Egypt

British colony, imperial capital

James Whidden

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Imperialismo

The book is a treatment of the British colony in Egypt from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, revealing deep-seated cultural and economic links, while also considering how the mundane concerns of ordinary colonials fared in a strategically vital imperial base, with all its attendant complications.

Chapter One
Capitulations

It would be incorrect to identify the origin of the British colony with the military occupation of 1882. Nor is there an origin in the sense of a founding script of the colony, like the Boer Treks. But there is an origin in the sense of the conditions that enabled Britons to travel to Egypt and establish residency. From that perspective, it is difficult to determine when the British acquired enough gravity to be considered a colony, except to say it was certainly before 1882. The characteristics of the colony before the invasion differed from it afterwards, involved different interests and enterprises, more economic and cultural than strategic or militaristic; these characteristics did not disappear with the military occupation, but continued to make up some of the various strands of the colonial experience.

British residence in Egypt was facilitated by commercial treaties, known as the ‘Capitulations’. The term capitulation came from the Latin caput or capitulum and literally referred to headings or articles in a legal contract. The origins of the idea of capitulations can be traced to the Crusades when the Italian city-states were granted legal privileges to trade in Fatimid Egypt in 1154, with Salah al-Din making similar grants in 1173. The Mamluk sultans continued the practice, for instance with the commercial agreements between the Italians and Sultan Qala’un (reigned 1279–90).¹ Like the subsequent Ottoman ‘Capitulations’, these legal agreements allowed Christians to reside within a khan or funduk, a fortified warehouse and hostel, situated in the marketplace or suq. The British first entered into such agreements with the Ottoman Empire in 1580, when 200 Capitulations were granted to the English Crown to enable trade. In the following year the royal charter of the Company of Merchants of the Levant gave it a monopoly of trade in the region. Shortly afterwards, British diplomatic representatives were sent out to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, and consuls were appointed to the entrepôts of the Levant, including Alexandria and Cairo, with Aleppo the most important British commercial centre until the nineteenth century. Throughout the following two and a half centuries, the Company covered the expenses of the diplomatic appointments. Only in 1825 did the British state take responsibility for selecting and appointing consuls.²

A history of the Levant Company by James Mather has shown that there was a high degree of cultural tolerance exhibited by the British merchants towards the Ottoman inhabitants of the Levant, something that contrasted with the modern colonial period.³ The Levant merchants mixed with their Ottoman counterparts in business, integrating some Ottoman cultural norms, such as language, dress, and diet. Also, certain categories of the Ottoman subject population were absorbed into the British colony, notably Christian and Jewish residents of the Levant ports, who were attracted to the protection provided by the Capitulations. Incredible wealth was produced: 300 to 400 per cent profits in the early period, with most cargos consisting of silk products. In a development that would transform Egypt in the nineteenth century, the Levant merchants found that cotton fibre was readily adapted to British markets by the weavers of Lancashire.⁴ Commercial and manufacturing profits in cotton, as well as the traditional luxury items of the Orient, had social consequences in the growth of an urban ‘Levantine’ social sector, part European and part Asian, in a ‘process’ that continued well into the twentieth century. Lord Cromer recognised the social category in 1908:

The process of manufacturing Levantines is at least as old as the Crusades. Thus, Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole says … ‘The early Crusaders, after thirty years residence in Syria, had become very much assimilated in character and habits to the people whom they had partly conquered, among whom they lived, and whose daughters they did not disdain to marry; they were growing into Levantines; they were known as Pullani or Creoles.’⁵

It is this ‘process’ that Mather highlights in his study, demonstrating that, in the pre-1800 era, consul and merchant colony had to obey the rules and customs of local institutions; as a result, British merchants of the Levant Company adapted to local norms. As he observed, the most important factor driving this process was that the market was a great leveller of national and religious difference. Individuals adapted their lifestyles to the requirements of trade.⁶ Whereas in the later period the European consuls held the balance of power, in the earlier period local Ottoman governors had the capacity to put the foreigners in their place at any perceived slight or transgression. If a ‘freeman’ of the Company lost the legal protection afforded by the Capitulations, the Ottoman officials could strip him of fortunes and stockpiles; for instance, marriage to Ottoman subjects was regarded as dangerous because it could be interpreted as removing the legal status of a British subject. Nevertheless, intermarriage occurred, there were also concubines and ‘harems’, but because of the relative power of the Ottoman state fewer than among their counterparts in the East India Company. The merchants of the Levant Company were wary of the Ottomans and therefore mostly pursued their own interests and leisure activities – notably drinking, feasting, and the hunt – somewhat aloof from the locals.

