A World Beneath the Sands, page 23
As if to confirm the dawn of a new age, Baedeker’s published its first guide to Egypt in the same year as A Thousand Miles Up the Nile appeared. Tourism to Egypt was now a truly international, mass-market affair. The year 1877 also witnessed another milestone in the British affair with Egypt. One of the two small obelisks in Alexandria, known erroneously as Cleopatra’s Needles, had been given to Britain by the Ottoman authorities soon after the expulsion of Bonaparte’s troops in 1801. At the time, the government in London was unenthusiastic about the prospect, never mind the expense, of bringing a piece of old stone to London. Two decades later, in the excitement surrounding the decipherment of hieroglyphics, George IV had ordered the Foreign Office to reconsider the plan, but once again Parliament had baulked at the cost. From time to time, Egyptian rulers, from Muhammad Ali to Ismail, reminded the British that the obelisk was theirs for the taking, but there was little public appetite.
Interest in bringing the obelisk to London was temporarily piqued when Prince Albert heard rumours that the French might be about to steal a march and add it to their collection of Egyptian monuments. Fearing a national disgrace, the prince consort wrote to the prime minister, Lord John Russell, asking him to take swift action. Questions were duly asked in Parliament, and the government decided to act. The cost of transport was estimated at £15,000. The politicians bit the bullet, but instead of receiving a chorus of approval, they found their decision criticized by the very people they might have expected to support it, the small but vocal Egyptological community in Britain. The objections were led by Wilkinson, supported by a group of his scholar friends. Hay, for example, argued that Cleopatra’s Needle was so inferior to the Luxor obelisk that it would be a national disgrace to bring it to London. Wilkinson’s criticism of the plan was motivated more by aesthetics; he wrote to Birch: ‘I do think it is a great mistake bringing obelisks to this country . . . we always place them in a position ill suited to them.’101 (By contrast, Wilkinson had lobbied hard in the 1830s for the colossus of Ramesses II at Memphis to be brought to England; perhaps he felt it was easier to site a statue.) With such eminent figures expressing vocal opposition to the proposal, it was killed stone dead. Cleopatra’s Needle remained on the Corniche in Alexandria.
It was only in 1877, a few years after Wilkinson’s death, that the prospect of another calamity reopened the question of bringing the obelisk to London. This time it was not the perfidious French who forced Britain’s hand, but a Greek landowner who planned to cut up the monument for building stone. With slim prospects of Parliament voting the necessary funds, a wealthy businessman, Erasmus Wilson, offered to pay for the whole project. A barge, aptly named the Cleopatra, was dispatched to Alexandria, and the obelisk carefully lifted aboard from the quayside. Slowly but surely, the tow ship Olga began to pull the Cleopatra and its precious cargo out into the Mediterranean. Along the North African coast, past Malta, and through the Straits of Gibraltar: everything went smoothly until the ships entered the Bay of Biscay. There they hit a storm, and the Cleopatra began rolling uncontrollably. It looked as if it might capsize, sending its monolith to the bottom of the Atlantic. The Olga sent a rescue boat, crewed by volunteers, but it foundered in the waves, drowning all six onboard. With the Cleopatra drifting helplessly and threatening to sink at any moment, it had to be rescued by a Glasgow steamer and taken to a Spanish port for essential repairs. Eventually, it was towed around the Breton peninsula and up the English Channel, arriving at the mouth of the Thames on 21 January 1878.
Eight months later, amid great ceremony, Cleopatra’s Needle was erected on the Victoria Embankment – where it, too, is now ‘scaling away by imperceptible degrees under the skyey influences of an alien climate’. It may have been incongruous to see this monument from a sunny Mediterranean land on the banks of the cold, grey Thames, but the obelisk’s symbolism was what mattered. Since the days of Julius Caesar, new empires had announced their arrival on the world stage and proclaimed their might by usurping the monuments of earlier empires, especially the empire of the pharaohs. Rome, Constantinople, Paris all had their obelisks; now it was London’s turn. By bringing Cleopatra’s needle to London, ‘Britain signalled its inheritance of world power. London would thus become virtually a “New Rome”.’102 Those who had cried out to Lucie Duff Gordon: ‘Let the English Queen come and take us!’ were about to be granted their wish.
