Muhammad ‘Alī Pasha

Governor of Egypt (1805-1848)

• Born: 1769
• Birthplace: Kavála, Macedonia, Ottoman Empire (now in Greece)
• Died: August 2, 1849
• Place of death: Alexandria, Egypt

By applying strong-arm techniques so as to ensure central-government control, Muḥammad ՙAlī transformed Egypt from an ungovernable and unproductive province of the Ottoman Empire into a largely autonomous state supported by an impressive military apparatus. That was done by combining Ottoman “new order” reform priorities with European technical contributions, especially in the areas of military and agricultural modernization.

Early Life

Although Muḥammad ՙAlī Pasha was born into a family that originated in Albania, it was in the Ottoman Turkish province of Macedonia (in modern Greece) that the first biographical information concerning him was recorded. His father’s position as a ranking Ottoman bureaucrat serving the sultanate of Selim III (who ruled between 1789 and 1808) was significant for the future career of Muḥammad. One of Selim’s main goals was to use loyal servants of the state to create, in the place of the by then severely inefficient Janissary corps and imperial administrative system, an army and government of “the new order” (nizam-ul Cedid). Without actually being members of the new order elite military unit that Selim had consciously copied from contemporary European models, both his father and the young Muḥammad were heavily influenced by the visible efficiency of new order Ottoman institutions.

When the sultan needed a capable lieutenant to accompany a force of irregular Albanian troops sent to reoccupy the Ottoman province of Egypt (after the retreat of Napoleon I’s famous 1798-1802 expeditionary force on the Nile), he chose Muḥammad. The future governor of Egypt entered history in early adulthood, not as an Albanian and certainly not as an Egyptian, but as a loyal Ottoman military officer.

Life’s Work

Muḥammad’s rise to power as an Ottoman governor and then a virtually independent ruler of Egypt between 1805 and 1848 was tied to his ability to centralize (in typical Ottoman new order fashion) governmental control over military, bureaucratic, and economic functions. He began this process in Egypt by befriending rival local groups and playing each against the others. Then he gradually and systematically reduced each of his temporary allies to dependence on his sole will. In stages, for example, the army under the new governor’s command ceased to be Albanian and was replaced by trainees under new order officer candidates selected by Muḥammad.

Some of those selected to take the place of Albanian irregulars and residual (pre-1798) mamlūk (foreign slave elite) military grandees were already Ottoman professionals. Others were retrained mamlūks. Any elements likely to resist Muḥammad’s restructuring of the province’s military forces were eliminated either by being reassigned (the case of Albanians sent to combat Wahhabi tribes in Arabia after 1811) or by being mercilessly killed (the fate of many mamlūk beys in 1811).

After he was in firm political and military control over Cairo’s governorate, Muḥammad proceeded to introduce a series of major internal reforms that would help strengthen his position. First, Egypt’s old mamlūk-dominated tax farm system (iltizamat) was replaced by a single tax (ferda) collected by direct salaried agents of the governor. Proceeds from taxes were used not only to expand and train the new military establishment (by bringing more professionals, including, after 1815, retired Napoleonic officers) but also to invest in publicly sponsored agricultural innovations. These included new irrigation canals engineered to increase productivity during the low Nile season and the introduction of new internationally marketable crops. The latter, especially silk and cotton, were brought under cultivation according to strictly controlled governmental terms.

By the early 1820’s, the effectiveness of Muḥammad’s authority as governor of Egypt was so obvious that his sultanic sovereign, Mahmud II , called on him (in 1826-1827) to send troops to help subdue Greek insurrectionists. Had this expedition been successful, Muḥammad might well have been named to the high imperial post of Ottoman grand vizier. Instead, the Concert of Europe powers, worried about Ottoman repression of the Greek independence movement but also seriously concerned about Muḥammad’s dominant, monopolistic control over the conditions of cash-crop trade (especially cotton) in Egyptian ports, intervened militarily at Navarino in 1827 and forcibly removed him from the Ottoman theater. Sultan Mahmud was thus robbed of the possibility of having a grand vizier and military commander capable of reversing Istanbul’s obvious decline.

The result was that Muḥammad redoubled his determination to make Egypt strong. State monopolistic controls over agricultural production methods and marketing were increased (in a specifically agricultural-labor code, or ganun al filahah, in 1829), and the army was expanded to include, for the first time, large numbers of Egyptian peasant recruits. In 1831, this army, under the command of Muḥammad’s son Ibrahim, seized control of Mahmud’s Syrian province, including the key Levant trade subzones of Lebanon and Palestine. Egypt’s governor then extended to Syria the same iron-handed controls over taxes, agricultural production, and trade that applied in Egypt, creating a sort of mini-empire, this time at Mahmud’s expense.

For eight years, Muḥammad and Ibrahim reigned supreme over this expanded Arab state of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Red Sea coast province of Arabia. By 1839, it was clear that the European powers that had intervened at Navarino in 1827 were determined that an even greater show of force against Muḥammad might be necessary. When the Battle of Nezib occurred in June, 1839, the Ottomans were so soundly defeated that Mahmud’s successor Abulmecid might well have been removed by Muḥammad. Such a development would have made it possible to put the revolutionary reform methods of the latter in place throughout the Ottoman Empire. To avoid this, the London Convention of 1840 produced an international ultimatum to Muḥammad: either withdraw to a hereditarily guaranteed Egyptian governorate and abandon commercial monopolies over the Levant zone as a whole or confront a joint European force.

