A History of the Middle East (18 page)

Egypt’s commitments to repay Ismail’s debts absorbed more than half its revenues, requiring the utmost financial prudence (which in any case fitted Cromer’s Gladstonian principles). Fortified by his experience in India, Cromer believed in the thesis of John Stuart
Mill, which had been adopted by Gladstone, that taxation should be as low as possible, to allow money to ‘fructify’ in the pockets of the producing classes. Accordingly there were no tax increases (the public could hardly have borne them) with the significant exception that, on the free-trade principle, countervailing duties were imposed on the products of Egyptian industries to equalize their prices with those of foreign imports. This virtually wiped out the Egyptian tobacco industry.

Slowly and painfully the economy recovered, and by the 1890s the budgets were showing small surpluses. The mainstay of the recovery was the increase in the output of agricultural crops – principally cotton, but also cereals, beans and rice. This was greatly assisted by one of the only kind of public works that Cromer was prepared to countenance – irrigation. British engineers, most of them with previous experience in India, set about repairing the great Delta barrages and canals built under Muhammad Ali and Ismail and expanding the system. Their crowning achievement was the building of a new dam at Aswan in Upper Egypt. Completed in 1902 and raised further in 1907 and 1912, this saved vast quantities of water by evening out the flow of the Nile between the autumn flood season and the rest of the year.

Unable to reduce taxes, as they would have wished, Cromer and his advisers set about improving the lot of the
fellahin
by replacing the corvée with paid labour and preventing the use of the
kurbaj
. This was gradually achieved during the first decade of British rule.

There was no doubt that Egypt was now better administered than before. Government decisions were normally carried out; an effective and reasonably uncorrupt civil service was being created. One of the most important factors in this was that the British officials in the Anglo-Egyptian service were collecting the kind of statistical information without which effective government is impossible. In this respect Egypt was unique in the Ottoman Empire.

With the exception of a few Liberal and Radical MPs at Westminster, the British people, encouraged by the evidence of the tens of thousands of tourists who poured into Egypt every winter, had
no doubt that the Egyptians should be wholly grateful for Cromer’s efforts on their behalf. The reaction of the Egyptians was inevitably more various and complex. The khedive and his ministers, together with the Turco-Circassian ruling class from which they almost exclusively came, were happy that their power had been restored and that a radical nationalist upheaval had been averted. Their view was shared by those who had been temporarily swept by enthusiasm for the Arabi revolt. Shaikh Muhammad Abduh, the most important of Arabi’s civilian supporters, decided to collaborate with the British occupiers when he was allowed to return from exile in 1884. He agreed to become a judge and began to work for the reform and modernization of Islamic education in Egypt. Cromer liked and respected him but felt that his task was impossible.

If the Egyptian ruling class temporarily accepted the presence of British troops, however, it was much less enthusiastic about what Nubar Pasha, the first prime minister after 1882, called the ‘administrative occupation’. Nubar tried to retain Egyptian control over the civil police, but failed. His successor, Riaz Pasha, was equally unsuccessful in preventing European supervision of the legal system – European inspectors were appointed to the native courts. On both these matters Cromer was adamant. The truth was that inside every Egyptian, however much he had benefited materially from the British occupation, there was some degree of resentment against rule by a Christian European power. Inevitably, this resentment would grow over the years.

In the early years of the British occupation there was a remarkable growth in rural unrest and acts of brigandage. This both alarmed and mystified Cromer, who had a passion for good order. It was partly a grass-roots rejection of the occupation but it also reflected the breakdown of the traditional system whereby the
omdehs
or village mayors, appointed by the government, maintained law and order in the countryside in collaboration with the Islamic
qadis
or judges. Although the
omdehs
were sometimes arbitrary and cruel, they generally reflected the local viewpoint. It was a system that the
fellah
could understand.

It is true that European secularist principles of law had already been introduced into Egypt long before the British occupation. Muhammad Ali had started the process, which was extended by the introduction of the new Ottoman penal code, based on French law, in 1863. By 1880 the Islamic
sharia
law was confined to matters of personal status (divorce, inheritance etc.) and homicide. The trouble was that these principles were now being applied much more widely – to matters of government as well as law – under the aegis of a Christian colonial power. At least this was the theory.

