EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: MODERNITY AND SUBALTERN REVOLT IN UPPER EGYPT, 1700-1920 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History By Zeinab A. Abul-Magd, M.A. Washington, DC June 17, 2008 Copy Rights 2008 by Zeinab Abul-Magd All Rights Reserved ii EMPIRE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: MODERNITY AND SUBALTERN REVOLT IN UPPER EGYPT, 1700-1920 Zeinab A. Abul-Magd, M.A. Dissertation Advisor: Judith E. Tucker, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Empire is not a supreme entity controlling high-level policies in metropolises: it is a reality translated into the daily lives of the subalterns at the periphery of the periphery of empire, as this microhistory of Qina province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argues. Qina is a small place deep in the south of Egypt, and this study looks at the lives of subaltern women and men in this province and then moves beyond southern Egypt to attempt to understand two centuries of imperialism and rebellion in world history. This period marked great transformations as the world moved from “traditional” to “modern” empire, or from “despotic” to allegedly “liberal” discourses and exercises of imperialism. In order to analyze modes of imperial hegemony and modes of subaltern revolt, this study examines four empires in Qina province: the Ottoman (1700s), Muhammad Ali’s (1811-1848), the informal British (1848 to 1882), and finally the formal British (1882-1920). This study argues that as the world progressed toward modern imperialism and its alleged modernity, Qina province endured irreversible peripheralization and marginalization, a fate that it might have shared with many other small places in the world. While the postcolonial critique of the “consequences of modernity” mostly iii focuses on metropolises overtly impacted by European imperialism or rural areas directly affected by capitalist disturbances, this study examines an utterly marginalized space, far away from the centers of events. It shows that the empire was there too, leaving a more profound impact and generating unique modes of resistance. This study adopts “the empire” as its main unit of analysis, rather than the nation state. It is an inquiry into the empire as the key to understanding the major shifts in modern history, and questions the ability of this unit to generate nuanced conclusions in studying the history of small, marginalized places in the world. Furthermore, this study turns its attention to the rural subalterns of the empires, rather than the urban nationalistic elites, to inquire about the ability of these social groups to reveal an alternative history of those places. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Empire, Modernity, and Subaltern Revolt …………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 Qina in a Non-Eurocentric World Economy, 1200s-1700s …………………. 28 Chapter 2 The “Republic” of Upper Egypt: Under the Ottoman Empire, 1700s ..……………………………………….... 64 Chapter 3 The Price of Revolt: Muhammad Ali’s Empire, 1811-1848 ………………………………………. 106 Chapter 4 Steamers, Plantations, and Mines: The Age of Informal Empire, 1848-1882 ……………………………………. 163 Chapter 5 Rebellion in the Time of Cholera: Under the British Empire, 1882-1920 ……………………………………….. 221 Conclusion The Empire Hasn’t Gone Yet ……………………………………………….. 278 Maps and Illustrations ………………………………………………………. 290 Glossary ……………………………………………………………………….. 298 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………... 300 v Upper Egypt Source: British Library vi Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Qena.jpg vii INTRODUCTION Empire, Modernity, and Subaltern Revolt Three years ago, while conducting my archival research in Cairo, I visited Qina province, a small place deep in the south of Egypt. In the fields bordering the town of Qus, one of the province’s agricultural and industrial centers, I noticed the glorious presence of an enormous silver, cylindrical building that looked alien to its surroundings. Inquiring about its contents, I learned that this was the storage silo for wheat granted by USAID. The controversial American food aid to Egypt, believed by many analysts to be a tool of imperial hegemony through establishing dependency, had made its way to the remotest places in the south. I also learned that the “informal empire” made an appearance in the province through many other ways.1 For instance, the program of economic reform that the Egyptian government has applied for many years, following the neoliberal Washington Consensus and its blueprint designed by the IMF and the World Bank, has deeply hurt the sugarcane cultivators in Qina. The former legal codes of landholding, promulgated by the Arab socialist regime, are now being reversed by a new code of private property, Law 96 of 1992. Peasants