Mohamed Sarhan
900050146

The British Occupation of Egypt in “1882”

European countries have always tried to strengthen themselves by occupying less powerful countries in different places all over the world, so as to ensure that none of these countries would reach a stage of economic and political stability that might be in someway threatening to these European countries. Some of these situations where a European country occupies another country might turn beneficial to the occupied country but in the majority of cases the problems this country starts to accumulate as the occupying country takes everything it can to benefit itself leaving the other country with accumulating problems that might lead to riots, civil wars and even revolutions as in the case of Egypt. By turning the focus to Egypt one can find that it was mainly a centre of attention for many European countries, due to its location in the centre of Africa, its strong image among neighbouring countries and its location on the trade map where its found between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and so its really controls the path of all passing ships. The history of Egypt being occupied dates back to along time ago from the Greeks to the huge ottoman empire from 1517 till the British occupation in 1882, with some minor interruptions by Napoleon’s France in the French expedition that was sent to Egypt. So generally speaking in the Middle East in particular colonies started to exist before colonialism as the political and economic dominance of one country by another during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has come to be called “Informal Empire”. The term informal state actually means according to Juan R.I.Cole is when a more powerful state makes an alliance with a collaborating group to attain informal hegemony over a weaker state and so their leverage gives the foreigners influence over decisions affecting imperial strategy, along with access to the local economy and privileges that allow them to exploit it. By trying to focus on the modern history of Egypt, we have to examine the turning point at that time, because the history of modern Egypt simply begins in 1882 when Egypt became part of the British chain of influence in the region. Every occupation might be looked at from two different perspectives, first of all its effects on the native people and whether this occupation have helped in increasing their living standards or not and the second, is how did the occupying country gained control of the countries political and economic regimes, so as to be able to identify whether they kept in mind that they want to improve the situation of this country or they were just so keen on themselves that they forgot about the rest. In order to know if the occupation was of any good to the Egyptians we must first examine the causes that led to the fall of Egypt under the British empire and to also examine what attracted the British to form a colony in Egypt.

Egypt in the 19th century was considered an important state of the Ottoman Empire and the Egyptian government was paying tribute to the sultan in Istanbul, through time the ottoman governor of Egypt was then known as the “khedive”. Although in the 1860’s and 70’s there was a cotton boom in Egypt the 1870’s were considered as desperate times in Egypt, as Egypt have conditionally reached a disastrous stage in terms of political and economic stability, the presence of a reckless ruler have created a climate that supports any unpleasant condition to prevail, because with a great deal of money borrowed from Europe for infrastructural development, the khedive has declared his government as unable to repay the debts and so with all the difficulties facing the Egyptian economy at that time, there were some proposed solutions of selling some of the Suez Canal shares to the British and from now on the problem started. First of all, according to what David Mentiply said who is a postgraduate student of International History at the University of Sheffield, UK, that prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had purchased cut-price government shares in the Suez Canal that amounted to 44% of its total stock, and as the financial situation of the Egyptian economy became worse, the British were able to control more shares of the Suez Canal. The following year Egypt have completely failed to repay all of its debts and therefore the country went bankrupt, and so there wasn’t any other situation that the British would find the Egyptians in that would’ve attracted them to occupying Egypt other than bankruptcy. Moreover in David Mentiply’s study it’s claimed that at the moment of invasion the British objectives were to mainly to install honesty, humanity and justice among Egyptians. Considering there was an element of truth to what the British have said, why did they choose this time in particular when the situation in Egypt was really bad and when nearly 80% of Egyptian exports are exported to Britain. And since this was mainly the situation in Egypt we have to move on to explain why Britain was somehow interested in forming a colony in Egypt or occupying Egypt as it did. The first reason would be how the European countries had plans of occupying different parts of Africa and how they have classified the countries according to their interest, and so the this occupation was mainly a part of a public plan to divide African countries among strong European countries as stated in Dr. said Ibrahim zu Al fokar’s book on the British imperialism in Egypt from 1882 till 1914. Second, a more of a strategic reason was behind the occupation of Egypt as Britain as any other European country wanted to shift its importance in maintaining a link between its empire and the east. According to Juan Cole who wrote a book about the events in Egypt from September 1881 to September 1882, in his book he summarized the reason why he thought the British invaded Egypt by saying that
“The British invaded Egypt in order to ensure that a process of state formation did not succeed in creating a new sort of stable order that would end European privileges and threaten the security of European property and Investments”.

This summarizes what its thought to be the main reasons why the British have targeted Egypt to invade in 1882 and what were the motives behind such a decision.

Its hard to really judge whether the invasion was of any benefit or not to the Egyptians without looking at several aspects that would guide us into knowing whether we’ve performed better under the British or not. First of all the British government has put on some tasks that it will be responsible for implementing and they were mainly:

▪ Maintaining free movement in Suez Canal

▪ Develop a new financial supervision program

▪ Fix Public Administrations

▪ Maintain a correct law system

▪ Equally distribute taxes among people

▪ Retrogression of the Army and Police

▪ Eliminate slavery and the trading of slaves

These are all basic duties that the British government vowed to implement, but since all of these sound somehow basic and should be present in any country then what else really matters is the performance of the economy through the period of invasion or before and after the British gained power over Egypt. As it was mentioned before the Egyptian economy was suffering a lot before the invasion with debts accumulating year by year and the government wasn’t able to use the cotton boom to repay those debts but instead it kept taking more debts to be able to lay the foundations for a new infrastructure, during the time of occupation we must not forget that an improved administrative system was used to generate data that is regarded as genuinely accurate compared to other countries in the middle east, as for example the population was calculated with a degree of error of up to 1m before the new systems were established.

