Three Empires on the Nile

by Dominic Green

  As Gordon’s mission reached its end, “the doles” closed in. Like Samuel Baker, he had found that the easy prescriptions of the humanitarians, and the easy promises of the khedive, meant nothing in the face of African reality. Policing the White Nile north of Khartoum made little difference to a slave trade whose hunting grounds had shifted to the Gazelle River, and whose export routes now ran overland. Those routes lay outside Gordon’s authority, and were controlled by the slavers and senior Egyptian administrators. So long as a corrupt Egyptian governor-general steered this conspiracy from Khartoum, the trade would continue. “What right have I to coax the natives to be quiet, for them to fall into the hands of a rapacious Pasha after my departure?”29

  To Gordon, the collapse of his grand project was a moral failure, proof of his secret vanity and his lust for worldly status. Malarial and morally exhausted, his assumptions melted in the heat. The Egyptians, he concluded, would never be agents of progress. “Oh! I am sick of these people. It is they, not the black, who need civilisation. There is little difference between white men and black men, I feel more and more assured.” He fell prey to “effeminate” fantasies of first-class railway carriages, the taste of fresh oysters, lying in a real bed all morning, and the luxury of turning down invitations to dinner. “Poor sheath, it is much worn!” Consumed by futility and ready to resign, he began the long journey back down to Cairo.30

  “You are a barnacle to the world and its judgments,” he berated himself. If Gordon needed proof of his smallness, it lay in events in Egypt in his absence. While he had hauled stores past the rapids, Ismail’s Egypt had shot over the cataracts of credit.31

  THE CRASH BEGAN on October 5, 1875, when Sultan Abdul Aziz announced that he could not afford the interest on Turkey’s £100 million of debt. The value of Turkish securities tumbled, and Egyptian securities followed. The umbilicus connecting Egypt to Turkey, to whose severance Ismail had devoted so much diplomacy and cash, tightened around his neck. If Ismail did not find a new source of revenue, Egypt would default on its next coupon, defrauding investors in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Geneva, and Constantinople. He and his ministers had already taxed men, butter, animals, and salt. They had sold tax exemptions, devised stock frauds, hocked the titles to Egypt’s best farmland, and turned debt to short-term loans and long-term consolidations. There remained only one asset: his private shares in the Suez Canal Company.

  A whisper went out from Cairo that Ismail’s 44 percent stake in the Canal was for sale. Ismail’s friend Henry Oppenheim mentioned it over dinner with Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, who told his proprietor George Smith, who mentioned it to Lord Derby, the foreign secretary. Derby followed the traditional Conservative line: “All we want is trade, and land is not necessary for trade; we can carry on commerce very well on ground belonging to other people.” So long as Egypt provided mutton chops and post horses, Britain had no need to intervene directly in its economy or politics. But Derby’s prime minister disagreed. Although he did not follow the mathematics, Benjamin Disraeli understood that two decades of rapid globalization had changed the international balance of power.32

  In 1815, a coalition of European monarchies—Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. To prevent further revolutionary outbreaks, the victors devised the Concert of Europe, a security system that defused international tension at regular summits. The result was four decades of economically productive but socially conservative peace. The Concert was a multilateral system resting on the unipolar authority of Britain, which possessed enormous industrial, economic, and military advantages. This peace eroded through the decline of the Sick Man of Europe and the rise of the Eastern Question. The Russian and British members of the Concert fell out over control of the Eastern Mediterranean. Fueled by a French partner seeking to regain global importance, this rivalry sparked the short but significant Crimean War of 1853–56, a shock from which neither the Sick Man nor the Concert ever recovered.

  The breakdown of the Concert coincided with the ripening of other eighteenth-century legacies: the Enlightenment notion of national identity, the French Revolution’s demand for mass enfranchisement, and the Industrial Revolution’s steam-powered machines. Europe, once imperial, feudal, and agricultural, became a continent of rising nationalism, sharp political division, and rapid industrialization. The new nations of Germany and Italy arose. In 1870, Gallic vanity and Prussian ambition led to the Franco-Prussian war, collapsing the Third Empire of Napoleon III and creating a unified German Empire. Although European statesmen still invoked the Concert of Europe, their relations turned into a multipolar struggle between “Great Powers.”

