CHAPTER 4
A young Muslim cleric approached the French sailing vessel La Truite, moored in Alexandria’s harbor, on April 13, 1826. As he stepped onto the gangway to board, dressed in the robes and turban of a scholar of Cairo’s ancient mosque university of al-Azhar (founded 969), Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi’s feet left Egyptian soil for the first time in his life. He was bound for France, appointed chaplain to Muhammad’Ali’s first major education mission to Europe. He would not see his native land for another five years.
Once aboard, al-Tahtawi examined the faces of the other delegates. They made for a very diverse group: forty-four men in all, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty-seven. Al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) was then twenty-four years old. Though ostensibly an Egyptian delegation, only eighteen of its envoys were actually native-born Arabic speakers. The rest of the group spoke Turkish and reflected the national diversity of the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was still a part—Turks, Circassians, Greeks, Georgians, and Armenians. These men had been chosen by the governor of Egypt to study European languages and sciences and, on their return, to apply what they learned in France to reforming their native land.
Born to a notable family of judges and theologians in a small village in Upper Egypt, al-Tahtawi had studied Arabic and Islamic theology since the age of sixteen. A gifted scholar, he was appointed to teach at al-Azhar before entering government service as a preacher in one of the new European-style Nizami infantry divisions in 1824. Through this post, and with the support of his patrons, al-Tahtawi was selected for this prestigious mission to Paris. It was the kind of posting that made a man’s career.
Al-Tahtawi took with him a blank copybook in which to record his impressions of France. No detail seemed too trivial to interest him: the way the French built their houses, earned a living, observed their religion; their means of transport and the workings of their financial system; relations between men and women; how they dressed and danced; how they decorated their homes and set their tables. Al-Tahtawi wrote with curiosity and respect but also critical detachment. For centuries, Europeans had traveled to the Middle East and written books on the manners and customs of the exotic people they found there. Now, for the first time, an Egyptian had turned the tables and wrote on the strange and exotic country called France.1
Al-Tahtawi’s reflections on France are full of contradictions. As a Muslim and an Egyptian Ottoman, he was confident of the superiority of his faith and culture. He saw France as a place of disbelief, where “not a single Muslim had settled” and where the French themselves were “Christians only in name.” Yet his firsthand observations left him in no doubt of Europe’s superiority in science and technology. “By God, during my stay in [France], I was grieved by the fact that it had enjoyed all those things that are lacking in Islamic kingdoms,” he recalled.2 To give some sense of the gulf that al-Tahtawi believed separated his readers from Western science, he judged it necessary to explain that European astronomers had proven that the earth was round. He realized how much the Islamic world had fallen behind Europe in the sciences and believed that the Islamic world had a duty and a right to recover this knowledge, given that Western advances since the Renaissance had been built on medieval Islam’s progress in the sciences. He argued that the Ottomans were only calling due the West’s debts to Islamic science by borrowing European advances in modern technology.3
Although al-Tahtawi’s book is replete with fascinating reflections on what, in Egyptian eyes, made France of the 1820s tick, he made his most substantial contribution to political reform with his analysis of constitutional government. He translated all seventy-four articles of the 1814 French constitution, or Charte constitutionelle, and wrote a detailed analysis of its key points.4 Al-Tahtawi believed the constitution to hold the secret of French advancement. “We should like to include this,” he explained to his elite readership, “so that you may see how their intellect has decided that justice and equity are the causes for the civilization of kingdoms, the well-being of subjects, and how rulers and their subjects were led by this, to the extent that their country has prospered, their knowledge increased, their wealth accumulated and their hearts satisfied.”
Al-Tahtawi’s praise for constitutional government was courageous for its time. These were dangerous new ideas with no roots in Islamic tradition. As he confessed, most of the principles of the French constitution “cannot be found in the Qur’an nor in the sunna[practices] of the Prophet.” He may have feared the reaction of his fellow Muslim clerics to these dangerous innovations, but he took the even greater risk of provoking the disfavor of his rulers. After all, the constitution applied to the king and his subjects alike, and it called for a division of powers between the monarch and an elected legislature. Muhammad ’Ali’s Egypt was a thoroughly autocratic state, and the Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy. The very notion of representative government or constraints on the powers of the monarch would have been seen as alien and subversive by most Ottoman elites.
The reformist cleric was captivated by the way the French constitution promoted the rights of common citizens rather than reinforcing the dominance of elites. Among the articles of the constitution that most impressed al-Tahtawi were those asserting the equality of all citizens before the law and the eligibility of all citizens “to any office, irrespective of its rank.” The possibility of such upward mobility, he maintained, would encourage “people to study and learn” so that they might “reach a higher position than the one they occupy,” thereby keeping their civilization from stagnating. Here again, al-Tahtawi was treading a fine line. In a rigidly hierarchical society like Ottoman Egypt, ideas of social mobility would have struck the elites of his time as a dangerous notion.
Al-Tahtawi went further, praising French rights of free expression. The constitution, he explained, encouraged “everybody freely to express his opinion, knowledge and feelings.” The medium by which the average Frenchman made his views known, Al-Tahtawi continued, was something called a “journal” or a “gazette.” This would have been the first time many of al-Tahtawi’s readers would have heard of newspapers, which were still unknown in the Arabic-speaking world. Both the powerful and the common people could publish their views in the newspapers, he explained. Indeed, he stressed the importance of commoners having access to the press “since even a lowly person may think of something that does not come to the mind of important people.” Yet it was the power of the press to hold people to account for their actions that struck the cleric as truly remarkable. “When someone does something great or despicable, the journalists write about it, so that it becomes known by both the notables and the common people—to encourage the person who did something good, or to make the person who has done a despicable thing forsake his ways.”
In his most daring breach of Ottoman political conventions, al-Tahtawi gave a detailed and sympathetic account of the July 1830 revolution that overthrew the Bourbon king Charles X. Sunni Muslim political thought asserted the duty of subjects to submit to rulers, even despotic rulers, in the interest of public order. Al-Tahtawi, who had observed the political drama firsthand, clearly sided with the French people against their king when Charles X suspended the charter and “shamed the laws in which the rights of the French people were enshrined.” In his bid to restore the absolute power of the monarchy, Charles X ignored the deputies in the Chamber, forbade public criticism of the monarch and his cabinet, and introduced press censorship. When the people rose in armed rebellion against their ruler, the Egyptian cleric took their side. Al-Tahtawi’s extensive analysis of the July Revolution is all the more remarkable for its implicit endorsement of the people’s right to overturn a monarch to preserve their legal rights.5
After five captivating years in Paris, al-Tahtawi returned to Egypt in 1831, his impressions of France still confined to his copybook. Fluent in French, he was given a high-level appointment to establish a government translation bureau, primarily to provide Arabic editions of European technical manuals essential for Muhammad ‘Ali’s reforms. While he was busy setting up the translation bureau, al-Tahtawi found time to revise his notes on Paris for publication. Perhaps to protect himself from retribution for the dangerous political ideas his book contained, he paid lavish tribute to Muhammad ’Ali in his preface. The results, published in Arabic in 1834 and subsequently translated into Turkish, were nothing short of a masterpiece. With its clear exposition of European advances in science and technology, and its analysis of Enlightenment political philosophy, al-Tahtawi’s book proved the opening shot in the nineteenth-century age of Ottoman—and Arab—reforms.
