This paper problematizes the relationship between dominant and muted, or peripheral, discourses though an examination of the correspondence between Egypt’s first consul general, Lord Cromer and W.S. Blunt. Blunt, who was a great fan of Egyptians and of Arabs, is typically dismissed as having annoyed British colonial personnel greatly while having influenced them little. Indeed, while Blunt’s desert lifestyle, effervescent prose and tendencies to “go native” have been well chronicled, what has been less well studied are the effects of his thoughts about the people he called “Arabs” and the construction of Cromer’s policies in Egypt and the Sudan. While Blunt was, in fact, of great annoyance to Cromer, this paper argues that he in fact shaped the Consul General’s thoughts about the identity of people in the territories that came to be understood and administered as Egypt and the Sudan. Drawing on British archival sources, correspondence between the two men, and Blunt and Cromer’s published works, this paper illustrates the substantial role that Blunt’s ideas about Arabs and Arab civilization played in the construction of Cromer’s blueprint for governing, both in Egypt and the Sudan. The paper questions the imperial “vision” by illustrating not only how it was frequently constructed on the spot, but also by highlighting the role of “anti-imperialists” like Blunt in its construction.

Long after the eclipse of Britain as the prime mover in the global economy, the “imperialism of free trade” continued to have powerful resonance in the rhetoric of British bureaucrats and businessmen. British enterprise, with its superior technology and industrial organization, was supposed to have proceeded unchallenged and dominated the primitive economies into which the entered. I argue that in reality, the survival and success of British businesses in these regions developed not through the inherent superiority of capitalist organization but through canny alliances with both local enterprise and the imperial bureaucracy. This paper consequently seeks to uncover the muted practices of British, Arab and Indian businesses who cooperated and competed to dominate the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Foreign Office and Admiralty files, as well as shipping company records and the family archives of the Ratansi Purshottam and Al-Sultan families of Muscat, indicate that corporate moguls like Lord Inchape, the chairman of the British India Steam Navigation Company (BISN), cultivated the collaboration of prominent local businessmen as well as the subsidies and preferential policies of imperial bureaucrats. The superior technology and management of British India steamships did not revolutionize shipping in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. Indeed, despite subsidies and advanced technology, the price of labor, coal and the ships themselves made dhows a more cost-effective method of shipping. Dhows further offered the flexibility of shipping times, accessibility to the smallest ports in the Gulf and India and comparative invisibility to customs officials. So what followed was lobbying from Inchape and other British businessmen to increase smuggling and sanitation regulations on dhows. This was in turn undermined as dhows began to frequent smaller ports with more lenient customs officers, and embrace their role as traffickers of illicit cargo. Ultimately, though, success in the shipping business required tapping into the personal networks that moved merchandise across the waves, and British shipping companies depended on the recruitment of prominent local merchants who could cajole and pressure their peers into paying the more expensive charges of steam-shipping. Thus the interlacing histories of Lord Inchape, Indian merchants and Arab dhow captains reveal a far more complex and contested history of colonial capitalism than is usually depicted.

In 1902, Lord Cromer completed a series of successful experiments aimed at extending rural credit to poorer peasant landholders and then established (with the help of Sir Ernest Cassel) the quasi-official Agricultural Bank of Egypt. Cromer took great pride in this institution, and its promotion elsewhere (such as in the Philippines), but the bank’s rural operations were effectively shut down in 1912 by Sir Herbert Kitchener when he passed the so-called five feddan law. Described by one prominent historian as “the most radical intervention”* ever undertaken during the period of British rule, this law prohibited creditors from dispossessing small landholders of their last five feddans, their house, or necessary animals and agricultural implements. Within a brief ten year span, colonial discourses on peasant foreclosure had changed dramatically: whereas Cromer drew primarily on European economic theories to extol the greatness of credit (and of bankruptcy too), Kitchener emphasized its perils through reference to his India experience as well as to concurrent homestead policies in America and England. The financial crisis of 1907 clearly had a huge impact on official perspectives. Yet neither Cromer nor Kitchener -- despite their professed commitment to the welfare of the ‘fellah’ and for all their reference to theoretical and global perspectives -- ever seem to have known very much about the dynamic and complex relations, social and economic, between cotton and credit in the Egyptian countryside. By examining the official accounts of rural indebtedness, the published reports of some banks, and the secondary literature on comparative credit institutions in India, America and England, this paper seeks to better understand the contradictory colonial perspectives on the provision of agricultural credit in Egyptian villages. The focus will be on the multiple contexts in which first Cromer and then Kitchener received and interpreted what little information about Egyptian agriculture was presented to them at the time. * Gabriel Baer, History of Land Ownership in Modern Egypt, 1800-1950 (Oxford, 1962), 89.

Albert Memmi famously denied the existence of the ‘colonial’ or the ‘colonizer who refuses’. There was only the colonizer, inextricably implicated in a project to exploit the colonized through privilege, prestige, and power. Memmi’s conclusion left little room for individual agency, policy change, or colonial reform. Certainly, the official, imperial narrative had an impact upon colonial culture. In Egypt Cromer, Milner, and Lloyd composed a public narrative and a public memory of Britain’s imperial mission in the Middle East. That memory was guarded by many in British public life, notably Winston Churchill. However, the private letters, memoirs, and public writings of T. E. Lawrence and John de Vere Loder are investigated in this paper to measure the reality of the colonial experience against the rhetoric of imperial narratives. For instance, T. E. Lawrence did not ‘refuse’ the policy of his government during and after the First World War, but he disagreed and plotted out an alternative. In this sense he was implicated in the larger project but determined to reform it through ‘para-colonial’ activity, such as his relationships with individuals involved in the ‘Arab Revolt’, like Faysal, or through cultural work in Britain, notably the publication of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Likewise, John de Vere Loder’s diaries record his immersion in Egyptian life, attraction to Levantine culture, and disillusion with British policy in the Middle East while serving as an intelligence officer during the First World War. These experiences resulted in his conversion to internationalism and his writing of a critical assessment of the imperial narrative in his The Truth about Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria.