A History of the Middle East (15 page)

It was possible to keep the scale of these massacres hidden from the outside world. News only trickled out and was often dismissed as exaggerated rumours. But in August 1896 a group of Armenian revolutionaries with characteristic foolhardiness took their struggle into the heart of Istanbul, where they raided and occupied the Ottoman Bank with the declared purpose of drawing the attention of the European embassies to the plight of their people. In the inevitable reprisal, the Istanbul mob led by religious fanatics was allowed to murder and pillage through the Armenian quarter. Now the powers of Europe could not ignore what was happening. In a series of joint notes they denounced the massacres and made clear their view that these were not spontaneous communal disturbances but had been deliberately provoked by the sultan and his agents. They made veiled threats of intervention by suggesting that the survival of the sultan and his dynasty was at stake.

Abdul Hamid’s replies were evasive and unsatisfactory. The rumour spread through the capital that the British fleet would force the Dardanelles and land troops. But once again the sultan was saved by the jealous rivalry of the powers. In England the aged William Gladstone might rage against the ‘unspeakable Turk’ as a ‘disgrace
to civilization’ and demand that Britain should if necessary act alone, but he was in opposition and the prudent prime minister Lord Salisbury, who like his monarch Queen Victoria always detested and feared the Russians more than the Turks, had no intention of doing such a thing. Public opinion might be aroused against the empire throughout Europe, but the governments of the powers still had no desire to see it dismembered. Russia did not want to see a powerful independent Armenia on its borders. France did not wish to risk its huge investments in the Ottoman Empire, which were now much larger than those of Britain. Germany had its own ambitions for political and commercial expansion to the east which could succeed only through an alliance with the sultan and his government. An international conference on the Armenian question in 1897 ended in failure, and the collapse of the empire was again forestalled. The Armenians, whose aims had never been realistic, were left to their fate.

Since his accession Abdul Hamid had regarded Germany, recently united under Bismarck, with the greatest favour among the powers of Europe. It not only lacked Britain, France and Russia’s imperial ambitions towards the Muslim world but also acted to restrain them. Backed by its rising industrial strength, which was soon to outstrip that of Britain, and allied with Austro-Hungary, imperial Germany created a new focus of power in central Europe. But there were strict limits to Bismarck’s ambitions: his own view was that the concept of eastwards expansion was a futile dream. One of his most notable observations was that the whole Eastern Question was ‘not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier’.

However, Germany’s foreign policy dramatically changed when, in 1888, the young Kaiser Wilhelm II acceded to the throne on the early death of his father. Intelligent but unstable, autocratic and ambitious, Wilhelm – although half-English through his mother, the daughter of Queen Victoria – was a passionate German nationalist. Against Bismarck’s advice he was easily persuaded by Marshal von der Goltz, who headed the German military mission in Istanbul, that Asiatic Turkey was ripe for the growth of German influence.
The policy of ‘
Drang nach Osten
’ (or ‘drive to the east’) was born. Abdul Hamid, always suspicious of liberal influences emanating from London and Paris and seeing nothing equivalent in Berlin, welcomed the new German interest. In 1889 he gave a lavish reception to the young kaiser and kaiserin when they made their first visit to Istanbul.

German engineers and scientists now joined the military experts in the difficult task of modernizing the Ottoman Empire. The principal German contribution was the building of the railway across Anatolia to Baghdad, with the prospect of extending it through Basra to Kuwait on the Persian Gulf. In 1898 the kaiser, who by now ‘dropped the pilot’ and dispensed with Bismarck’s services, made a second visit to Istanbul of much greater significance. This time he went on from Turkey to the Arab provinces of the empire. With doubtful symbolism he entered Jerusalem dressed as a crusader knight, after praying on his knees outside the walls of the Holy City. But he went on to Damascus where, in a memorable speech at the tomb of Saladin, he swore Germany’s disinterested protection for the 300 million subjects of the sultan/caliph.