The relationships between Ottomans and British were defined more by ambiguity than cross-cultural harmony, but far from the animosity between foreigners and locals that, apparently, characterised relations of the post-1800 period. Mather's narrative is thus hopeful, suggesting that cultural ruptures are not inevitable; however, that characterisation of the Levant merchant colonies is not conventional. Other accounts have described the Company ‘factories’ as tight-knit organisations where British merchants had very little contact with the local population, did not speak Arabic, Turkish or other local languages, and lived in constant fear of the plague and the hostility of the local population. Therefore what contact the British had was through local intermediaries, normally Christian or Jewish, also under the protection of the Capitulations by a mechanism known as the berat.⁷ From these accounts the Capitulations were easily corrupted to favour Europeans, with British and French consuls winning more and more concessions and privileges so that the legal status of British merchants and their clients came to resemble something like ‘diplomatic immunity’.⁸ The contradictions inherent in these divergent narratives of the Levant Company can at least partly be explained by historical method. Mather describes individuals and their everyday lives within a Levantine milieu, drawing a contrast between the Levant merchants and those of the East India Company or modern colonialism. On the other hand, economic historians analyse larger structures over the long term and, with hindsight, the process afoot amounted to the eventual domination of the Europeans. Thus, Robert Ilbert has shown that in the nineteenth century Europeans in Egypt were increasingly assertive, and the consuls, particularly the British and French, insinuated themselves within the Egyptian system.⁹ After the Levant Company monopoly on the export trade was terminated in 1825, competition increased among foreign and local merchants. British consuls and merchants campaigned to limit or abolish Egyptian internal tariffs on the movement of goods or state monopolies over valuable export commodities.¹⁰ By re-orienting the economy towards Britain's export and import requirements, the consuls and the merchant colony served as a ‘bridgehead’ for imperialism in Egypt well before the British occupation of 1882. Capitulations were the primary instrument to assert power, so that rather than a grant from the Ottoman ruler, the Capitulations were interpreted, at least from the nineteenth century, as a guarantee of European ‘rights’ that extended into all areas of Egypt's economy and administration.¹¹ The British resisted Egyptian efforts to revise the commercial agreements imposed upon them from the 1820s. As a result, the Egyptians had to wait until the 1930s to reform the basic rules of international trade and finance with the abolition of the Capitulations in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. The ‘bridgehead’ was finally dismantled, the British and other colonies retreated, and the Egyptians occupied the Levantine quarters of Alexandria and Cairo.¹²

Philip Mansell's study of the Levant offers a synthesis of these differing interpretations of colonial relationships. While recognising that the imperial states of Europe shaped unequal social relations between Europeans and Ottoman subjects, Mansell has also said that it is important to investigate the Levantine milieu in specific locales. As Mansell said, the ‘cities of the Levant were protagonists in the dialogues between cities and states, ports and hinterlands, as well as between East and West’. Note the different levels of interaction: regional, state, and global. From this perspective, the ‘Levant’ represented a culture that negotiated at several intersections or ‘bridgeheads’, as well as historical periods. Mansell refers to a Levantine ‘mentality’ that survived the Byzantine Empire into the period of the Ottoman Empire and, one assumes his inclusion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alexandria in his category of the Levant, survived the British Empire also. In the Levantine urban space the hard boundaries of nation-state, ethnicity, or religion were not fully formed and might, in certain historical locales or periods, reveal a ‘third way’, to which Mansell applies terms such as ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘global cities’, and ‘coexistence’.¹³ Mansell is thus attentive to trends submerged by the emergence of the nation-state. This in effect brings Mather's observations on the pre-nineteenth-century Levant into the colonial period, albeit adopting a more multifaceted approach whereby imperialism has to be understood as a contradictory phenomenon. Take, for example, the term ‘bridgehead’ as applied by Michael Reimer to capture the way social and spatial change in Alexandria in the nineteenth century prefigured the military occupation that forced Egypt into the British Empire. According to Reimer, foreign control over Egypt's people and territory existed before 1882 and thus the term ‘bridgehead’ has the sense of foreign intrusion. Reimer's argument is essentially that the foreign colony originated in the economic transformation of Alexandria, its integration into the imperial networks of trade, migration, and European financi...