The Ottomans and their Arab citizens experienced increased interaction with Europe throughout the nineteenth century, forcing the people of the Middle East to recognize that Europe had surpassed them in military and economic might. Although most Ottomans remained convinced of the cultural superiority of their world, their reformers argued that they needed to gain mastery over the ideas and technology of Europe if Europe was not to gain mastery over them.
The Ottomans and their autonomous Arab vassals in Egypt and Tunisia began by reforming their armies. It soon became apparent that the revenue base of the state had to expand to support the expense of a modern army. Administrative and economic practices thus were changed along European lines with the hope that prosperity and increased tax revenues would follow. More and more European technology was imported, pushed by European capitalists looking for foreign markets for their manufactured goods and machinery. The sultan and his viceroys in Tunis and Cairo were keen to use the benefits of modern European technology—such as telegraphs, steamships, and railways—as visible signs of progress and development. This technology was expensive, however, and as the educated elite in Istanbul, Cairo, and Tunis grew concerned about their rulers’ extravagance, they began to call for constitutions and parliaments as the missing element in the reform agenda.
Each phase of the reforms was intended to strengthen the institutions of the Ottoman Empire and its Arab vassal states and to protect them from European encroachment. In this, the reformers were to be disappointed, for the reform era left the Ottoman world increasingly vulnerable to European penetration. Informal European control through consular pressure, trade, and capital investment would be followed by formal European domination as first Tunisia, then the Ottoman government, and finally Egypt failed to meet their financial commitments to foreign creditors.
The era of Ottoman reforms began at the height of the Second Egyptian Crisis, in 1839. The death of Sultan Mahmud II and the accession of his teenage son Abdulmecid I was hardly an auspicious moment to announce a program of radical reform. Yet the Ottoman Empire, under imminent threat from Muhammad ’Ali’s Egyptian army, needed European goodwill more than ever. To secure Europe’s guarantees of its territory and sovereignty, the Ottoman government believed it needed to demonstrate to the European powers that it could adhere to European norms of statecraft as a responsible member of the community of modern states. Moreover, the reformers who had worked under Mahmud II were determined to consolidate the changes already undertaken under the late sultan’s reign, and to commit his successor to the reform process.
These twin motives would characterize the era of Ottoman reforms: public relations gestures to win European support coupled with a genuine commitment to reform the empire in order to ensure its survival against both internal and external threats. On November 3, 1839, the Ottoman foreign minister, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, read a reform decree on behalf of Abdulmecid I to an invited group of Ottoman and foreign dignitaries in Istanbul. On that date the Ottomans entered a period of administrative reforms that, between 1839 and 1876, would transform their state into a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament—a period known as the Tanzimat (literally, “reordering”).
Three major milestones mark the Tanzimat: the 1839 Reform Decree; the 1856 Reform Decree, which restated and extended the agenda of 1839; and the Constitution of 1876. The decrees of 1839 and 1856 reveal the debt of Ottoman reformers to Western political thought. The first document set out a modest, three-point reform agenda: to ensure “perfect security for life, honour, and property” for all Ottoman subjects; to establish “a regular system of assessing taxes”; and to reform the terms of military service by regular conscription and fixed terms of service.6
The 1856 Decree reiterated the reforms set out in 1839 and expanded on the process to address reforms in the courts and penal system. Corporal punishment was to be curbed, and torture abolished. The decree sought to regularize the finances of the empire through annual budgets that would be open to public scrutiny. The decree also called for the modernization of the financial system and the establishment of a modern banking system “to create funds to be employed in augmenting the sources of wealth” in the empire through such public works as roads and canals. “To accomplish these objects,” the decree concluded, “means shall be sought to profit by the science, the art, and the funds of Europe, and thus gradually to execute them.”7
However, to view the Tanzimat in the light of the major decrees alone would be to overlook the full scope of reforms carried out between 1839 and 1876. The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a major transformation in the chief institutions of Ottoman state and society. In order to reform the tax base and ensure its future prosperity, the government began to conduct a regular census and introduced a new system of land records that replaced the tax farms of old with individual title, which was more in line with Western notions of private property. The provincial administration was completely overhauled to provide a regular system of government reaching from provincial capitals like Damascus and Baghdad down to the village level.
These changes required thousands of new bureaucrats with a modern, technical education. To meet this need, the state established a network of new elementary, intermediate, and high schools styled on European curricula to train civil servants. Similarly, the laws of the empire were codified in an ambitious project to reconcile Islamic law with Western codes to make the Ottoman legal system more compatible with European legal norms.
So long as the reforms applied to the higher echelons of government, the subjects of the Ottoman Empire took little interest in the Tanzimat. In the course of the 1850s and 1860s, however, the reforms began to touch the lives of individuals. Ever fearful of taxation and conscription, Ottoman subjects resisted all state efforts to inscribe their names in the government’s registers. Parents avoided sending their children to state schools, fearing that by registering their names for study they would end up in the army. Townsmen avoided census officials and farmers avoided land registration for as long as they could. Yet as the bureaucracy grew in size and efficiency, the people of the empire succumbed to one of the imperatives of modern government: to maintain accurate records on the state’s subjects and their property.
The sultan was no less affected by the reform process than his subjects. The absolute power of the Ottoman sultan eroded as the center of political gravity shifted from the sultan’s palace to the offices of the Ottoman government in the Sublime Porte. The Council of Ministers took on the principal legislative and executive roles in government, and the grand vizier emerged as the head of government. The sultan was reduced to the ceremonial and symbolic role of head of state. This evolution was capped by the promulgation of the constitution in 1876, which, while leaving great powers in the sultan’s hands, broadened political participation through the establishment of a parliament. In the course of thirty-seven years, Ottoman absolutism had been replaced by a constitutional monarchy.
