Egypt

THE MODERN HISTORY of Egypt can be said to have begun with the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869. The canal, largely the creation of the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps (who would later attempt the first Panama Canal), opened Egypt to much new investment in the commercial waterway and its related industries. The canal, for example, would be the shortest maritime route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean beyond. Indeed, the canal was built during a period of progressive thought in Egypt, as the ruling Khedive Ismail attempted to bring Egypt out of the years of back-wardness caused by the rule of the Ottoman Empire. However, ironically, Ismail's dreams of modernization were thwarted by their cost. Hostile pressure from Germany, Austria, England, and France forced the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid to force Ismail to abdicate in favor of his son Tewfik.

The obvious influence of foreign governments in Egypt greatly exacerbated the internal problems of modernization and the debt. With the government seen as being corrupt, nationalist thinking began to coalesce around followers of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who, as Peter Mansfield wrote in A History of the Middle East, “was one of the most powerful intellectual influences in 19th-century Islam.” The nationalist leader became Colonel Arabi Pasha, one of the first of the modernizing military officers who would have such an impact in modern history. The London Times quoted him on September 12, 1881, as saying “the army, we must remember, is the only native institution which Egypt now owns.” Unfortunately, a developing Egyptian nationalism was not on the agenda of England, which had bought the debt-ridden Ismail's Suez Canal Company shares in November 1875. In September 1882, at Tel-el-Kebir, British General Sir Garnet Wolseley crushed Arabi's force and the compliant Tewfik dissolved his own army to prevent further resistance.

The British conquest led to the establishment of what the British called “the veiled protectorate” in the time of Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer. Theoretically, Tewfik still reigned, but the British ruled, as shown by the troop garrison now in the country and the use of Alexandria as a main port in the Mediterranean for the British fleet. The British Royal Navy had, in fact, bombarded Alexandria before the invasion under Wolseley. Cromer served as the imperial proconsul, the true “power behind the throne.” A.P. Thornton, in The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power noted that the anti-imperialist sociology pioneer Herbert Spencer felt such “militarism was just another aspect of the rebarbarization of the nation.”

Before long, Baring found himself embroiled in a revolt in the Sudan, which had been the subject of ineffective [Page 144]and corrupt Egyptian rule since 1820. As in Egypt itself, with political avenues blocked, popular disaffection among the Sudanese expressed itself in Mohammed Ahmed, who styled himself the Mahdi, “the Expected One” of Allah. After leading it astray in the desert, the Mahdi's Ansar army crushed an Egyptian army under former British General William Hicks at El Obeid.

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