are being evicted from land that the state had returned to the pre-1952 elite families of the colonial era. Moreover, the state- 1 The concept of “informal empire” is used by many world historians to refer to forms of imperial hegemony that does not include military occupation. See: Niall Ferguson, Colossus: the Price of America’s Empire (New York : The Penguin Press, 2004), p. 10. On US aid in general and USAID’s wheat aid in particular and Egyptian dependency see: Galal Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 1 owned sugar factory in Qus is awaiting its turn for privatization, which will entail the laying off of thousands of the province’s workers.2 As a matter of fact, the southern provinces of Egypt, including Qina, are known to be the most underdeveloped regions in the country’s modern history, as well as the most rebellious and disturbing to the central government. The UNDP’s annual reports on Arab human development show that Upper Egypt is located at the bottom of the ladder of human development, and several World Bank reports allude to the same fact.3 These reports come out while the neoliberal program of economic reform is being persistently applied in Egypt amidst profound opposition from those hurt by it. On the other hand, the gangs of bandits who take refuge in the mountains bordering the two sides of the Nile in Upper Egypt, matarid al-jabal, have come to symbolize ruthless crime as well as audacious resistance to the state. Many popular TV series and movies have presented a criminal, yet romantic, image of those bandits. They have even made their appearance recently on Facebook: an oppositional group of youth, resenting the authoritarian regime and its market reforms, named itself after an ever-resonating proclamation by a legendary southern bandit. The story of ‘Izzat ‘Ali Hanafi, whose execution filled the newspapers while I was conducting my archival research, was made into the most popular Egyptian movie of 2008, where he said: “From today, there is no government. I am the 2 Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents (London; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003) insists that the US spreads the neoliberal myth of development only through market reform in the third world. On the impact of market reform policies on Qina’s peasants, see the reports of the Land Center of Human Rights, 2000-2008, Cairo. 3 See: UNDP, Arab Human Development Report 2004 (New York: 2005); http://go.worldbank.org/C15AQ9EG50 2 government” (min el naharda mafish hukuma. ana el hukuma).This fierce political statement is the name of the Facebook opposition group.4 Stories of wheat, sugarcane, liberal economies, bandits’ rebellion, and, more importantly, informal and formal empires constitute the history of the last few centuries in Qina province. Empire is not a supreme entity controlling high-level policies in metropolises: it is a reality translated into the daily lives of the subalterns at the periphery of the periphery of empire, as this microhistory of Qina province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argues.5 This study looks at the lives of subaltern women and men in Qina and then moves beyond this hardly-known southern province to attempt to understand two centuries of imperialism and rebellion in world history. This period marked great transformations as the world moved from “traditional” to “modern” empire, or from “despotic” to allegedly “liberal” discourses and exercises of imperialism. In order to analyze modes of imperial hegemony and modes of subaltern revolt, this study examines four empires in Qina province: the Ottoman (1700s), Muhammad Ali’s (1811- 1848), the informal British (1848 to 1882), and finally the formal British (1882-1920). This study argues that as the world progressed toward modern imperialism and its alleged modernity, Qina province, a small place in Upper Egypt,6 endured irreversible peripheralization and marginalization, a fate that it might have shared with many other 4 http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8412576147. The movie’s title is al-Jazira, and among the popular TV series on Upper Egyptian bandits are Hada‘iq al-Shaytan and Dhi‘ab al-Jabal. 5 This study uses the term “microhistory” in a different way than its original meaning, proposed by Italian and other foreign historians such as Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg and Macro Ferrari, which focuses on the peoples and internal dynamics of European small villages and towns. Rather, this study looks at a small place while putting its internal transformations into the larger context of world economy and imperialism. 6 Using the term “small” place here is inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s provocative and astounding book in post-colonial literature on the Caribbean Island