1. 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 Middle East in 1800 Ottoman reforms Land law of 1858 Egypt and cotton British rule (1882-1922) Depression

2. Ottoman Middle East, 1800 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

3. Ottoman reforms, 1789-1858 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.

4. Land law, 1858 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)

5. Impact of 1858 land law 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

6. Impact of 1858 land law 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

7. Muhammad Alis Egypt French conquest (1798-1801) Muhammad Alis rule in Egypt (1805-1849) Autonomous province An 1840 portrait of Muhammad Ali by Auguste Coder

8. Muhammad Alis Egypt 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

9. Egypt, 1840-1882 By 1840s, centralization collapses; land re- distributed as private property Foreign capital flows directly to delta villages; cotton boom of the 1860s Corvee labour Bankruptcy leads to British occupation

10. British rule, 1882-1922 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

11. The fellah, 1919 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

12. The fellah, 1919 Dinshaway incident (1906) Peasants & nationalist revolt (1919) Targets of peasant attack: Railways Greeks izbe compounds Local administration Pictures from the village of Dinshaway, 1900s (from http://www.cedej- eg.org/spip.php?article46)http://www.cedej- eg.org/spip.php?article46

13. Egypt, interwar period 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

14. 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)