There are dangers inherent in any major reform program, particularly when foreign ideas are involved. Conservative Ottoman Muslims denounced the Tanzimat for introducing un-Islamic innovations into state and society. No issue proved more explosive than changes to the status of Christians and Jews as non-Muslim minority communities in Sunni Muslim Ottoman society.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the European powers increasingly used minority rights as a pretext to intervene in Ottoman affairs. Russia extended its protection to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Ottoman Christian community. France had long enjoyed a special relationship with the Maronite church in Mount Lebanon and in the nineteenth century developed formal patronage of all Ottoman Catholic communities. The British had no historic ties to any church in the region. Nonetheless, Britain represented the interests of the Jews, the Druze, and the tiny communities of converts that gathered around Protestant missionaries in the Arab world. So long as the Ottoman Empire straddled areas of strategic importance, the European powers would exploit any means to meddle with Ottoman affairs. Issues of minority rights provided the powers with ample opportunity to impose their will on the Ottomans—sometimes with disastrous consequences for both Europeans and Ottomans alike.
The “Holy Places Dispute” of 1851–1852 demonstrated the dangers of great-power intervention on all parties. Differences arose between Catholic and Greek Orthodox monks over their respective rights and privileges to Christian holy places in Palestine. France and Russia responded by putting pressure on Istanbul to confer privileges on their respective client communities. The Ottomans first conceded to French pressures, giving the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the Catholics. The Russians were determined to secure a bigger trophy for the Greek Orthodox Church so as not to lose face to the French. But after the Ottomans made similar concessions to the Russians, the French emperor Napoleon III dispatched a state-of-the-art propeller-driven warship up the Dardanelles to deliver his ambassador to Istanbul and threatened to bombard Ottoman positions in North Africa if the Porte did not rescind the concessions to Russia’s Orthodox clients. When the Ottomans caved in to the French, the Russians threatened war. What began as an Ottoman-Russian war in the autumn of 1853 degenerated into the Crimean War of 1854–1855, pitting Britain and France against Tsarist Russia in a violent conflict that claimed over 300,000 lives and left many more wounded. The consequences of European intervention on behalf of Ottoman minority communities were too serious for the Porte to allow the practice to continue.
The Ottomans had made a half-hearted attempt to reclaim the initiative over non-Muslim minority communities in the 1839 Reform Decree. “The Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall, without exception, enjoy our imperial concessions,” the sultan declared in his firman, or rescript. Clearly he and his administrators needed to make a stronger statement of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims if they were to persuade the European powers that their interventions were no longer needed to ensure the welfare of Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The problem for the Ottoman government was to gain the consent of its own Muslim majority for a policy of equality between different faiths. The Qur’an draws clear distinctions between Muslims and the other two monotheistic faiths, and these distinctions had been enshrined in Islamic law. For the Ottoman government to disregard such distinctions would, in the view of many believers, go against God’s book and God’s law.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War the Ottoman government decided to risk public outrage at home to prevent further European interventions on behalf of the non-Muslim minority communities of the empire. The 1856 Reform Decree was timed to coincide with the Peace of Paris, concluding the Crimean War. Most of the provisions of the 1856 Reform Decree were concerned with the rights and responsibilities of Ottoman Christians and Jews. The decree established for the first time complete equality of all Ottoman subjects regardless of their religion: “Every distinction or designation pending to make any class whatever of the subjects of my empire inferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be forever effaced from administrative protocol.” The decree went on to promise all Ottoman subjects access to schools and government jobs, as well as to military conscription, without distinction by religion or nationality.
The reform process had already been controversial for its European leanings. But nothing in the reforms prior to the 1856 Decree had directly contravened the Qur’an—revered by Muslims as the literal and eternal Word of God. To contradict the Qur’an was to contradict God, and not surprisingly the decree provoked outrage among pious Muslims when it was read in the cities of the empire. An Ottoman judge in Damascus recorded in his diary in 1856, “The decree conferring complete equality on Christians was read in Court, granting equality and freedom and other such violations of the eternal Islamic law. . . . It was ashes on [the heads of] all Muslims. We ask Him to strengthen the religion and make the Muslims victorious.”8 Ottoman subjects understood immediately the significance of this particular reform.
The reforms of the Tanzimat were taking the Ottoman Empire into dangerous territory. With the government promulgating reforms that contravened the religion and values of the majority of the population, the reform process risked provoking rebellion against the authority of the government and violence between its subjects.
The Ottomans were not the first Muslim rulers to decree equality between Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Muhammad ‘Ali had done this in Egypt in the 1820s; however, this earlier decree had more to do with Muhammad ’Ali’s wish to tax and conscript all Egyptians on an equal basis, without distinction by religion, than with any concern to liberate minority communities. Although objections undoubtedly were raised among pious Muslims when the principle of equality was applied during the Egyptian occupation of Greater Syria in the 1830s, Muhammad ‘Ali was sufficiently strong to face down his critics and impose his will. Having observed Muhammad’Ali’s reforms, the Ottomans likely believed they could follow his precedent without provoking civil strife.
The Egyptian occupation had also opened the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to European commercial penetration. Beirut emerged as an important port in the Eastern Mediterranean, and merchants gained access to new markets in inland cities formerly closed to Western merchants, such as Damascus. European merchants came to rely on local Christians and Jews to serve as their intermediaries—as translators and agents. Individual Christians and Jews grew wealthy through these connections to European trade and consular activity, and many gained immunity from Ottoman law by accepting European citizenship.
The Muslim community in Greater Syria was already growing dangerously resentful of the privileges enjoyed by some Arab Christians and Jews in the 1840s. The delicate communal balance was being upset by external forces. For the first time in generations, the Arab provinces witnessed sectarian violence. The Jews of Damascus were accused of the ritual murder of a Catholic priest in 1840 and were subsequently subject to violent repression by the authorities.9 In October 1850, communal violence broke out in Aleppo when a Muslim mob attacked the city’s prosperous Christian minority, leaving dozens killed and hundreds wounded. Such events were unprecedented in Aleppo’s history and reflected the resentment of Muslim merchants whose businesses had suffered while their Christian neighbors were enriched through their commercial contacts with Europe.10
Greater trouble was brewing in Mount Lebanon. The Egyptian occupation in the 1830s had led to the collapse of the local ruling order and drove a wedge between the Maronites, who had allied with the Egyptians, and the Druze, who had resisted them. The Druze returned to Mount Lebanon after the Egyptian withdrawal to find the Maronites had grown wealthy and powerful in their absence—and claimed lands the Druze had abandoned when they fled Egyptian rule. The differences between the communities led to an outbreak of communal fighting in 1841, which continued intermittently over the next two decades, fueled by British support for the Druze and French support for the Maronites.