  The newly powerful European states turned abroad for materials and markets. Playing out their local rivalries on a global scale, governments used private businesses as assets in strategic competition. Free Trade gave way to protectionism, and private traders to government-run colonies. Rather than a utopia of economic liberalism and international harmony, the opening of the Suez Canal inaugurated an era of trade tariffs and chauvinism. The informal influence that governments gained through private investors and gunboat diplomats hardened into formal empires and global strategies. National honor and prosperity now depended on what became known as “Imperialism.” Within five years of the fireworks at Port Said, some Europeans feared that Imperialism might ignite a general European war.

  THE BRITISH HAD the most to lose. Their advantage over their fellow Europeans eroded as they lost the patents on their industrial technology. Their campaign for global Free Trade foundered on protectionism. Their ally the Turkish sultan played them off against Bismarck’s shiny Germany. Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, understood that Britain must compete or decline. He also had a Romantic’s fondness for the Orient, and a showman’s feel for the public. He offered voters a choice between “a comfortable England” or “a great country, an imperial country, a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world.” The million working class voters that Disraeli created through the 1867 Reform Bill responded to his spicy vision of Eastern power. The prime minister who, as a baptized Jew, had joked, “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” became the pivot of Britain’s imperial development.33

  When the Egyptian crash came, the British government had no policy other than its traditional laissez-faire distaste for entanglement in its subjects’ foreign speculations. But while British politicians, Disraeli included, had held aloof from Ismail’s wild dance of debt, French politicians had supported their businessmen and bankers in Egypt as a means of recovering their Napoleonic influence. By the time Disraeli heard that Ismail’s Suez Canal shares were available, two French banks had already tabled offers, one organized by Ferdinand de Lesseps, and both backed by their government. Meanwhile, Britain held the largest share of Egypt’s debt, took 80 percent of its exports, and supplied 44 percent of its imports. Egyptian cotton had become as integral to Britain’s economy as the Canal had become to its strategy.

  Business had become too important to be left to businessmen. Overriding Lord Derby, Disraeli secured Queen Victoria’s permission to enter secret negotiations with Ismail and Nubar Pasha, raised £4 million from the banker Edmund de Rothschild, and bought all of Ismail’s 177,646 shares. Although the Canal Company remained a French company run by French engineers, the controlling stake now sat in the vaults of the Bank of England. Disraeli’s assertive “forward” policies, and the omnipotence of the Royal Navy, had combined to establish Britain as the Canal’s effective proprietor. Believing that he had secured the India Route, Disraeli set a symbolic capstone on Britain’s formal empire by dubbing Queen Victoria the empress of India.

  ISMAIL PREFERRED THAT his government collapsed into British arms. Selling his shares to Disraeli created a pleasing balance of foreign interest. Now Britain and France both had deep
political interests to go with their crucial private investments in Egypt. By manipulating the tension between the two states, Ismail could play them off against each other. First, however, he had to restore his credit after the embarrassment of Sultan Abdul Aziz’s default on the Turkish debt, in order to tempt foreign creditors back to the pink suite at the Abdin Palace. In January 1876, Ismail invited his new British friends to send “some competent Government official” to assist Ismail Sadyk Pasha in “remedying the confusion” of Egypt’s finance ministry, so that he might reconstitute it along British lines.34

  The Disraeli government was aggressive, but it was not foolish. Responding cautiously, it sent its paymaster-general, Stephen Cave, M.P., to prepare a confidential report on the Egyptian finances. Cave had trouble deciphering Ismail’s accounts; the finance ministry was the sinecure of several Coptic families, who had kept out interlopers by writing the accounts in Arabic code. Despite their refusal to help him, Cave produced a detailed Parliamentary Report. He concluded that Egypt was £76.5 million in debt, but the country might yet stay afloat, if only Ismail would stop spending. “Egypt is well able to bear the charge of the whole of her present indebtedness at a reasonable rate of interest, but she cannot go on renewing floating debts at 25%, and raising fresh loans at 12 or 13%.”35