SEVEN
A permanent occupation
Flinders Petrie outside a rock-cut tomb at Giza (which served as his home) on the first of his many archaeological expeditions to Egypt.
I believe the true line lies as much in the careful noting and comparison of small details, as in more wholesale and off-hand clearances.1
FLINDERS PETRIE, 1882
The early 1880s were perhaps the most momentous years in the entire history of Egyptology and of Egypt’s entanglement with the West. They stand, alongside the Napoleonic expedition of 1798–1801, as a turning point in the European discovery of Egypt, and Egypt’s discovery of itself. In the space of eighteen months, between January 1881 and July 1882, three unrelated yet inextricably intertwined events shook the comfortable worlds of the khedivial court and European scholarship. By the time the events had played out, the Egypt of Muhammad Ali, Said and Ismail, and the Egyptology of Champollion, Wilkinson and Lepsius would be irrevocably consigned to history. Neither the country nor the subject would ever be the same again.
For Ismail, it had all started so well. His recognition as khedive in 1867 had been followed six years later by ‘an Imperial Rescript making him an independent sovereign with the right to raise loans and grant concessions in Egypt’s name without reference to the Porte’.2 The ability to raise loans gave Ismail free rein to indulge his grand schemes for Egypt by heaping up yet more government debt. He simply did not understand financial matters, and was not the type of personality to ask for advice. Had he not, after all, presided over a trebling of Egypt’s exports, a transformation of its infrastructure, and a wholesale modernization of its economy? To finance his limitless ambitions, Egypt’s foreign debt soared from $16 million in 1862 to a colossal $443 million in 1875. Unable to meet the interest payments, Ismail decided to sell his 44 per cent holding in the Suez Canal Company to raise some much-needed cash. The British government spotted an opportunity to take a strategic stake in a crucial communication link with India, and moved quickly, paying Ismail the sum of £4 million, raised with the assistance of the Rothschilds. The deal was presented to Parliament as a fait accompli. As a contemporary observer noted: ‘The purchase of four million pounds’ worth of Suez Canal shares by the British Government was not merely an evidence of Ismail Pasha’s dwindling resources; it gave England a foothold in addition to the stake in the country that Disraeli, with his schemes of empire, had recognized as soon as the project of the canal had been put into execution.’3
Faced with an ever-growing burden of debt, Ismail soon found that even the funds raised from selling the shares were not enough. Under pressure from British and French bond-holders, and their governments, he was forced to accept foreign control over Egypt’s finances. In 1876, an Armenian prime minister, a British finance minister, and a French minister of public works arrived in Cairo to take up their posts. They were joined by a young British civil servant whose job was controller of the collection of debt; his name was Evelyn Baring. Little did he know – little did Egypt know – that he would come to dominate its affairs, economic and political, for the best part of three decades.
So began Anglo-French dominance of Egypt’s government, the so-called ‘Dual Control’. No matter that Egypt had, in the eyes of some, ‘advanced as much in seventy years as many other countries have done in five hundred’:4 it had come at a staggering cost. From now on, the Commission of the Public Debt, and the two executive controllers-general, an Englishman for revenue and a Frenchman for expenditure, oversaw ever greater swathes of the Egyptian economy. Ismail was humiliated, but ‘it was not repentance that he suffered, but a sense of injustice’.5 To start turning the public finances around, taxes were increased across the board, and a concession was even sold to a British firm to use ancient tombs for the storage of fertilizer.6 In the efforts to rescue modern Egypt, ancient Egypt took second place. In a bitter irony, a new official newspaper appeared for the first time in 1876, named Al-Ahram (The Pyramids) after Egypt’s greatest monuments. In reality, foreigners called the shots, not the descendants of the pharaohs.
