunuchs, and cleaners. In Egypt, some 80 percent of slaves were female. The average slave survived ten to twelve years, dying in her midtwenties, a mortality rate that her masters attributed to the humid Delta climate, not the miseries of her servitude. Forcibly converted to Islam, she was kept in isolation from the smaller male slave population, with any unwanted infants who beat the odds deliberately neglected by her master. If she became pregnant by him, the child was born a free Muslim.19

  UNLIKE EUROPEAN IMPERIALISTS, Mehmet Ali and his heirs did not intend to turn Sudan into a stable partner for “legitimate trade,” by encouraging agriculture in order to sell finished goods. Egypt had little to offer its empire other than garrisons and governors, and it needed raw materials to prop up its balance of trade. It came only to exploit the Sudan by seizing its goods and people. If the Turkish elite considered the darker-skinned Egyptians to be their ethnic inferiors, they considered the black pagans of Sudan to be an expendable resource, like the hard sant wood that Egypt used for the butts of its soldiers’ rifles. The government became a major supplier and customer in the slave trade, indistinguishable from the disorder it purported to replace.