The pattern of the British control over Egypt can be very helpful in explaining to us how the situation was back at that time. First of all according to the British as its found in Roger Owen’s book The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914, their purpose from occupying Egypt was to re-establish the mechanisms of foreign financial control which they have thought to be seriously threatened by the Urabi movement. But their decision to withdraw was continuously delayed time after time and so these mechanisms became more of amendments that the British will implement in order to strengthen its own power, and so these amendments were finally established and it included the use of some the money generated by the British government to fund the occupation and for the French to remove the ceiling on the Egyptian administrative expenditure and thus helping Britain to control the day to day local finances. This was simply because the British started to gain control over organizations like the railways, the telegraphs, the port of Alexandria and former Royal estates. The book tries to explain how the British themselves have thought of these decisions, what actually they planned the world to understand was that they were in defense of Egyptian interest against the selfish and greedy interests of the French. But when we take time to think about it, we arrive to the conclusion that Britain as a colonial power would obviously seek control over Egypt and to win the hearts of the people its ruling, but that wasn’t the case at all in Egypt.

Once the occupation became permanent, the formation of a foreign policy in Egypt came second in terms of importance to the establishment of a force of international constraint; the result was like what happened in India and elsewhere in the British Empire. Their main aim was to ensure was to balance economic and political considerations so as to make sure that the growth of the Egyptian economy wasn’t of any threat to any imperial force outside Egypt.

The first concern to the British in terms of importance was the agricultural sector in Egypt; in the first years of the occupation it was extremely important for the British to generate the maximum amount of revenue from agriculture so as to avoid another bankruptcy. And so the British started to improve our systems of irrigation, in Lower Egypt were cotton was mainly grown. According to Roger Owen’s book a new system of irrigation was implemented in 1890 and once the system started working, there was mainly an increase in the supply of every Egyptian crop. As it may sound cheerful the new system did bring on some unexpected problems, first the supply of water was always flowing throughout the lands and with huge amounts, and so they weren’t able to control this supply efficiently and thus leading to some ruined crops like in 1909 when the whole crop of cotton was damaged. The new irrigation system wasn’t only what contributed to the flourishing of the agricultural sector; there were other government activities that played a vital role, from the ability to generate more quantities of rural labour yearly to the building of new agricultural roads to facilitate transport. In addition their was a vast improvement in the methods of tax collection, the new methods helped in providing agricultural lands to poor peasants by reducing the level of direct taxation, also a new system of low interest loans was institutionalised by the Agricultural Bank to benefit small purchasers. When trying to look on the policies established by the British with a broad view one could hardly think they wouldn’t succeed but the reality is some of them really didn’t work, first of all the poor peasants that the British were targeting weren’t able to benefit at all, because neither did they have the resources to fund the lands they were given nor they had the credit worthiness needed for them to take one of the low interest loans offered by the Agricultural Bank, and so no matter how sounding a policy could be, its implementing is a whole different story.

Turning the focus to other sectors, the British did really target some improvements in other sectors of the Egyptian economy, but the main scheme that was applied was bending towards a laissez-faire economy. So laws of establishing new businesses were unrestricting to the extent that private businesses were always encouraged. But as it may sound very appealing this was also established in a way that would indirectly limit the control of the Egyptians, as the National Bank despite its name had minimal if not zero control over taxation, level of interest and money supply, and so the operations of the Cairo and Alexandria stock exchanges were also under their control. At last the industrial sector was also affected a lot in terms of its performance, the British intervention in this sector was very much of both worlds, on one hand they would force the two biggest cotton spinning and weaving factories to pay 8% (according to Roger Owen’s findings) and therefore it deprives them of the minimum protection they have been granted by the tariffs that are paid. While on the other hand the British have helped the main sugar producer S.G. by selling all of its railways to the government and thus saving the producer from bankruptcy. Archie Hunter in His Book “Power and Passion in Egypt” quoted the times by saying “The Times commented that Egypt was a marvellous instance of progress she has advanced as much as in seventy years as many other countries have done in five hundred”

In conclusion, one could easily find that the British were mainly using the economic growth that happened in Egypt as a justifying reason to their presence here, and so it wasn’t actually helping the Egyptians form the greedy French the main reason for the occupation but rather for Britain to have a huge empire with colonies all over the world. When trying to see what effects the occupation had on Egyptians, we could only notice a change in the way of thinking of businessmen, finance officials and bankers, as the empire had great control over our money flow and supply and the new ideas they’ve brought have attracted Egyptians engaging in business activities. While the business mentality isn’t everything responsible for growth and prosperity, we could easily say that the British have failed in having any impact on many other influential sectors, that would’ve maid the occupation of some benefit to the Egyptians, for example the British didn’t have any influence on the education in Egypt, so we didn’t notice any improvements in educational standards in Egypt at the time of British, but instead the elite people started sending their children abroad to educate them in a better way. Also the health sector for example didn’t improve greatly during the occupation, as we didn’t hear of any breakthrough technologies being imported from Europe and used here, but instead it was all about having a strong industrial economy that would help and contribute to the big British Empire.

Works Cited
"» The British Invasion of Egypt, 1882." E-IR. 03 May 2009 .
Cole, Juan Ricardo. Colonialism and revolution in the Middle East social and cultural origins of Egypt's 'Urabi movement. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 1993.
"Egypt: History - British Occupation Period." Egypt Travel, Tours, Vacations, Ancient Egypt from Tour Egypt. 03 May 2009 .
Hunter, Archie. Power and Passion in Egypt ( A life of Sir Eldon Gorst, 1861-1911). London-New York: I.B Tauris.
Owen, Roger. The Middle East in the World Economy 1800-1914. I.B Tauris, 1993.
Zu Al fakar, Said Ibrahim. British Imperialism In Egypt ( Arabic Edition) 1882-1914.