Despite the best efforts of Dual Control, by 1877, the year of Amelia Edwards’s A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, Egypt was on its knees. The British controller-general proposed halving the rate of interest on the public debt, but Baring, now Commissioner of the Public Debt, was outraged. His plan was to force Ismail to accept an international commission of inquiry into Egypt’s revenues and expenditure, and he browbeat all opposition. As Baring had predicted, the commission’s report was devastating, pointing the finger squarely at Ismail for corruption and abuse of power.7 He was forced to cede all his personal and family estates, roughly a fifth of all the cultivated land in Egypt, to the state. From now on, he would be supported by a modest civil list. He tried to put a brave face on it, declaring: ‘My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions.’8 The worst, however, was still to come. A low Nile flood that year led to crop failure the following season, which coincided with an outbreak of cotton blight, devastating Egypt’s main export crop. The economy plunged further into crisis, as thousands died from starvation and disease in Upper Egypt. Impoverished peasants parted with everything – household possessions, even the clothes off their backs – to pay their taxes. Ismail tried everything to curry favour with his Western backers, even offering the British Museum the colossus of Ramesses II at Memphis (if they could pay for its removal). But to no avail. It was as if the gods themselves had deserted Egypt.
After the disastrously low inundation in 1877, the Nile flood of 1878 was one of the highest of the nineteenth century. Where the low flood had brought famine, the high Nile wreaked great damage, in particular to the Egyptian Museum at Bulaq, which was sited close to the riverbank. Water flooded its halls, and undermined its foundations. It seemed to sum up the parlous state of the country at large. Eventually, the museum was reinforced, restored and reopened, but by that time, Ismail was no longer khedive. His end, when it came, was relatively swift. In early 1879, he tried to reassert his authority over Dual Control, dismissing his prime minister and informing European diplomats that he planned to form a ministry composed entirely of Egyptians. The response was a general strike throughout Egypt by European officials, whose numbers had swelled under Dual Control. (In 1878, there were over a hundred thousand foreign residents in Egypt, many of them employed in government jobs.) Neither the British nor the French government had much appetite for direct intervention, but when the German and Austrian governments added their pressure over the treatment of foreign bond-holders, the two powers swung into action. They pressured the Ottoman sultan, still nominally Egypt’s suzerain, to order Ismail to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, Tewfiq.9 The note delivered to Ismail in one of his many Cairo palaces was brief and to the point: ‘The French and English Governments are agreed to advise Your Highness officially to abdicate and to leave Egypt.’10 He duly collected the crown jewels and £3 million in cash, and sailed from Alexandria aboard the royal yacht, bound for Naples and later Istanbul. He never returned to Egypt. The British blamed him for bankrupting Egypt, while Egyptian nationalists never forgave him for throwing away the country’s independence. A contemporary commentator summed up his predicament most perceptively: ‘It was Ismail Pasha’s misfortune that he lived too late. The age of tyrants and despots was passing, even in the East, and Egypt was too near to Europe not to have come, to some extent, under its modernising influence.’11
The new khedive, Tewfiq, was reluctant to submit to the full political control of Britain and France, so it was agreed that the two controllers-general should have only advisory powers and a consultative role in cabinet; however, the khedive would not be able to dismiss them without their governments’ consent. It was a fig-leaf that enabled Tewfiq to salvage some semblance of independence. Baring took up the role of British controller-general; Egypt’s debts were finally settled, and taxes on the peasantry reduced. Following the Liberals’ victory in the 1880 British general election, the new Viceroy of India, the Marquess of Ripon, appointed Baring to be his financial secretary (Baring had served earlier in his career as private secretary to a previous Viceroy), and he left Egypt in June that year, after barely six months in the country. While he was away, administering the finances of a subcontinent, things came to a head in Egypt.
From the outset, Tewfiq had struggled to assert his legitimacy with Egyptian nationalists; his submission to foreign influence had led to an alliance between the constitutionalists (who demanded constitutional change) and Egyptian officers in the army (who had emerged as champions of Egyptian self-determination). When the khedive promulgated a draft law reserving the higher ranks of the military for the Turkish and Circassian elite, junior officers of Egyptian nationality, led by one of their number named Arabi, revolted. A botched attempt to place the ringleaders on trial, and their subsequent escape from prison, turned the army into the focus of Egyptian nationalism (a position it has cultivated and maintained to this day) and Arabi into a popular hero. The rebels’ demands were readily understood and widely shared by the population at large: a restoration of the Egyptian army to the strength it had enjoyed before the Convention of London, regulation of water rights, restrictions on usury, and the abolition of the hated corvée. Not for the first time in their imperial history, nor for the last, the British gravely underestimated both the scale of people’s grievances and the severity of the nationalist threat.
