This panel takes up a paradox in the recent historiography of modern Egypt: while recent decades have witnessed a vigorous elaboration of scholarship on colonialism, that otherwise rich and diverse body of work has remained rather silent about the nature and ongoing transformation of the colonial state. Consigned to the contextual "background" of the British occupation, the state quickly fades from view as narratives move beyond 1882. With some notable exceptions, scholars writing from a remarkable diversity of perspectives often reproduce the same basic proposition: under British occupation, the Egyptian state became a uniform instrument for the advancement of British economic interests, and towards that end, it functioned to render Egypt a giant plantation for the production of long-staple cotton.
The four papers comprising this panel together aim to challenge and engage this well-rehearsed characterization. All four hold that the management of agricultural production and agrarian populations remained a central concern throughout the long and troubled history of colonial rule. But for all four authors, the state is understood less as a static entity than as a process, a complex and contested assemblage of institutions, practices, and ideas undergoing constant, if highly uneven, transformation. The first paper seeks to complicate notions about the centrality of cotton to colonial practice by approaching the British occupation from a different geographic vantage and a different commodity. The paper explores the European administration of the khedivial sugar plantations of the Daira Sanieh in southern Egypt arguing that the production of agricultural environments was fundamental to state practice during the late nineteenth century. The second paper focuses on the boom years of the early 1900s to argue that newly emergent land and mortgage markets played a central role both in transforming agricultural practices and in rendering plausible new ways of critiquing colonial rule. Moving forward to the inter-war period, the next paper explores the rise of institutions--such as the Credit Agricole Bank--and discourses--like the agricultural census--that emerged out of an effort to control and understand the social dislocations and crises within the rural economy of these years. From WWII onwards, such efforts enabled the new practices of government intervention in the food supply that form the central concern of the fourth and final paper. These efforts induced the first mass Egyptian military tribunals for civilians to enforce strict sowing and rationing rules, which both sparked public controversy and influenced later, more successful policies.
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In early February 1904, the Egyptian local committee for the Gresham Life Insurance Company held their first meeting to hash out the details of a new business venture in the country. Acting on directives from the London Board of the company, they began to specify the terms on which a million British pounds of Gresham’s substantial float would be invested in Egypt’s booming mortgage market. In the years that followed, the members of the local committee sought to attract suitable borrowers from among the country’s powerful class of large landlords. Anxiously aware that the waves of mortgage credit then flooding the country threatened to drive interest rates downward, they raced to place the Board’s investments ahead of their numerous competitors. And yet just three years later, the mortgage market screeched to a halt in what Egypt’s new cadre of political economists described as the country’s first true economic crisis. Alarmed by the number of loans that suddenly started to go bad, the London Board demanded an explanation for how their agents in Egypt had acted so irresponsibly.
Drawing heavily on a remarkable collection of archival sources detailing the Egyptian local committee’s activities, my paper will use this tale of boom and bust to explore the changing relationship between state, finance, and land during the British occupation of Egypt. I will begin by arguing that the conditions of possibility for Egypt’s wildly speculative land market lay, paradoxically, in an array of novel colonial policies that aimed to create a class of conservative peasant landowners firmly rooted to their own land. More specifically, the series of tax reforms and land surveys enacted in the mid-1890s generated masses of standardized data that, for the first time, provided the practical and technical means for treating rural land as an abstract commodity.
The second half of the paper will attempt to offer the outlines of an “eco-social” history of this speculative boom and subsequent crisis. In particular, I will suggest that the expectations motivating the onslaught of finance capital at the close of the nineteenth century entailed an uneasy oscillation between the growth of monetary value and the growth of plants on the land. The sudden and rapid decline in both forms of growth during the first decade of the twentieth century helped to bring about a widespread shift towards more politically charged understandings of crisis in Egypt.
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Samantha Iyer
In the 1940s, Karl Polanyi tried to make sense of the recent rise of fascism, communism, and welfare-state capitalism, arguing that they were different forms of a common “double movement”: efforts to protect society from the utopian project to create a self-regulating market. Central to this utopian project, he argued, was the organization of markets around three “fictitious commodities”—labor, land, and money—distinct from other commodities like cars or t-shirts. This paper explores the double movement in the colonial world that followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the commodification of land, a fictitious commodity because nature produces it. Part of a dissertation on the history of U.S. food aid to Egypt and India, it draws on extensive research at the National Archives in Egypt, India, and England, and the British Library. It also examines social scientific writings, papers of social scientists, and official government publications and statistics.