The Ottomans tried to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the retreating Egyptian forces to assert greater control over the administration of Mount Lebanon. They replaced the discredited Shihabi principality that had ruled since the end of the seventeenth century with a dual governorate, headed by a Maronite in the northern district and a Druze governor to the south of the Beirut-Damascus road. This sectarian split had no basis either in geography or in the demography of Mount Lebanon, as Maronites and Druze were to be found on both sides of the boundary. As a result, the dual governorate seemed only to exacerbate tensions between the two communities. To make matters worse, the Maronites suffered from internal cleavages, with deep divisions between the ruling families, the peasants, and the clergy erupting in peasant revolts that further heightened tensions. By 1860 Mount Lebanon had become a powder keg as the Druze and Maronites formed armed bands and prepared for war.
On May 27, 1860, a Christian force of 3,000 men from the town of Zahleh marched toward the Druze heartland to avenge attacks on Christian villagers. They engaged a smaller force of some 600 Druze, who met them on the Beirut-Damascus road near the village of ‘Ayn Dara. The Druze dealt the Christians a decisive defeat and went on the offensive, sacking a number of Christian villages. The battle of ’Ayn Dara marked the beginning of a war of extermination. The Maronite Christians suffered one defeat after another, as their towns and villages were overrun by the victorious Druze in what today would be characterized as ethnic cleansing. Eyewitnesses spoke of rivers of blood flowing through the streets of the highland villages.
Within three weeks the Druze had secured the south of Mount Lebanon and the whole of the Biqa’ Valley. The town of Zahleh, to the north of the Beirut-Damascus road, was the last Christian stronghold to fall. On June 18, the Druze attacked and overran Zahleh, killing the defenders and putting its residents to flight. The Christian forces of Lebanon had been utterly destroyed, leaving the Druze in full mastery. At least 200 villages had been sacked and thousands of Christians killed, wounded, or left homeless.11
Events in Mount Lebanon heightened communal tensions throughout Greater Syria. Relations between Muslims and Christians had already been strained by the proclamation of the 1856 Reform Decree and the establishment of legal equality between Ottoman citizens of all faiths. Various Damascene chroniclers noted how the Christians had changed since gaining their legal rights. They no longer recognized the customary privileges of the Muslims, but began to wear the same colors and clothes that formerly had been reserved for Muslims. They grew increasingly assertive, too. “So it came about,” one outraged Muslim notable recorded, “that when a Christian quarrelled with a Muslim, the Christian would fling back at the Muslim any insults the latter used, and even add to them.”12 The Muslims of Damascus found such behavior intolerable.
These views were echoed by a Christian notable. Mikhayil Mishaqa was a native of Mount Lebanon who had served the ruling Shihabi family at the time of the Egyptian occupation in the 1830s. He had since moved to Damascus, where he secured an appointment as the vice consul of a relatively minor power at the time, the United States of America. “As the Empire began to implement reforms and equality among its subjects regardless of their religious affiliation,” he wrote, “the ignorant Christians went too far in their interpretation of equality and thought that the small did not have to submit to the great, and the low did not have to respect the high. Indeed they thought that humble Christians were on a par with exalted Muslims.”13 By flaunting such age-old conventions, the Christians of Damascus unwittingly contributed to sectarian tensions that would prove their undoing.
The Muslim community within Damascus followed the bloody events of Mount Lebanon with grim satisfaction. They believed, with some justification, that the Christians of Lebanon had behaved arrogantly and had provoked the Druze. The Damascene Muslims were pleased to see the Christians defeated, and they showed no remorse over the bloodletting. When they heard of the fall of Zahleh, “there was such rejoicing and celebration in Damascus,” Mishaqa recorded, that “you would have thought the Empire had conquered Russia.” Faced with the growing hostility of the Muslims of the city, the Christians of Damascus began to fear for their own safety.
Following the fall of Zahleh, Druze bands began to raid Christian villages in the hinterlands of Damascus. The Christian peasants fled their exposed villages for the relative safety of Damascus’s walls. The streets of the Christian quarters of Damascus began to fill with these Christian refugees, who, Mishaqa claimed, “slept in the lanes around the churches, with no bed save the ground and no cover save the sky.” These defenseless people became the target of growing anti-Christian sentiment, their vulnerability and poverty diminishing their very humanity to those who were increasingly hostile to the Christian community. They looked to their fellow Christians and to the Ottoman governor to shelter them from harm.
Ahmad Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Damascus, was no friend to the city’s Christian community. Mishaqa, who as a consular official had many interactions with the governor, became convinced that Ahmad Pasha was actively promoting intercommunal tensions. Ahmad Pasha believed the Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 reforms, Mishaqa explained, and that they had deliberately tried to elude the duties—particularly tax obligations—that accompanied their newfound rights. Though the Muslim community of Damascus outnumbered the Christians by a margin of five to one, Ahmad Pasha exacerbated Muslim fears by posting cannons to “protect” mosques from Christian attack. By such measures, Ahmad Pasha encouraged Damascene Muslims to believe they were threatened by attack from the town’s Christians.
At the very height of the tensions Ahmad Pasha ordered a demonstration designed to provoke a riot. On July 10, 1860, he paraded a group of Muslim prisoners jailed for crimes against Christians through the streets of central Damascus—ostensibly to teach them a lesson. Predictably, a Muslim mob gathered around the men to break their chains and set them free. The spectacle of Muslims being gratuitously humiliated in this way only reinforced public views that Christians had risen above their station since the 1856 decree. The mob turned to the Christian quarters determined to teach them a lesson. With the recent events in Mount Lebanon still fresh in everyone’s minds, extermination seemed a reasonable solution to the merciless mob.
Mishaqa found himself caught up in the violence he had long predicted. He described how the mob beat down his gates and flooded into his home. Mishaqa and his youngest children fled through a back door hoping to take refuge in the house of a Muslim neighbor. At each turn of the road, their path was blocked by rioters. To divert them, Mishaqa threw handfuls of coins and fled with his children while the crowd scrambled after his money. Three times he eluded the mob by this ruse, but eventually he found his way blocked by a frenzied crowd.
I had nowhere to run. They surrounded me to strip and kill me. My son and daughter were screaming, “Kill us instead of our father!” One of these wretches struck my daughter on the head with an ax, and he will answer for her blood. Another fired at me from a distance of six paces and missed, but I was wounded on my right temple by a blow with an ax, and my right side, face and arm were crushed by a blow with a cudgel. There were so many crowding around me that it was impossible to fire without hitting others.
Mishaqa was now the prisoner of the crowd. He was separated from his family and taken through the back streets to an official’s house. Mishaqa was, after all, the consul of a foreign state. One of Mishaqa’s Muslim neighbors gave his battered Christian friend sanctuary and reunited him with his family, all of whom—including his young daughter struck down by the crowd—miraculously survived the massacre.
