This panel offers a critical rethinking of some of the received categories of political economy, in particular debt, land, law, and development, through three key historical moments of transformation throughout the fin de siècle Ottoman realm. The backdrop for these papers is the Ottoman and Ottoman-Egyptian debt crises culminating in the bankruptcy and the Caisse de la Dette Publique in the 1870s. Generally regarded as merely having led to unprecedented European financial control, debates have frequently revolved around the extent to which this helped or hindered ‘development’ in the Middle East. By contrast, these papers do not take the categories of political economic analysis for granted. Instead, each considers how ‘internal’ dynamics played out and new forms of power materialised in these spaces, creating the very conditions for the emergence of received conceptual demarcations, including ‘development’ itself.
Four papers explore interlocking questions of debt, land, law and development. The first paper examines the role of joint-stock infrastructure companies in transforming land from an exhaustible source of surplus to an objective political economic “field” which could be infinitely developed. In Egypt, railroad corporations were the first to promote “land development” schemes. More generally, the paper questions the assumption that Egypt’s independence hinged on ending, rather than the perpetuation and institutionalisation, of its debt crisis. A second paper on famine and debt in Ottoman Anatolia in 1887-93 examines how political economy and political ecology intersected during the Anatolian famines. Often examined separately, it ties the Ottoman debt crisis to the new forms of debt experienced by cultivators and the new property regimes that undergirded them. The third paper re-examines transformations in the political economy of nineteenth century Sudan in light of the critique--and conceptual repository--offered by a messianic insurgency, namely the Mahdiyya. Moreover, it shows how British colonial policy around “land development” was impacted by the spectre of Mahdist resurgence and geared towards counter-insurgency through the production of future-oriented subjects. The final paper explores the genealogy of the Suez Canal Company to study the social, economic, and legal transformations that gave rise to corporations as paradigmatic means of colonial government in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taken together, the papers offer a cross-regional perspective, showing how practices around debt, land, law and development--and the conceptual distinctions generated--were themselves products of new forms of power unfolding in the late nineteenth century.
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Dr. Hengameh Ziai
Ottoman-Egyptian rule in Sudan began with the invasion of Muhammad ʻAli in 1821 and ended with the Mahdist insurgency in 1884, which established a state at the height of the ‘Scramble for Africa.’ The Ottoman period brought about significant changes in land and debt relations, including the vast expansion of individual ownership and new forms of debt tied to land, largely incurred by the northern peasantry. Indeed, such hardships propelled the spectacular success of the insurgency. This paper asks what it would mean to rethink these transformations—not through the categories of political economy but—through the conceptual framework offered by the Mahdi himself. For, unlike many subaltern uprisings, the Mahdist insurgency is unique in leaving in its wake a vast written record. What would it mean to treat the Mahdi as an intellectual, in the manner of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani or Muhammad ʻAbduh, and his words as a form of critique? What is an eschatological approach to land and debt? What might we learn from treating the Mahdist archive as a conceptual repository through which to rethink the key categories of political economy?
The paper consists of two parts. First, it explores the Mahdi’s critique of and approach to debt and land, an approach transcending the division between religion and economy. It explores the way these ideas unfolded in practice following the success of the revolt, under the exigencies of worldly government (1884-1898). In this context, what role was played by messianic time—the time of the present, or political possibility—in attempts at a radical reconfiguration of practices? Second, it turns to the early decades of British colonial rule in Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian condominium (1898-1925). Though Mahdism was defeated in the battlefield, the spectre of Mahdist resurgence remained present in the minds of British soldier-administrators. In light of this, how were approaches to land, debt, and development in Sudan oriented around overcoming this Mahdist threat? How was the production of prosperity—inherently orientated toward the future—a means through which to neutralise insurgent Mahdist temporalities? I explore how these questions played out on the establishment of a major cotton-growing project between White and Blue Niles, the Gezira Scheme, one site for the production of economic subjects. More broadly, I argue that Sudan was one early site in which land and debt were used as a strategy for colonial political governance, later to be transmitted to Egypt.