The food crisis in Egypt extends far earlier than the 1970s, when food imports from the US skyrocketed. In the late nineteenth century, the growth of perennial irrigation and rural money-lending systems encouraged small landholders to produce cotton for the export market at the expense of grain production and at the cost of soil depletion. During the global Depression of the 1920 and 1930s, Egyptian and British government officials attempted to respond to some of the problems of this system: the debt of small cultivators, low crop prices, and insufficient food yields as a result of high cotton acreage. Their efforts included the establishment of an Agricultural Reserve and the Credit Agricole Bank, which offered cash advances as well as choice seeds and chemical fertilizers—required now as a result of soil depletion—in exchange for crops held as securities. This period also saw the rise of agricultural censuses, efforts to measure and manage national food production, and new social scientific interpretations of population growth. The paper describes parallel and inter-linked developments in the U.S. and India, in response to the economic crises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The double movement in this period—however insufficient in tackling the problems of the rural economy—allowed for the centralization of grain surpluses and the rise of new ideas and discursive practices. These developments would later enable and encourage a new mode of managing national and international food supply in which state officials played an unprecedented role.
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Mr. Eric Schewe
The Second World War precipitated an agricultural, economic and financial crisis unlike any Egypt had ever seen. The structures of free market capitalism, which except for brief periods since the 1880s had delivered riches to Egypt’s local and foreign elite, were now threatening it with famine and social unrest. With global trade cut by submarine warfare and German and Italian trade foresworn, Egypt’s cotton exports stagnated, and crucial fertilizer imports fell nearly to zero, causing yields on food crops to fall precipitously. The British responded with the Middle East Supply Center, which helped organize regional trade to address local shortfalls while using the smallest volume of shipping possible. However, in Egypt, its recommendations on domestic agricultural growing and commercial policies depended entirely on the political will of the government. Using government documents from the Egyptian National Archives, this paper examines the lesser known aspects of the Egyptian response to the crisis. It prompted the state to intervene more thoroughly than ever before in the growing and marketing of cotton and grain and in the consumption of food and other essentials.
The principal mechanism for this control was the “state of siege,” a constitutional state of emergency which was initially intended to enforce censorship, prevent trading with the enemy and capture spies and fifth columnists, but gradually became the avenue for hundreds of executive proclamations relating to economic and social issues outside the traditional definition of public security. The Prime Ministers’ archived records of the military tribunals that enforced state of siege legislation reveal that more than two thirds of the estimated 150,000 civilians tried between 1940-1945 had been accused of infringing rationing rules, price control or were hoarding or transporting grain, sugar or cotton without licenses. At the same time, the state offered the carrot of high fixed prices to peasants for growing wheat and maize and easy credit to smallholders through the recently created Credit Agricole Bank, and subsidized consumption of the sha?abi loaf, kerosene and course cloth for the peasants by encouraging the spread of semi-autonomous rural cooperatives. These governmental efforts were not without their weaknesses and failures, and they drew criticism from the landed elite, but the new state structures and social commitments reshaped the role of the government in the lives of Egyptians foreshadowing Nasser-era policies in ways that are recognizable until the present day.
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Nineteenth-century Egypt was marked by a vibrant agricultural landscape. In addition to its booming cotton production, central and southern Egyptian cultivators produced sizable quantities of sugarcane. The bulk of this sugarcane was cultivated on khedivial estates known as the Daira Sanieh. The Daira Sanieh expanded dramatically during the 1860s and 1870s and hosted a vast network of irrigation canals, agricultural railways, a river transport system, and a series of sugar mills. In 1878, a European commission assumed control of these estates faced with the impending bankruptcy of the Egyptian state. In the decades that followed, the policies and practices of this commission shaped the experiences of the colonial state for Egyptian cultivators in large swaths of central and southern Egypt. Reading the archives of the Daira Sanieh (housed at the Egyptian National Archives), this paper explores the organization and practice of agricultural geography on the Daira Sanieh during the colonial era pursuing the following questions: First, how did the colonial administration commodify and manage the Daira Sanieh’s agricultural environment? Second, how did Egyptian cultivators engage these practices of the colonial state through struggles over soil, fertilizer, irrigation water, and plant life? Thirdly, how does the history of the Daira Sanieh nuance an historical interpretation of the colonial state in Egypt by exploring the interstices of colonial rule, the physical environment, and the experience of agriculture? Explorations of colonial Egypt often homogenize Egypt’s agricultural geography and marshal this simplified geography to support an under-theorized interpretation of the objectives, experiences, and embodiments of the colonial state in Egypt. This paper engages a specific and distinct incarnation of Egypt’s agricultural geography to critically examine the encounters of Egyptian cultivators with the micro-environments that framed their quotidian experiences of cultivation, labor, and production.