In 1883 Lord Dufferin actually persuaded Tewfik to issue an Organic Law granting the right of universal suffrage to male Egyptians over twenty years of age. But Cromer saw to it that the elected legislative and provincial councils remained powerless. As we have seen, he had no faith in the capacity of Egyptians to govern themselves, and he considered representative institutions to be entirely unsuitable for the government of a ‘subject race’.

Nor did Cromer believe there was any purpose in training an élite of native Egyptians to take over the higher executive positions – in fact, during his twenty-four years in Egypt, their numbers in the higher ranks of the government service actually declined, while those of Englishmen and other Europeans increased. Accordingly, he had little interest in the spread of education above the elementary level. From his experience in India he had concluded that the expansion of Western-style higher education manufactured a class of discontented and place-seeking demagogues who were divorced from their own people. As he wrote shortly before his retirement, ‘I am doing all I can to push forward both elementary and technical education. I want all the next generation of Egyptians to be able to read and write. Also I want to create as many carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers etc., as I possibly can. More than this I cannot do.’ Unfortunately, even these efforts were not very successful. On his retirement, about 1.5 per cent of the population was receiving primary education as compared with 1.7 per cent in 1873, and the vast majority remained illiterate.

Cromer reversed Muhammad Ali’s and Ismail’s policy of providing free education in state schools and colleges. His
laissez-faire
principles told him that it was not the state’s duty to provide education, and this also accorded with his general aim to economize. The result was that higher education became the prerogative of the wealthy. Like the great majority of his British colleagues in Egypt, Cromer was unsympathetic towards proposals to establish a university, which he believed would foster dangerous nationalism. However, he did not interfere with the higher institutes of learning which had survived from Ismail’s reign: the schools of medicine, engineering and law. Since the reformed Egyptian legal system was based on French law, the teachers in the law school were French and it was this, in the absence of a university, which became the focus of nationalism.

The obverse side of the neglect of education under Cromer was that there was no systematic attempt to impose English culture on Egypt in the manner in which the French aimed to produce a Gallicized élite in their North African possessions. The educational system was only partially and gradually brought under British control and Anglicized. Although the use of English inevitably became more widespread, and ambitious young Egyptians needed to acquire it, the Egyptian upper classes remained francophone. This was partly because of the limitations of the Veiled Protectorate and partly because Cromer would have regarded the effort to turn the native Egyptians into pseudo-Englishmen as futile; he had nothing but contempt for the few Egyptians who managed to acquire a university education abroad and became europeanized.

It was therefore natural that Cromer should make no attempt to interfere with the Islamic system of education which existed in the village
kuttabs
or Koranic schools and the
madrasas
attached to the mosques which served for secondary education. This would have provoked a most hostile reaction. Again the principle of
laissez-faire
served all his purposes. But while he respected the laws of Islam, he expressed the view that as a progressive social system it was a total failure. He often said that Egypt could never have a genuinely civilized society under Islam – the position of women alone making this impossible – but he had no wish to see Egyptians abandon their
religion. He felt that the europeanized Egyptian he so despised was ‘generally an agnostic’. But while he sympathized with the efforts of Muhammad Abduh – who had become grand mufti of Egypt – to reform and modernize the education system at the great al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was sure they were fruitless because ‘reformed Islam is Islam no longer.’

Cromer’s authoritarianism was so often negative rather than positive in its expression. He favoured
laissez-faire
rather than firm government action. He considered that Egypt was a natural agricultural country and that the
fellah
was a good farmer – better than his Indian equivalent – who with enough land and low taxation would produce well. He considered Muhammad Ali’s ambition to turn Egypt into a manufacturing country as unrealistic, as it would have required heavy protective tariffs and an expensive programme of industrial training for Egyptians, to which he was naturally opposed.