  Ismail responded by establishing a Commission of the Public Debt, to implement Cave’s recommendations for recovery. To secure British and French support, he suggested that it be furnished with an advisory panel of Europeans. The commission was a smokescreen. Ismail was confident that competition between its British and French members would prevent it from offering any real advice. And as the commission had taken over Ismail’s debts, he considered himself free from the need to pay his creditors. On April 8, 1876, he followed Sultan Abdul Aziz into bankruptcy and suspended payments on all bonds and debts.

  Ismail’s strategy produced the desired division. The French government sent a candidate to the commission’s panel, but the British government refused to name a representative. When Disraeli refused to publish the Cave Report because he did not wish to frighten the markets, the French and British bondholders united in concern for their money and launched their own inquiry. The French government weighed in behind its bondholders and nominated a Paris banker named Joubert as its investigator, but Lord Derby refused to support the British bondholders: A business gone bad was not the responsibility of Her Majesty’s Government. The British bondholders sent the British banker George Goschen anyway.

  In October 1876, Goschen and Joubert began to excavate the debris of Ismail’s finance ministry. Determining that the Cave Report had overstated the scale of Egypt’s debt, they arrived at a figure of £59 million, and drew up a new austerity plan for the Egyptian economy. Goschen did not expect Ismail to implement it. He warned the Foreign Office that the khedive “would repudiate if he got the chance,” and that “there was reason to believe he was holding back funds which he had in hand.”36

  Gordon’s return from Equatoria coincided with the last act of the Goschen-Joubert inquiry. In their labors, they had uncovered evidence of systematic fraud: false invoices, fake receipts, and duplicate bonds. When they asked Ismail, he suggested that they had only found evidence of innocent clerical blunders. And when they pressed him, he reminded them that in a modern state like Egypt, all financial complexities were the province of the finance minister, Ismail Sadyk Pasha.

  As Gordon sailed down from Khartoum, Ismail Sadyk Pasha went in the opposite direction. In chains and under armed guard, the windows of his steamer boarded shut, Sadyk Pasha was taken to the military camp at Dongola in the Sudan. “Sadyk Pasha has sought to organise a plot against His Highness the khedive, by exciting the religious sentiments of the native population against the scheme proposed by Messrs. Goschen and Joubert,” announced the government-owned Egyptian Monitor. “He has also accused the khedive of selling Egypt to the Christians.”37

  “What an affair!” Gordon wrote to Augusta. “Everyone speaks of it in bated breath.”38

  In early December 1876, the foreign consuls received a circular reporting Sadyk Pasha’s natural death at Dongola from “fatigue, grief and excess.” It omitted to mention that in his fatigue and grief he had bitten off one of his murderers’ thumbs.39

  3

  God’s Diplomacy

  1879–81

  Sheikh Said Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani, the “Sage of the East.”

  Religion is the Mainstay of Nations and the Source of their Welfare. In it is their Happiness, and around it is their Pivot. Materialism is the Root of Corruption and the Source of Foulness. From it comes the ruin of the Land and the Perdition of Man.

  —Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani, The Truth about the Materialists, 18811

  AT THE SOUTHEAST CORNER of the Ezbekiyyeh Gardens, on the plot between the Opera House and Ismail’s estate offices whose previous occupant had been the Cairo circus, a team of imported Syrian stonemasons finished their work. Facing Ataba Square and the kiosks and promenades of the Gardens, and backing onto the alleys of the old city, the Mattatias Building was one of the last gasps of Ismail’s golden age. Neoclassical arches sheltered an arcade of shops, overlooked by two upper stories whose arched windows owed more to Italian Gothic than the Ottoman vernacular. The developer and namesake of this polyglot design was Mattatias Nahman, a Greek Jewish businessman who had engaged the French architect Ambroise Baudry and, after pausing to avoid bankruptcy in the Debt Crisis of 1875, spent six hundred thousand francs building it.