Only those Christians who found such safe refuge escaped the carnage. Some were rescued by Muslim notables, headed by the exiled hero of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism, the amir Abd al-Qadir. He and others risked their own lives to rescue and give shelter to fleeing Christians. Other Christians took refuge in the limited space of the British and Prussian consulates, whose guards succeeded in holding back the mob. The majority of those who survived took precarious shelter in the citadel of Damascus, fearful that the soldiers might let the mob through at any moment. While the majority of the city’s Christians did find safe refuge, thousands did not and suffered terrible violence at the hands of the mob in three days of carnage.
Mishaqa later detailed the human and material costs of the massacres in a report to the American consul in Beirut. He claimed that no less than 5,000 Christians had been killed in the violence, one-quarter of a community that originally numbered 20,000. Some 400 women were abducted and raped, and many were left pregnant, including one of Mishaqa’s own house servants. The material damages were very extensive. More than 1,500 houses lay in ruins, all Christian-owned shops had been looted, and some 200 shops in the Christian quarters were put to the torch. Churches, schools, and monasteries were plundered and destroyed.14 The Christian quarters had been gutted by theft, vandalism, and fire in an irruption of communal violence unprecedented in the city’s modern history.
The Ottoman government had established legal equality between its Muslim and non-Muslim citizens largely to prevent the European powers from intervening in its domestic affairs. The ensuing violence against Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus engendered the prospect of a massive European intervention. Upon learning of the massacre, the French government of Napoleon III immediately dispatched a military expedition headed by General Charles de Beaufort d’Hautpoul, a French aristocrat who had advised the Egyptian army during its occupation of Syria in the 1830s. De Beaufort was charged with the mission of preventing further bloodshed and bringing to justice the perpetrators of violence against the region’s Christians.
The Ottomans had to act quickly. They dispatched one of their highest-ranking government officials, an architect of the Ottoman reforms named Fuad Pasha, to take all necessary measures to restore order before the French expedition reached the Syrian coast. Fuad fulfilled his mission with remarkable efficiency. He set in motion a military tribunal to mete out severe punishments to all responsible for the breakdown in order. The governor of Damascus was sentenced to death for his failure to prevent the massacre. Dozens of Muslims, from the nobility down to the poorest urban workers, were publicly hanged in the streets of Damascus. Scores of Ottoman soldiers faced the firing squad for having broken ranks and participated in the murder and looting. Hundreds of Damascenes were exiled or marched away in chains to serve long prison sentences with heavy labor.
The government set up commissions to address Christian claims for compensation for damaged and stolen property. Muslim quarters were emptied to provide temporary housing for homeless Christians while state-funded masons rebuilt the devastated Christian quarters. Basically, the Ottoman officials anticipated every grievance the European powers might raise and acted upon it before the Europeans had a chance to intervene. By the time General de Beaufort reached the Lebanese coast, Fuad had the situation under control. He thanked the French profusely for their services and provided them with a campsite on the Lebanese coast, far from any population center, where the soldiers would be on hand in case they were needed. The need never arose, and within a year the French withdrew their forces. The Ottomans had weathered the crisis, their sovereignty intact.
The Ottomans learned some important lessons from the experience of 1860. Never again would they pursue a reform measure that openly contravened Islamic doctrine. Thus, in the decades that followed, when the abolitionist movement and the British government combined forces to pressure the Ottoman Empire to abolish slavery, the Porte demurred. Verses of the Qur’an encourage owners to treat slaves well, to allow them to marry, and to give them their manumission, but slavery is in no way forbidden. How could the sultan outlaw that which God’s book permits? In an effort to accommodate British pressure, the Porte agreed to work instead toward the abolition of the slave trade, on which the Qur’an is silent. In 1880 the Porte signed the Anglo-Ottoman Convention for the suppression of the black slave trade. It was a compromise intended to preserve peace within the empire rather than to curb the institution of slavery.15
The Ottomans also recognized the need to balance reforms with benefits to win public support for the Tanzimat. The population at large did not gain from an expanded bureaucracy designed to tax them better or conscript them more efficiently into Western-style military service. All of the legal changes designed to make the Ottoman Empire more compatible with European political thought and practice were alien to the average Ottoman. To encourage its subjects to accept such alien changes, the Ottoman government needed to invest more in the local economy and in promoting social welfare. Large-scale projects that gave the public pride and confidence in the sultan’s government—such as gas lighting, steam-powered ferry boats, and electric trams—could generate support for the reformist government. The Porte needed to make such tangible, visible contributions to Ottoman society and the economy if the reform process were not to produce more disturbances.
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed massive state investment in building projects and public works throughout the Ottoman Empire. Two Ottoman vassal states—Egypt and Tunisia—enjoyed sufficient autonomy to pursue their own development programs. Having adopted Enlightenment ideas, the Ottoman world began to acquire advanced European industrial technology in a wild spending spree. Industrial goods and products reached Arab markets in ever-increasing diversity as the Ottoman world was drawn into the global economy of the late nineteenth century.
Egypt led the way in modernization initiatives in the nineteenth century. Muhammad’Ali had invested heavily in industry and technology, though his projects were always undertaken with the military in mind. It fell to his successors to invest in Egypt’s civilianinfrastructure.
Abbas Pasha (r. 1848–1854) made a modest start when he granted a concession to a British firm to build a railroad between Alexandria and Cairo. Concessions were the standard contract by which a government encouraged private companies to undertake major investments in its domains. The terms of a concession would set out the rights and benefits accruing to both the investors and the government for a fixed period of time. The more generous the terms of a concession, the easier it was to attract entrepreneurs to one’s country. However, governments had to be careful not to concede too much to foreigners if they hoped for the enterprise to generate some profit for their own treasury. With governments in South America, Africa, and Asia vying for new technology, industrialists drove hard bargains. Abbas Pasha was a conservative man who preferred not to make many commitments to foreign investors.
The next ruler of Egypt, Said Pasha (r. 1854–1863), committed the country to far more ambitious plans. He laid a second railway line between Cairo and Alexandria and awarded a concession for a new line from Cairo to Suez, completing the overland link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea route to the Indian Ocean. He fostered Euro-Egyptian partnerships to bring steam shipping to the Nile and the Red Sea. Yet nothing could compare with the 1856 concession Said gave his former French tutor, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to construct a waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: the Suez Canal. It was to prove Egypt’s greatest development project, and the biggest drain on Egypt’s treasury, of the nineteenth century.
The granting of concessions was not in itself an expense to the treasury. If all of the ventures established by Egyptian concession-holders had succeeded, investors and governments alike would have profited. Unfortunately, many of these ventures were very risky and failed. This would have been bad enough for the host government, which had hoped to build stronger domestic economies through investment in European technology. Its losses were compounded by the demands of European consuls for indemnities when their citizens’ investments failed.