The foundations had been laid of an Ottoman–German alliance which two decades later was to result in the destruction and dismemberment of the empire. But it was wholly understandable that Abdul Hamid should have clutched at Germany as an ally to help preserve from British and French imperial ambitions his Arab Asian dominions which were virtually all that remained of his empire. Morocco had never been Ottoman, Algeria was lost to France in the 1830s and Tunisia in 1881. Turkish governors still ruled the desert provinces of Libya, but, partly through accident and bungling, Egypt had come under lasting British control.

In 1841, combined European and Ottoman pressure had forced Muhammad Ali of Egypt to abandon all his dreams of empire except for possession of Sudan. However, he nevertheless left his successors a cohesive semi-independent state whose strategic position gave it considerable importance in the eastern Mediterranean. They also inherited gigantic problems which they were ultimately incapable of managing.

Some of these problems closely mirrored those of the Ottoman sultan. The abolition of Muhammad Ali’s system of monopolies and the opening up of Egypt to European trade and enterprise (equivalent to the
infitah
or open-door policy of President Sadat more than a century later) not only removed the basis of the state’s revenues but also made it impossible for the rulers of Egypt to maintain control over the country’s economic development. There was no question of Egypt becoming an industrial power.

There were also important differences from Turkey, however. The enforced reduction of the armed forces to 18,000 men, under the 1841 Treaty of London, removed the need for high military spending, which had bled the country. But this also meant that Egypt was no longer a military power of any consequence, even though the Ottoman sultan was neither willing nor able to offer protection against occupation by a European power.

Egypt’s open-door policy promoted a more intensive and comprehensive economic development than was taking place in Turkey. In area Egypt is the size of France and Spain, but only 3 per cent of this was inhabited, its population being less than one-tenth of what it is today. Good communications and a modern infrastructure were relatively easy to install, and by the 1870s the inextensive but intensely fertile lands of the Nile Valley and Delta
were producing valuable crops for export, of which cotton was the most important.

Unfortunately this did little to improve the lot of the mass of Egyptians, for two reasons. One was that the foreign entrepreneurs who were responsible for so much of the new development made little contribution to Egypt’s revenues; under the protection of the Capitulations, they paid virtually no taxes. Secondly, while the trend towards the granting of freehold property rights was more advanced than in Ottoman Turkey, the principal result was that more and more land was concentrated into vast estates owned by the Turco-Circassian ruling class, and especially the numerous members of the family of Muhammad Ali. At the same time, many of the small farmers – the
fellahin
– actually lost control over lands that their families had farmed for generations. The
kurbaj
(whip) might no longer be used to force them into the ranks of Ibrahim Pasha’s armies, but it was employed to conscript labour among the landless peasants.

Abbas, Muhammad Ali’s immediate successor (1844–54), was an embittered reactionary who dismissed his grandfather’s French advisers and willingly closed schools and halted public works. But though generally xenophobic he was curiously Anglophile, and he allowed James Stephenson to build the Cairo–Alexandria railway in 1850–1, the first railway in Africa or Asia. Despite his meanness, Egypt’s lack of revenues forced him into borrowing. On his murder by two household slaves (possibly as an act of revenge by his aunt, Princess Zohra, whom he had banished for amorous activities), he was succeeded by a man of very different temperament, his genial and Francophile uncle Said (1854–63). Said launched a vastly expensive new programme of public works – digging new canals, repairing dams and expanding both the railways and steamer transport on the Nile. He set a precedent by negotiating a loan from Fruhling and Goschen of London at 8 per cent. As European entrepreneurs, supported by their consuls and protected by the Capitulations, extracted expensive and one-sided concessions from the Egyptian government, Egypt’s debts mounted dangerously.

