Bedouin, fellahs and sultans:
History of the Islamic Countryside
Week 8
The colonial economy:
Modernity, cotton & Egypt
Queen Mary University of
London
HST 5112, 2011-12
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Middle East in 1800
Ottoman reforms
Land law of 1858
Egypt and cotton
British rule (1882-1922)
Depression
Ottoman Middle East, 1800
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Most land is miri (state-owned), cultivated with
cereals
Agricultural taxes by tax-farming, at control of
local elites
Waqf – revenues from land alienated for
religious purposes / family descendants
Peasants had rights of usufruct
Communal cultivation in high-risk areas
Ottoman reforms, 1789-1858
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Ottoman tax revenues £2.25 – 3.57m; British
are £16.8m (for circa 1800)
Move to direct collection of taxes and abolition
of tax-farms and waqfs.
Land law, 1858
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1858 land law - every piece of
miri land was to be registered in
the name of the person who
cultivated it.
State ownership re-established
but title deed (tapu) to
encourage stability
Sultan Abdulmecid I (r. 1839 – 1861)
Impact of 1858 land law
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Who actually registered the land? Sometimes
individual peasants, sometimes local notables
By the 1850s, European capital flows into
coastal areas (Izmir, Lebanon), leading to
expansion of cash crops (cotton, silk)
Handful of railway routes allow export of crops &
cereals from the hinterland
Impact of 1858 land law
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Emergence of estates, often effectively owned
by Europeans (half of land around Izmir owned
by Brits in 1878)
System of Capitulations for European
merchants – free trade, not subject to local
jurisdiction
But by WWI – Anatolia still has majority of small
holdings in the interior of the country
Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt
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French conquest (1798-1801)
Muhammad ‘Ali’s rule in Egypt (1805-1849)
Autonomous province
An 1840 portrait of Muhammad Ali by Auguste
Coder
Muhammad ‘Ali’s Egypt
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Abolition of all tax-farms
State monopoly on trade in cereals, sugar
Centralized Introduction of long-staple cotton
Forced labour (corvee) for irrigation works
Mass conscription of peasants to new army
Construction of textile factories
Egypt, 1840-1882
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By 1840s, centralization collapses; land redistributed as private property
Foreign capital flows directly to delta villages;
cotton boom of the 1860s
Corvee labour
Bankruptcy leads to British occupation
British rule, 1882-1922
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Balancing the books: investment in irrigation &
transport infrastructure to allow rise in
productivity; abolition of corvee
Emergence of large cotton estates: by 1894,
42% of holdings are more than 50 acres
The ‘izbe: large landowner would allow tenants
on his lands, in return for fees & labour
By WWI, 40-50% of peasants are landless
The fellah, 1919
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85% of 12.7m population is rural
Irrigation is year-round in most of Egypt
Cotton as main crop (92% of exports in 1913)
Transport links allow closer control by Cairo
Bureaucratization at village level; ‘umda (mayor)
and watchmen paid by state
Small holdings, or ‘izbe tenants of large
landowners
The fellah, 1919
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Dinshaway incident (1906)
Peasants & nationalist revolt (1919)
Targets of peasant attack:
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Railways
Greeks
‘izbe compounds
Local administration
Pictures from the village of Dinshaway,
1900s (from http://www.cedejeg.org/spip.php?article46)
Egypt, interwar period
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Formal independence, British tutelage (1922)
Political dominance of large land-owners
Decreasing soil fertility after over-watering
under the British; per capita growth stagnant
The Depression (setting of Egyptian Earth) – fall
in cotton prices and further indebtedness of
peasants
The ‘colonial economy’
British legacy in Egypt as a typical ‘colonial economy’
 Reliance on one crop
 low tariffs, minimal restrictions on trade
 Colony should pay for itself, little infrastructure
 No local central bank
 Political management through large landowners or
tribal chiefs
Overview of modern economic history of the Middle East in R. Owen and Sevket
Pamuk, A history of Middle East economies in the twentieth century (1998)