Egypt • 173Mehmet Ali and His Reforms
The man who eventually filled that vacuum was a soldier of fortune named
Mehmet Ali. He had come to Egypt as second in command of the Albanian
regiment in the Ottoman expeditionary force that tried, unsuccessfully in
1799 but victoriously two years later, to dislodge the French. Mehmet Ali
used to underscore his personal ambitions by remarking, "I was born in the
same year as Napoleon in the land of Alexander." He patterned his career
after both men: By 1805 he had emerged from the pack of contenders for
power and secured recognition from a group of ulama and local notables.
Later that year he incited a revolt against the Ottoman governor and se¬
cured the sultan's consent to take his place. Like many of the Ottoman
reformers, Mehmet Ali realized that losses on the battlefield showed the
glaring weakness of the existing army and the government behind it. Un¬
like the others, though, he saw that adopting European uniforms, arms,
and tactics, or even importing foreign instructors and technicians, could
not solve their military problems. Wholehearted and far-reaching reforms
were a must. If those Western ways displeased Muslims, Mehmet Ali be¬
came ruthless and dictatorial.
The Nile Valley made Egypt a proverbially easy land to govern, once all
rival power centers were wiped out. The Mamluks posed the major obsta¬
cle; in 1811 Mehmet Ali had them all massacred. Because the ulama en¬
joyed great power and prestige, he exploited their internecine rivalries, then
weakened them by seizing most of the land they had managed as waqfs. He
also put most privately owned land under state control, thereby wiping out
the tax-farmers and the rural aristocracy. His government thus gained a
monopoly over Egypt's most valuable resource, its agricultural land. The
state now decided which crops the peasants might grow; supplied them
with seeds, tools, and fertilizer; purchased all their crops; and sold them at a
profit. To make it easier to move goods from one part of the country to an¬
other, Mehmet Ali drafted farmers to build roads and dig barge canals. New
irrigation works enabled them to raise three crops a year in fields that used
to produce just one. Egypt became the first Middle Eastern country to
make the shift from subsistence agriculture (in which farmers raised essen¬
tially the crops they consumed, plus what they had to pay in rent and taxes)
to cash crop farming (in which they raised crops to sell on the market). To¬
bacco, sugar, indigo, and cotton became major Egyptian crops. Using the
revenues they produced, Mehmet Ali financed his schemes for industrial
and military development.
Mehmet Ali was the first non-Western ruler to grasp the significance
of the Industrial Revolution. He realized that a modernized army would
need textile factories to make its tents and uniforms, dockyards to build