As a matter of national pride, each consul took note of the indemnities received by the consuls of other states and sought to outdo them. Thus, when the Nile Navigation Company went bankrupt, the Egyptian treasury had to compensate European shareholders to the sum of £340,000.16 The Austrians set a new benchmark for individual claims when their consul managed to squeeze 700,000 francs from the government of Egypt to compensate an Austrian investor on the spurious grounds that twenty-eight cases of silk cocoons had been spoiled by the late departure of the Suez-to-Cairo train. Said was reported to have interrupted a meeting with a European businessman to ask a servant to close the window. “If this gentleman catches cold,” he quipped, “it will cost me £10,000.”17
The Suez Canal project generated the greatest indemnity bill of all. The British had objected to French plans to create a canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Given its empire in India, Britain would inevitably be more reliant on the canal than any other maritime power. The idea of placing such a strategic waterway under the control of a French company was completely unacceptable to the British. They had no right to prevent the government of Egypt from offering concessions to its sovereign soil, but they could object to the terms of the concession. Specifically, the British objected to Egypt’s promise to provide free labor to dig the canal as tantamount to slavery, and they demanded that Egypt rescind those articles conferring rights on the Suez Canal Company to develop both banks of the canal in a colonization scheme. The Egyptian government was too reliant on Britain’s goodwill to refuse its objections, and it therefore notified the Suez Canal Company that it wished to renegotiate key terms of the original 1856 concession. The company turned the dispute over to the French government to defend its rights as a concession holder against British pressure.
Said’s successor Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879) inherited the dispute and had to suffer the arbitration of the French emperor Napoleon III—hardly a disinterested party. In his settlement of 1864, Napoleon III demanded that the Egyptian government pay 38 million francs to the Suez Canal Company to compensate it for the loss of free labor, and 30 million francs for the land along the banks of the canal that was to be returned to Egypt. Additionally, he found reason to charge the Egyptian government an additional 16 million francs, making for a total indemnity of some 84 million francs (£3,360,000, about $33.5 million in 1864)—an unprecedented sum.18
In spite of its heavy losses to development projects, the government of Egypt remained optimistic about its economic future. Egypt’s most important export crop was long-staple cotton, prized by European weavers. In 1861 the supply of American cotton was cut by the outbreak of the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, cotton prices quadrupled. Egypt’s annual income from cotton rose dramatically from around £1,000,000 in the early 1850s to reach a peak of £11,500,000 by the mid-1860s. With cotton money flowing into Egypt’s coffers, Ismail Pasha believed he could honor his commitments to the Suez Canal Company and still undertake ambitious new projects.
Ismail aspired to turn Egypt into a great power and to gain greater personal recognition as its ruler. In 1867 he sought Ottoman permission to change his gubernatorial title of “pasha” to khedive, a more impressive Persian title meaning “viceroy.” As khedive, Ismail sought to remake his capital city—Cairo—and took Paris for his example. With an eye to the ceremonies marking the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Ismail put Cairo on a course of rapid, radical transformation. Modern quarters with European-style buildings lining broad, straight streets were built between Old Cairo and the Nile. A new bridge was built across the Nile, and Ismail built himself a new palace on the main island in the Nile (it would later be converted to a hotel when the Egyptian government went bankrupt). The streets were paved and lit with gas fittings. Landscape architects turned the old Nile flood ponds, such as the Ezbekiyya pool, into public gardens with cafés and promenades. A national theater and an opera house were built.19 The Italian composer Verdi was commissioned to write an opera with an Egyptian theme to inaugurate the opera house, but he took a bit too long to complete Aida, and the hall was opened to the strains of Rigoletto instead. The flurry of construction climaxed with the visit of the French empress Eugènie to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869.
The outrageous spending was part of Ismail’s bid to secure Egypt’s place among the civilized states of the world. Though the ceremonies were by all accounts most impressive, the new Cairo was a vanity project built on borrowed funds that left Ismail’s government living on borrowed time. The irony of the situation was that Egypt had embarked on its development schemes to secure independence from Ottoman and European domination. Yet with each new concession, the government of Egypt made itself more vulnerable to European encroachment. Egypt was not alone. Another state in North Africa was also increasing its dependence on Europe through ambitious reforms and development projects.
Tunisia, like Egypt, enjoyed sufficient autonomy from the Ottoman Empire to pursue its own development projects in the nineteenth century. Its government, known as the Regency, had been headed by the Husaynid Dynasty since the early eighteenth century. Gone were the days of Barbary Coast piracy. Since 1830 the Regency had banned all piracy and sought to develop the economy of the country through industry and trade.
Between 1837 and 1855, Tunis was ruled by a reformer named Ahmad Bey. Heavily influenced by the example of Muhammad ’Ali in Egypt, Ahmad Bey created a Nizami army in Tunisia, along with a military academy and support industries to produce the weapons and uniforms needed to provision the new army. Among the military men trained for the new army was a young Mamluk named Khayr al-Din, who would prove one of the great reformers of the nineteenth century, eventually rising to be prime minister both in Tunis and in the Ottoman Empire itself.
As a Mamluk, Khayr al-Din was the last of his kind, a man who rose from slavery to the pinnacle of political power. In his autobiography, addressed to his own children, Khayr al-Din gave a rare insight into how it felt to be a Mamluk: “Though I know with certainty that I am a Circassian, I have no precise memory of my country or of my parents. I must have been separated from my family after some war or emigration, and lost trace of them forever.” Despite repeated attempts, Khayr al-Din never succeeded in his quest to find his biological family. “My earliest memories of childhood,” he wrote, “were in Istanbul, whence I passed into the service of the Bey of Tunis in 1839.”20
After learning Arabic and receiving an Islamic education, Khayr al-Din was enrolled in the military and trained by French officers. A brilliant young officer, he rose to the top of the officer corps and reached the rank of general before entering into political life—all within fourteen years of arriving in Tunisia. Fluent in French, Arabic, and Turkish, Khayr al-Din traveled widely through Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the course of his career. His firsthand experience of European progress made him an ardent supporter of the Tanzimat reforms and of the need to draw on European experience and technology to enable Muslim states to realize their full potential. He set out his views in an influential political tract published in Arabic in 1867, and in an authorized French translation two years later.