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Matthew Ghazarian
In 1881, the Ottoman Empire formalized its financial subordination to Europe with the creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA). While other scholarship has debated whether the OPDA represented a bridgehead of colonial expansion or the Ottomans’ best opportunity at cheap credit and development, both approaches tend to focus on decision-makers in London, Paris, and Istanbul. Drawing on Ottoman, Armenian, British, and American sources, this paper shifts the focus to rural, agrarian areas, where the majority of Ottoman subjects lived. Examining those regions reveals how financial precarity on the imperial level gave rise to the same on the individual level: Ottoman imperial debt meant increasing indebtedness among individual Ottoman cultivators. This pattern was most clear during the Anatolian famines of 1888-93, when scarcity pushed many rural-dwellers to the brink. These famines were linked not only to ecological factors but also to the Empire’s debt troubles. In some cases, grain tithes were shipped directly out of famine districts to cover foreign debt payments. When desperate Ottoman subjects requested aid, Ottoman officials offered them loans, facilitated by the newly-established Agricultural Bank (Ziraat Bankası). Obtaining those loans, however, required cultivators to register their lands and offer them as collateral. In this way, loans-as-aid schemes secured for the bank the future bounties of these famine-stricken lands. The loans also helped officials avoid burdens on the imperial budget, impose property registration on cultivators, and wield the threat of dispossession. By analyzing how political economy and political ecology intersected during the 1887-93 Anatolian famines, this paper demonstrates how private property there emerged not as a “right” for which people fought, but as a deepening debt relation imposed by the powerful upon the desperate.
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Dr. Rana Baker
My paper investigates the emergence of joint-stock railway companies which explicitly identified their object as “land development” in the last decade of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, I explore the role of infrastructure in general and railways in particular in the production of land as an object of development.
I make two central propositions. First, I propose that, in Egypt, “land development” in its political economic sense was first articulated in infrastructural terms and by infrastructure companies. The Egyptian Delta Light Railways and Fayoum Light Railway Company founded in 1893 and 1898 respectively were two of the first infrastructure companies to present their railway schemes explicitly in terms of “land development.” Prior to the last decade of the nineteenth century, land was conceived of in terms of its ability to produce surplus and capacity for natural exhaustion. Development was not yet something one could apply to land. By 1906, however, land development became a well-established corporate practice and was automatically tied to urban transport. The link between railroads and tramways on the one hand and land development on the other was consolidated with the establishment in 1906 of the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oasis Company which precipitated the formation of Heliopolis, an upscale neighbourhood north of Cairo. The “development” of the “garden city” of Maadi in the south was similarly taken over by the Delta Light Railways company.
Second, I propose that the transformation of land from a naturally exhaustible source of surplus to an object of infinite development, from exhaustible to inexhaustible, was underpinned by a specific configuration of Egypt’s debt as productive and advantageous to the country’s financial standing and conducive to its independence. Studies on debt in Egypt often assume that the British and French made the country’s independence conditional upon the fulfilment of its financial obligations to foreign banks. As I show in my analysis of railroad and tramway land development companies, it was the institutionalisation – not end – of borrowing which was the condition of Egypt’s self-rule and independence. Land development was an important financial instrument of this institutionalisation and the railroads were its technical apparatus.
In making these two propositions, I rely on source material which includes bond certificates, mortgage registers, corporate memoranda and articles of association, as well as private archival collections which consist of private and official correspondence.
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Dr. Ibrahim Elhoudaiby
In November 1854, Egypt’s viceroy Sa‘id Pasha issued a firman (decree) granting his friend Ferdinand De Lesseps the exclusive power to constitute a universal joint-stock company to connect the Mediterranean and Red Sea by means of a maritime canal, and operate it for ninety-nine years. Notwithstanding its importance, this firman was not the first Ottoman decree ordering the construction of the canal. Almost two centuries earlier, a decree issued by the Ottoman Sultan Selim II ordered his Egyptian viceroy to assemble all “experienced architects and engineers and send necessary manpower” to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, to dig a canal. The Portuguese naval expedition was the cause of increasing anxiety in the Ottoman court, and the Sultan, already strengthening its naval arsenal, saw in the isthmus of Suez a barrier to his naval power. While both Selim II and Sa‘id died shortly after issuing their decrees, the former’s firman never materialized, and was soon forgotten, while the remembered is the Canal’s patron.
This paper takes this failed attempt to dig through the isthmus as a vantage point though which to explore the transformations in government that made digging the Suez Canal, the engineering marvel of the nineteenth century, possible. It sets out to answer two questions: Why did this sixteenth century attempt to cut through the isthmus fail? What are the legal, political, economic and technical transformations that allowed for the project success in the nineteenth century? It challenges the standard narrative, propagated in part by the Suez Canal Company, which explains success through the technological developments intensifying in the nineteenth century, not the least because the Mediterranean and Red Sea were connected earlier by the ‘ancient canal.’ Instead, I argue that it was the rise of the joint-stock company as a political, economic and legal structure that allowed for the successful undertaking of the project. I explore the genealogy of this company, focusing primarily on the commercial and legal history of nineteenth century Egypt, the history and limitations of chartered companies, and the history of European joint stock companies.