  A café sheltered in the arcade. It was open all night and served meals in a small alcove. The regulars were a hybrid bunch: journalists, playwrights, Freemasons, and, the café being near al-Azhar University, unconventional clerics. Lately having turned down a post at al-Azhar for tenure at Mattatias’s café and a small rented house in the Jewish Quarter, fueled by tea, coffee, tobacco, and the odd brandy, the Sage of the East held forth at his usual table.2

  Bearded, voluble, and a little bug-eyed, Sheikh Said Jamal ed-Din al-Afghani was a prophet without honor in many lands, usually under an assumed identity. In Afghanistan and India, he pretended to be a Turk called Said al-Istanbuli: “Said of Istanbul.” In the Ottoman Empire, he called himself al-Afghani: “The Afghan.” In both guises, he claimed to be a defender of mainstream Sunni Islam. None of this was true. He was a Shia, not a Sunni; from northwest Persia, not Afghanistan; and rather than being an orthodox scholar, he was a highly unorthodox revolutionary. Afghani believed that Islamic civilization was under deliberate military and cultural assault from the Christian world. The only solution was to beat the infidels at their own game. Western technology and ideas would be the weapons of a modern, reformed Islamic society.3

  Afghani grew up in Persia, its shah the chief defender of the Shiite minority that had splintered off from Islam in the decades after Mohammed’s death. While messianism was incidental to Sunni Islam, it was integral to Shia faith. As a child in Tehran, Afghani learned that the twelfth in the series of infallible imams that had led the Shia had disappeared over a thousand years earlier, but would return as the Mahdi, the Expected Redeemer who would inaugurate a new millennium. In a further deviation from Sunni custom, Afghani’s education in the Shia seminaries of Najaf included both the rationalist, Greek-derived philosophy of medieval Islam—banned as heresy in the Turkish and Arab worlds—and also Sufi mysticism. In Afghani’s youth, the blending of these streams of thought produced the Shaikhi sect, a stew of rationalist philosophy, mysticism, and a cult of strong, hidden leadership. While the Sunni clerics of the Ottoman lands endorsed the sultan and stability, Afghani was a philosopher, a heretic, and a mystic who expected a messianic redemption.

  Afghani dwelt on Islam’s intellectual frontier in an era when European exports and armies broke the borders between the Islamic and Christian worlds. By economics or war, the outcomes were the same: the eclipse of Muslim power. The shah of Persia intrigued weakly between the British and Russians as the borders of their empires converged on
Central Asia. The Mughal emperors of India were crushed by first the French and then the British. The Ottoman sultan betrayed his caliphate, entering military alliances with the Christian nations against whom previous sultans had waged jihads of conquest and conversion.

  The rise of the Christian West mocked the Muslim conviction that in the unfolding of the divine plan that was history, theirs was the final and true religion. More than modern Judaism or Christianity, Islam was a total system. Accepting no separation between religion and state, its ambit included all life, including politics. The past power of Islamic empires attested that Islam was the true religion. Yet if Muslims possessed the final revelation and the duty to spread it, how had Christians, their infidel inferiors, taken over the world?

  The only reason could be that Muslim rulers and their subjects had drifted from true Islam. Some preached a return to an idealized past of authoritarian purity and desert tribalism. In Arabia, the Wahhabi sect rejected the corrupt sultan’s claim to the caliphate and attacked the Ottoman occupiers of Mecca. In Libya, the Wahhabi-influenced Senussi sect retreated from the cosmopolitan coast to the desert, reconstructing an idealized Koranic society. Others, especially in the borderlands of Islam, incorporated Western elements. In Turkey, a rumbling movement for political reform dressed its ambition in concern for the independence of the sultan-caliph. In Persia, the years of Afghani’s boyhood saw the rise of the modernizing, messianic Babi sect, whose leader called himself the Bab, the gate that would lead to the arrival of the Twelfth Imam. All believed that the best future resembled the distant past, whether that was located in the militant austerity of the Prophet’s wars or the messianic restoration of the Twelfth Imam.