The consequences of this extravagance were overshadowed by
one decision which was to be fateful for Egypt. As a youth, one of Said’s closest European friends had been Ferdinand de Lesseps, a young engineer who was son of the French political agent. De Lesseps was interested in a scheme to cut a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea across the isthmus of Suez. This was not a new idea. Napoleon had wanted to do it in order to gain control of the Red Sea for France, but his engineers had told him it was impossible because of the different levels of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. This was contradicted by a British engineer in the 1830s, and Muhammad Ali and his French advisers favoured the project. Palmerston, however, was strongly opposed – especially if the canal was to be built by French engineers. British interests would make control of the canal imperative, and this would mean the occupation of Egypt. As he famously remarked,

Britain preferred the trans-Egyptian route to the East to be opened by extending the Cairo–Alexandria railway to Suez.

One of Said’s first actions on his accession was to sign a canal concession agreement with de Lesseps. The terms were hugely unfavourable to Egypt: it had to provide a corvée of 20,000 unpaid labourers a year, pay for all the extensive ancillary works and abandon its rights to the land on both banks of the canal. In addition, when nearly half the shares in the Suez Canal Company were left unsold by public subscription, de Lesseps persuaded Said that he must purchase them.

Britain still opposed the scheme, and endeavoured to use its influence with the Ottoman sultan. But Said was sufficiently independent, and de Lesseps had the enthusiastic support of Napoleon III. In April 1859 the work began. The Canal was half completed
when Said died and was succeeded as viceroy by Ismail, son of Ibrahim Pasha. Ismail was a man of ambition, intelligence and enterprise, but his failings were to destroy Egypt’s hopes of independence. Work on the Canal was pushed ahead and was completed by 1869, when Ismail played the lavish host to the Empress Eugénie and other European royalty for the official opening. The cost to Egypt was gigantic. The sultan, encouraged by Britain, had maintained his right to veto the concession. Although de Lesseps persuaded him to refer the dispute to Napoleon III for arbitration, the French emperor’s award, which was intended finally to determine the status of the Suez Canal Company, placed an unbearable burden on Egypt. Ismail had to pay the Company the extortionate sum of 130 million francs to relinquish its rights to land, navigation and free labour under the original concession. The sultan issued his firman of approval, but Egypt was rapidly approaching bankruptcy.

The Suez Canal was the most important single expense for Egypt, but there was much more. During Ismail’s reign, 8,400 miles of canal were dug and the railway system was extended from 275 to 1,185 miles. Telegraphs, bridges, docks and lighthouses gave Egypt the infrastructure of a modernizing nineteenth-century state. In a remark which is still remembered in Egypt, Ismail claimed that ‘My country no longer belongs to Africa; it is part of Europe.’ Even
The Times
’s correspondent concurred when he wrote in 1876 that ‘Egypt is a marvellous instance of progress. She has advanced as much in seventy years as many other countries have done in five hundred.’ The cultivated area was extended by some 15 per cent, and between 1862 and 1879 the value of exports and imports nearly tripled.

There were two disastrous weaknesses in this apparent prosperity. One was that it depended so heavily on the export of a single primary product – cotton. Manufactured goods were mostly imported. Like Turkey, Egypt benefited from the effects of the American Civil War on cotton output from the southern states. The boom encouraged Ismail to further extravagance but swiftly faded. The other weakness was the mountain of debt on which the apparent prosperity was based. Within five years of Ismail’s Canal
concession he had borrowed over £25 million at rates of interest nominally varying between 7 and 12 per cent but in reality amounting to between 12 and 26 per cent. One of his troubles was that as viceroy appointed by the sultan, rather than an independent sovereign, he had no legal power to pledge the revenue of the state, so the terms on which he could borrow were proportionately more expensive. In 1867 he managed to secure from the sultan the style and title of khedive together with the right to change the law of succession in favour of his direct descendants instead of succession passing, as previously, to the eldest surviving member of the House of Muhammad Ali. In 1873 he obtained an Imperial Rescript which made him virtually an independent sovereign with the right to raise loans and secure concessions without reference to the sultan. All this was achieved only with heavy bribes, but it meant that what had previously been the personal liability of the viceroy now became that of the Egyptian state and ultimately of the long-suffering
fellahin
.