With prudent financial management Egypt was prosperous at the turn of the century, and real
per capita
income was probably higher than at any subsequent period. But this concealed some real weaknesses. The level of dependence on a single crop – cotton – was dangerous, and there were technical problems in overflooding from irrigation through lack of drainage and a variety of cotton pests which the parsimonious government was hesitant to tackle. Moreover, although Cromer hoped for the creation of a large class of Egyptian small farmers who would act as a conservative bulwark to society, only the most vigorous government action could have prevented the new prosperity from accruing to those who were already economically powerful – the big landowners – while the
fellahin
sank deeper into debt. After twenty-four years of Cromerism, 80 per cent of those who owned land in Egypt possessed less than 25 per cent of the whole, while at the other end of the scale 1 per cent owned more than 40 per cent of the whole.

Egyptian nationalists would later claim that Cromer deliberately planned to make Egypt a vast cotton plantation, producing cheap raw material for the Lancashire cotton mills. But he had no such
conscious intention – to him this was a natural role for a ‘subject race’. Moreover, although he would not have liked to admit it, he was in many respects continuing the policies of Ismail.

In 1892 Khedive Tewfik died and was succeeded by his 17-year-old son Abbas Hilmi, who was being educated in Europe. Cromer at first thought that Abbas would be as pliable as Tewfik, but he was intelligent and forceful – more in the mould of his grandfather Ismail than his father. Soon he attempted to assert himself by rejecting Cromer’s choice of ministers and criticizing the standard of the British-trained Egyptian army. Since his succession coincided with the first new stirrings of nationalist feeling since the collapse of the Arabi revolt, Abbas began to see himself as leading a challenge to British rule. Cromer was thoroughly alarmed.

His fears were unnecessary. Abbas was hoping for help from Istanbul – Egypt was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. But, as usual, Sultan Abdul Hamid gave no more than verbal promises of support, as he was quite unprepared to risk his relations with Britain or the other European powers, which might have no love for the British occupation but equally had no wish to see any revival of Egyptian independence. Abbas had also hoped that the return to power of Gladstone’s Liberal government in Britain would help him, because the Liberals professed greater understanding of Egyptian nationalism than the Tories. Unfortunately, Gladstone’s foreign secretary was Lord Rosebery, a Liberal imperialist who gave his full support to Cromer. Seeing that he could be forced to abdicate, the humiliated Abbas capitulated. The Veiled Protectorate continued, with Cromer pulling the strings behind his screen.

When Abbas challenged the quality of the Anglo-Egyptian army, a furious Kitchener, its
sirdar
or commander-in-chief, threatened to resign. Since the army’s dissolution in 1882, British officers had trained a new force of some 15,000 which included five black battalions of southern Sudanese tribesmen. (The cost was borne by the Egyptian budget, with an additional contribution towards the stationing of the British occupying troops.) The first purpose of the new army was to help defend Egypt’s borders, but by 1892 both Cromer and the
British government had come to regard the reconquest of the Sudan as vital. Italy had penetrated Ethiopia and was threatening to gain control of the waters of the Upper Nile, and, as Cromer wrote to London, ‘Whatever Powers hold the Upper Nile Valley must, by the mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt.’

Reconquest began in 1895. Cautiously and economically, Kitchener’s army, strengthened by 8,000 British troops, advanced up the Nile and finally routed the Mahdist forces outside their capital, Omdurman.

The difficult question arose as to the future status of the Sudan. The reconquest had been directed by Britain but it had been carried out in the khedive’s name mainly by Egyptian troops at Egypt’s expense. But there was no question of restoring the
status quo
of before the Mahdist revolt. In Salisbury’s words, the British government had every intention of keeping ‘a predominant voice in all matters connected with the Sudan’. The result was the decision to establish an Anglo-Egyptian condominium. Hailed as a masterpiece of British pragmatism, this worked reasonably well for some years. One advantage was that it prevented the system of Capitulations from being extended to the Sudan. But the theoretical equality of Britain and Egypt in the government of Sudan was no more than a façade: the higher levels of the administration were all in British hands, and the governor-general, who was appointed by the khedive on British advice, was always an Englishman. Egyptians had not abandoned their claim to rule Sudan and as they recovered their independence from Britain this became the most contentious issue between Britain and Egypt.