WEST COMES EAST 243Mohammed Ali invited the leading tax-farming mamluks to dinner and
had them massacred. Then he launched a crash program to build modern
roads, modern schools, and the like. This was all a foretaste of a pattern
that was to be repeated many times in the next century.
All this sudden development bankrupted Egypt, and Mohammed Ali
had to borrow money to keep his government afloat. He borrowed it
from European bankers, of course, who insisted that European financial
advisers be allowed to monitor the various agencies of Mohammed Ali's
government, just to oversee the work and make sure the money was not
being misused.
Meanwhile, the Ottomans were getting nervous about Mohammed Ali,
who was asserting some claims to Syria. They were already too weak to
curb him on their own, so they asked the British for help. The British said
they would lend a hand if the Ottomans would only sign a treaty allowing
Europeans certain privileges on Turkish soil. They organized a consortium
of European nations to come in on the treaty, a coalition of the willing, so
to speak, and when the dust settled, Mohammed Ali was safely confined to
Egypt, but Europeans were powerful players throughout the Levant. Now,
only "the Eastern question" remained to resolve, the question being: which
European nation would be responsible for "protecting" which part of the
eastern Mediterranean?
Egypt was the richest prize, so both France and Britain cozied up to
rulers here. Mohammed Ali legally established his family as dynastic rulers
of Egypt, power passing to his sons, grandsons, and so on down, and in
the next few decades, these governor-kings of Egypt, these khedives as they
were called, gave Britain a concession to build a railroad in Egypt; then
mollified France with a rich contract to build the Suez canal; then pla-
cated the indignant British by giving them the right to build and own the
Egyptian national bank, squeezing kickbacks out of each transaction for
themselves-you see where this is going.
Meanwhile, Mohammed Ali's descendants decided Egypt's future lay
in cotton. Textile manufacturing was the first enterprise to be industrial-
ized in Europe, so the market for cotton became voracious, and the Nile
Valley grew excellent cotton. Around 1860, the price of cotton on the
world market suddenly soared. The khedive of that moment, a spend-
thrift playboy of the Eastern world named Ismail, got starry-eyed with