Muḥammad’s decision to save his Egyptian governorate (which eventually became the hereditary possession of his family, a situation that ended only with the overthrow of King Faruk in 1952) saved him from a nearly certain military disaster in 1840. The terms that the Ottoman sultan imposed on Cairo during the last eight years of his rule, however, made it clear that the new order principles that had built Muḥammad’s power would not survive long. Egypt’s cotton monopoly was dismantled and its army cut back to a mere eighteen thousand men. By the time of his death in 1849, Muḥammad had begun to rely on practices of ruling patronage (private land grants for privileged political supporters and members of the ruling family, decentralization of taxation with benefits for privileged elements, and the like) that would characterize Egypt’s decline and eventual chaotic drift toward foreign colonial domination in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

Significance

Muḥammad ՙAlī Pasha’s governorate in Egypt represented a successful application of Ottoman imperial new order reform priorities to a single regional province. After the old forms of inefficient military and fiscal organization were removed and restored state authority became unchallenged, the productive potential of Egypt became very promising. Because of what proved to be possible in Egypt under the right conditions, future prospects for the eastern Mediterranean basin as a whole took on new importance. From a position of relative unimportance until 1798, Egypt emerged in the brief span of twenty years, between 1820 and 1840, to occupy a key position of international strategic importance that it would hold throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Muḥammad’s strongly autocratic reforms may have been necessary to ensure the maintenance of order and expanded productivity in the local context of the Egyptian province. When they were expanded beyond this local context, however, it became apparent that parties who were accustomed to the Ottoman status quo prior to 1798, especially where open trade in Levantine agricultural and transit trade products were concerned, were not keen to see other areas of the empire fall under Muḥammad’s control.

The effects of Muḥammad’s expanded governorate over Syria and Lebanon proved to be controversial, both for the interests of internal social and economic subgroups (especially the Maronite Christians) and, ultimately, for the foreign powers who drafted the 1840 London Convention on the “Egyptian crisis.” After the latter decided to intervene to reverse Muḥammad’s gains, a pattern was set for the future intermingling of foreign imperial priorities and vested (if not to say reactionary) local interest groups leery of centrally imposed government reform priorities.

Bibliography

Abdel-Rahim Mustafa, Ahmed. “The Breakdown of the Monopoly System in Egypt After 1840.” In Political and Social Change in Modern Egypt, edited by Peter M. Holt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Deals specifically with the internal and international consequences of the Concert of Europe’s decision, in 1840, to force free market conditions on Muḥammad’s governorate. Particularly useful for its discussion of the terms of the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty of 1838, which became after 1840 the basis for European dealings, not only in cotton but also in other agricultural products that Muḥammad’s monopoly system had defined as the basis of a nationalistic (or protectionist) economy for the Egyptian province as early as the 1820’s.

Baer, Gabriel. A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt, 1800-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Baer’s study contains perhaps the best-documented examination of the Muḥammad decentralized tax farm (iltizam) system and its linkages with land ownership and patterns of cultivation. The chapter on Muḥammad’s reforms examines his success not only in boosting administrative efficiency by replacing the iltizams but also in the effect such changes had on agricultural productivity.

Daly, M. W., ed. Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century. Vol. 2 in The Cambridge History of Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Chapter 6, written by Khaled Fahmy (see below), chronicles the events and significance of Muḥammad’s governorate.

Dobrowolska, Agnieszka, and Khaled Fahmy. Muḥammad ՙAlī Pasha and His Sabil. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005. After his son, Tusun, died in 1816, Muḥammad commemorated his son by constructing a sabil (public cistern and water dispenser) in Cairo. This book describes how the sabil was built, used, changed, and restored over time, and provides information about Muḥammad’s life and personality.

Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Examines Muḥammad’s military reforms and recruitment policies. Fahmy counters historians who maintain Muḥammad’s military and economic reforms sought to create an independent Egyptian state; he argues Muḥammad wanted to establish hereditary rule of an Egyptian province within the Ottoman Empire.

Holt, Peter M. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, 1516-1922. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966. Deals with the general history of Egypt and its relations with surrounding Ottoman provinces. Contains a chapter on Muḥammad’s governorate in part 3: “The Last Phase of Ottoman Rule.” Because both Syria and Lebanon are part of Holt’s general history, this book makes it possible to place the phenomenon of the Egyptian occupation of 1831-1841 in a comparative historical context.

Hunter, F. Robert. Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1879. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Part 1 of this book is devoted to a concentrated analysis of Muḥammad’s reign, which the author characterizes as “the emergence of the new power state.” In addition to its concise synopsis of Muḥammad’s governorate, this work contains the most comprehensive coverage, in one book, of the reigns of his immediate successors, Abbās the Great, Sa’īd Pasha, and Ismā’īl Pasha. The study of these successors is needed to gauge the long-term effects, both positive and negative, of what Muḥammad had accomplished, both in the area of political institutions and in their supporting social and economic structures.

Sayyid-Marsot, Afaf Lutfi. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Deals not only with the close circles of elites, both Egyptian and foreign, who had a hand in the construction of Muḥammad’s state system but also with the measurable effects of the changes that he introduced. Very valuable, for example, for its investigation of the industrial and commercial sectors of Egypt’s economy under Muḥammad, which complemented developmental efforts in agriculture.