Khayr al-Din addressed his reform agenda to both a European audience skeptical of the Muslim world’s ability to adapt to the modern age and to a Muslim audience that rejected foreign innovations as somehow contrary to the religion and values of Islam. Here Khayr al-Din was building on an argument first pronounced by the Egyptian advocate of reform, al-Tahtawi (Khayr al-Din had read and admired his book on France), to which later Muslim reformers would return increasingly across the nineteenth century: that Muslim borrowings from modern European sciences were but the return they were due from Europe’s debt to medieval Islamic sciences.21
Although Khayr al-Din was an outspoken advocate for political and economic reform, he was a fiscal conservative. He wanted to see Tunisia develop its economic base to be able to support the expense of modern technology. He believed the government should invest in factories to process its own cash crops into goods for the domestic market. He regretted how Tunisian laborers sold their raw cotton, silk, and wool “to the European for a cheap price, and then in a short time buy it back, after it has been processed [into manufactured cloth], at a price several times higher.”22 Far better, he argued, for Tunisian factories to spin and weave Tunisian fibers to produce fabrics for domestic consumption. In this way, the prosperity of the country would expand, allowing the government to invest in more infrastructural projects. Such financial sound management required intelligent government. Khayr al-Din watched with growing dismay as he saw the rulers of Tunisia take their country down the road to insolvency through vanity projects and bad investments.
Tunisia is a relatively small country, and its expenditures on reforms were modest when compared to the projects undertaken in Egypt. The greatest expenditures undertaken during the reign of Ahmad Bey were related to the Nizami army. Because Ahmad Bey aspired to maintain an infantry of 26,000 men, he imported from France all of the necessary technology and work force to create support industries—arsenals, foundries, textile factories for uniforms, tanneries for saddles and boots, and so on. However, like Ismail Pasha in Egypt, Ahmad Bey also had his vanity projects. His most wasteful extravagance was a palace complex in Muhammadia, 10 miles south-west of the capital city Tunis, which he described as Tunisia’s Versailles. As expenditures increasingly outstripped resources, Ahmad Bey was forced to cut back on his ambitions. He ultimately abandoned many of the new factories at a total loss. Ahmad Bey’s successors continued the reform process, combining high expenditures on public projects with dwindling resources. A telegraph line was laid in 1859 to improve communications, and an aqueduct was built to provide fresh water to Tunis. A concession was given to a British firm to build a 22-mile railway linking Tunis with the port of La Goulette and the seaside town of al-Marsa. Gas lighting was introduced to Tunis, and the city streets were paved.23 Like Ismail Pasha in Egypt, the rulers of Tunisia wanted to endow their capital city with all the trappings of European modernity.
The reform process proceeded at a different pace in Istanbul and the other Ottoman provinces. As the imperial center, with responsibility for provinces scattered across the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab world, Istanbul had to ensure the development of all its provincial capitals. The government undertook major urban projects in the Arab world, building new markets, government offices, and schools. In addition, it introduced gas lighting and trams and other trappings of modern life in many of the Empire’s leading cities.
The Ottomans also gave concessions to European firms to build major infrastructural projects. They modernized ports in Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey, and in Beirut. They set up steamship companies in the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea. A British firm received the concession in 1856 to build the first railway in Turkey, a 130-kilometer (81-mile) line from the port of Izmir to the agricultural hinterland of Aydin. A French company received the concession for a second line from Smyrna to Kasaba (93 kilometers, or 58 miles), built between 1863 and 1865. As these lines were extended, government revenues from the railways increased significantly, encouraging further investment in Anatolian railways. A number of industrial ventures were established in the Tanzimat era, and mines were founded to extract coal and minerals. However, profits from successful ventures were matched by losses in those that failed, and the returns on Ottoman investments in European technology never offset the costs of new technology.
Reckless government spending alarmed reformers across the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The acquisition of European technology achieved the opposite of the intended result; instead of making these states strong and independent, the development process led to the impoverishment and weakening of Middle Eastern governments, increasing their vulnerability to European intervention. Writing about Tunisia, Khayr al-Din claimed, “It is clear that the excessive expenses which burden the kingdom beyond its capability are the result of arbitrary rule, and that economy, which is the course of the kingdom’s well-being, is attained by regulating all expenses within the bounds of the tanzimat.”24 For the development projects to bear fruit, Khayr al-Din argued, governments needed to stay within their means. The benefits of Tanzimat reforms were being undermined by arbitrary rule and excessive spending.
To reform-minded thinkers like Khayr al-Din, the solution to both reckless government spending and arbitrary rule lay in constitutional reforms and representative government. The echoes of al-Tahtawi’s analysis of the French constitution could be heard very clearly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Under constitutional rule, a country would prosper, the people’s knowledge would increase, their wealth would accumulate, and their hearts would be satisfied. At least that was the theory.
The Tunisian Constitution of 1861 fell well short of reformers’ hopes. The text of the constitution drew on the Ottoman reform decrees of 1839 and 1856 and placed few limits on the executive power of the bey, who retained the right to appoint and dismiss his ministers. However, it did call for the establishment of a representative assembly, the Grand Council, composed of sixty members nominated by the ruler. Khayr al-Din, appointed president of the Grand Council, was soon disillusioned by the assembly’s limited powers to curb the bey’s excesses. He recognized that Ahmad Bey and his prime minister had only convened the council to rubberstamp their decisions, and so in 1863 he tendered his resignation. The issue that provoked his resignation was the government’s decision to contract its first foreign loan, which Khayr al-Din predicted would drag his adoptive country “to its ruin.”25
The Egyptian constitutional movement took root in the 1860s as well. Following the lines of al-Tahtawi’s analysis, many reformers believed constitutional government to be the basis of European strength and prosperity and the missing link in Egypt’s own reforms. Yet, as in Tunisia, no change was possible without the consent of the ruler. It was the viceroy of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, who called for the creation of the first Consultative Council of Deputies in 1866. The council was composed of seventy-five members indirectly elected to three-year terms. Like the bey in Tunisia, the ruler of Egypt sought to implicate the landed notables in his controversial financial policies through the convening of the council, whose role was limited to a consultative capacity (deputies had no role in making the laws of Egypt). Though a creation of the ruler, the council became a forum for Egyptian elites to voice criticism of the policies of the ruler and his government, and it marked the beginning of broader participation in the affairs of state.26
The most significant constitutional movement in the Eastern Mediterranean emerged from Ottoman Turkey. Some of Turkey’s leading intellectuals met in Paris and London in the late 1860s, where they mixed with European liberals and framed a set of demands for constitutional government, the sovereignty of the people, and an elected parliament to represent the people. Known as the Society of Young Ottomans, they criticized the government for the poverty of Ottoman society and the financial condition of the state. Its members lamented the Ottoman Empire’s increasing dependence on the European powers as well as foreign intervention into Ottoman affairs, and they laid blame for Turkey’s problems squarely on the irresponsible policies of the sultan and his government. The Young Ottomans published newspapers and lobbied foreign governments to gain support for their cause. Even so, they recognized that change could only come with the consent of the sultan. Namik Kemal, one of the great Turkish intellectuals of the nineteenth century, told his fellow Young Ottomans that “the Ottoman nation was loyal to its Ottoman rulers; with us nothing was done unless the [sultan] really wanted it.”27 The society dissolved in 1871 but returned to lobby its cause in Istanbul, where it found support among reformist government officials. The Young Ottomans’ efforts were rewarded in 1876 with the promulgation of the Ottoman Constitution and the convening of the first Ottoman Parliament.