Trapped between his foreign masters and a rebellious army, Tewfiq planned a counter-attack, but the colonels anticipated his move and marched on Cairo’s Abdin Palace to confront the khedive. He gave in to some of their demands but refused to accept any permanent changes to the constitution. The British wanted, above all, to preserve the status quo of Dual Control, wary of Bismark’s ambitions for a greater Germany; characteristically, the Sultan in Constantinople vacillated, playing for time. A new French government in November 1881 lent its wholehearted support to Tewfiq, while the Egyptian army strengthened its popularity in the provinces. By the spring of 1882, the impasse could no longer endure. Tewfiq invited the Dual Powers to help him snuff out the rebellion, once and for all. It was a disastrous decision.
When news spread of an Anglo-French task force headed for Alexandria, it provoked a great outpouring of patriotic sentiment throughout Egypt. On 11 June 1882, a riot in Alexandria caused the death of at least fifty European residents, including a petty officer in the Royal Navy, and the British consul was badly wounded. While panicking expatriates were evacuated in their thousands, Arabi’s forces stepped in to restore order. The French, Austrian and German governments urged Tewfiq to back Arabi, but the British – still reeling from recent nationalist murders in Dublin’s Phoenix Park – would not countenance appeasement. As tensions rose in Alexandria, the European powers grew increasingly suspicious of each other’s motives and intentions. On Arabi’s orders, batteries were built along the harbourside of Alexandria to deter any British assault. The admiral in charge of the taskforce issued an ultimatum demanding their dismantling. It was ignored. The next morning, 11 July, British warships began the bombardment of the city. Egyptian troops left as the city was reduced to rubble. The British, French and Italian consulates were gutted; the Grand Square was almost completely ruined. After two days of heavy shelling, British troops came ashore on 13 July, and Arabi declared war against the foreign invaders of his country. The House of Commons overwhelmingly backed British military intervention, but neither the French nor the Italians would join the assault. The Ottoman sultan procrastinated as usual. Arabi believed that, with the population on his side, he was sure of victory. He was wrong.
A British expeditionary force landed at Alexandria on 16 August, soon to be joined by another from India, sealing the Suez Canal at both ends. As the net tightened, Arabi’s forces began to desert their leader. The decisive battle, fought at Tel el Kebir on 13 September, lasted barely forty minutes. At the end of the fighting, 10,000 Egyptians lay dead, against just fifty-seven British fatalities. Arabi retreated to Cairo where he surrendered. After a trial, he was exiled to Ceylon – the last thing the British needed was another nationalist martyr. In a show of force, British troops paraded before Tewfiq on 30 September, before retiring to barracks in all the major Egyptian cities. All the while, the British government maintained the fiction that its forces were in Egypt to protect the khedive.
Having snuffed out Arabi’s rebellion and formally abolished Dual Control, the British were faced with the question of what to do next. Although the main expeditionary force had withdrawn shortly after Tel el Kebir, Egypt was simply too strategically important to be left to its own devices. On the other hand, Britain did not particularly want to add Egypt to its colonial possessions. The solution to the dilemma, typically, was to set up an enquiry. Lord Dufferin’s report of 1883 was a classic fudge, rejecting both direct and indirect rule. Instead, the British would continue to govern Egypt, but under a ‘veiled protectorate’ – designed, above all, to avoid further provoking France. Under the novel arrangement, British representatives would have no formal authority over the Egyptian government, but there was an expectation, nonetheless, that their orders would be obeyed. And who better to implement this rule by stealth than Evelyn Baring. Confident to the point of authoritarianism – his nickname was ‘over-Baring’ – he had already demonstrated his clear-sightedness and fiscal discipline. He arrived back in Cairo in 1883, officially as British agent and consul-general, but in reality he was now de facto ruler of Egypt.