If reformers in Tunisia, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire had hoped to stave off economic collapse by instituting constitutional reforms, they were to be sadly disappointed. The early constitutional movements were too respectful of authority to impose constraints on their rulers. They seemed to hope that the bey in Tunis, the pasha in Cairo, or the sultan in Istanbul would accept constraints voluntarily and share power with representative assemblies as an act of enlightened benevolence. These were not realistic expectations. The bey, pasha, and sultan continued to rule as before, and there was no constraint to prevent them from spending their governments into insolvency.
The single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East was not the armies of Europe but its banks. Ottoman reformers were terrified by the risks involved in accepting loans from Europe. In 1852, when Sultan Abdulmecid sought funds from France, one of his advisors took him aside and counseled strongly against the loan: “Your father [Mahmud II] had two wars with the Russians and lived through many campaigns. He had many pressures on him, yet he did not borrow money from abroad. Your sultanate has passed in peace. What will the people say if money is borrowed?” The advisor continued: “If this state borrows five piasters it will sink. For if once a loan is taken, there will be no end to it. [The state] will sink overwhelmed in debt.” Abdulmecid was convinced and canceled the loan, though he would return to European creditors within two years.28
In 1863 Khayr al-Din chose to resign as Tunisia’s president of the Grand Council rather than be party to the country’s first foreign loan. He later wrote bitterly of the policies that led to Tunisia’s bankruptcy in 1869. “After having exhausted all the resources of the Regency, [the prime minister] cast himself down the ruinous path of loans and in less than seven years . . . Tunisia, which had never owed anything to anyone, saw itself burdened with a debt of 240 million piasters [£6 million, $39 million] borrowed by the Government from Europe.”29 By Khayr al-Din’s estimate, the annual revenues of the Tunisian state had remained constant, at about 20 million piasters, right through the reform era. The result was that for seven years, expenditures exceeded revenues by 170 percent per annum. The result was the surrender of Tunisia’s sovereignty to an international financial commission.
The Ottoman central government was next to declare bankruptcy, in 1875. In the course of twenty years, the Ottomans had contracted sixteen foreign loans totaling nearly £220 million ($1.21 billion). With each loan, the Ottoman economy fell deeper into European economic dominion. Between discounts to attract increasingly skeptical investors and the various commissions and fees charged to float loans on European markets, the Ottoman government only received £116 million ($638 million)—the greater part of which was spent to service the Ottoman debt (some £19 million, or $104.5 million, in repayment and over £66 million, or $363 million, in interest). This left only £41 million ($225.5 million) for the Ottomans to invest in their economic objectives out of a total debt of £220 million ($1.21 billion). As Abdulmecid’s advisor predicted, the Ottoman state sank, overwhelmed in debt.
Over the next six years, amid the tumult of another disastrous war with Russia (1877–1878) and territorial losses confirmed in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin concluding the war, the Ottomans finally came to an agreement with their European creditors in 1881 with the formation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (PDA). Headed by a seven-man council representing the main bondholder states (Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire), the presidency of the PDA rotated between France and Britain. Whole sectors of the Ottoman economy were placed under the control of the PDA, with revenues from the salt monopoly, fish tax, silk tithes, stamp and spirit duties, as well as part of the annual tributes of several Ottoman provinces, dedicated to debt repayment. The lucrative tobacco trade also fell under the PDA, though a separate administration soon was created to oversee the monopoly over the purchase and sale of tobacco. The PDA gained tremendous power over the finances of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, which the European powers used not just to control the actions of the sultan’s government but to open the Ottoman economy to European companies for railways, mining, and public works.30
Although Egypt held the distinction of being the last of the Middle Eastern states to declare bankruptcy, in 1876, the government’s position would have been far stronger had it declared insolvency sooner rather than later. The parallels to the Ottoman case are striking. Between 1862 and 1873, Egypt contracted eight foreign loans, totaling £68.5 million ($376.75 million), which, after discounts, left only £47 million ($258.5 million), of which some £36 million ($198 million) were spent in payments on the principal and interest on the foreign loans. Thus, out of a debt of £68.5 million ($376.75 million), the government of Egypt gained only about £11 million ($60.5 million) to invest in its economy.
Faced with increased difficulty in raising funds to cover his debts, Khedive Ismail began to sell off the assets of the Egyptian state. He borrowed an estimated £28 million ($154 million) domestically. In 1872 the Egyptian government passed a law granting landholders who paid six years of their land tax in advance a future discount of 50 percent on future land taxes in perpetuity. As this desperate measure failed to staunch the hemorrhage, the viceroy sold the government’s shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government in 1875 for £4 million ($22 million)—recouping only one-quarter of the £16 million ($88 million) the canal is estimated to have cost the government of Egypt. Stripped of key assets, the treasury tried to postpone payment on the interest of the state’s debt in April 1876. This was tantamount to a declaration of bankruptcy, and the repo men of the international economy descended on Egypt like a plague.
Between 1876 and 1880 the finances of Egypt were assumed by European experts from Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and Russia whose primary concern was foreign bondholder interests. As in Istanbul, a formal commission was established. One unrealistic plan followed the next in quick succession, placing terrible burdens on Egyptian taxpayers. With each plan, the foreign economic advisors managed to insinuate themselves deeper into the financial administration of Egypt.
European control over Egypt was firmly established in 1878, when two European commissioners were “invited” to join the viceroy’s cabinet. British economist Charles Rivers Wilson was appointed minister of finance, and the Frenchman Ernest-Gabriel de Blignières was named minister of public works. Europe got to demonstrate its power over Egypt in 1879, when Khedive Ismail sought to dismiss Wilson and de Blignières in a cabinet reshuffle. The governments of Britain and France brought pressure to bear on the Ottoman sultan to dismiss “his” viceroy in Egypt. Overnight, the recalcitrant Ismail was overthrown and replaced by his more compliant son, Tawfiq.31
With the bankruptcies in Tunis, Istanbul, and Cairo, the Middle East reform initiatives had gone full circle. What had begun as movements to strengthen the Ottomans and their vassal states from outside interference had instead opened the Middle Eastern states to increasing European domination. Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.