(^404) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
In 1822, Jumel transplanted a bush he had found on the He Bourbon
(later renamed Réunion) and developed for Egypt the cotton we know
by his name.^11 This species has a very long fiber, thin and yet tough,
spinnable in combed form and suitable to the finest yarn and cloth.
In the new world of mechanized cotton manufacture, jumel cotton was
a winner from the start. Muhammad Ali had it grown on his own es
tates, which occupied an increasing share of Egypt's best soil, and his
officials quickly followed his example. By 1824, over 11 million kilo
grams were exported; by 1845, the figure was 15.5 million kilograms.^12
It was the earnings from jumel cotton, bought (expropriated) at arti
ficially low prices and marketed through state monopolies (roughly
half of total Egyptian exports in 1835), that paid for Ali's economic
and military ambitions and for much of the Suez Canal. The rest came
from other crops, also sold by official agencies. This was a quiet way to
generate revenue without levying uncollectable taxes. The system
drove European merchants wild.
Beginning in the 1820s, a good part of these earnings flowed into a
massive educational and industrial effort—into technical and military
schools, and a wide variety of mills and shops for the manufacture of
textiles, metals and metal products, chemicals, rope, arms, ships, and
the like—all the things necessary to replace imports and feed a grow
ing war machine. The viceroy even sought a deeper independence by
buying European machines and copying them in Egypt. In the face of
British export prohibitions, the Egyptians got permission in 1826 to
import five hundred power looms from Galloway's in Manchester. No
harm would follow, assured a scornful William Huskisson, president of
the Board of Trade; in six months "they would have been knocked to
pieces."^13
Some say that Muhammad Ali was trying to build a war machine;
others, that he was aiming at an industrial revolution in a land far be
hind the European follower countries. It was a quixotically bold vision,
one that was bound to vex European industrial and trading interests:
the first attempt by a backward, non-Western society to build a mod-
- At the time, the only finer cotton came from a few islands off the coast of Georgia
and the Carolinas, the so-called sea island cotton. Little enough of this was ever grown
(by 1835 the Egyptian crop was three times as large), and the crop has shrunk over
time almost to nothing, as hotels, summer homes, and tourism have taken over these
sandbars. Egyptian cotton today is to all intents and purposes the best in the world.
On the early history of Jumel, see Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes, p. 199.
I Issawi, "Economie Development," p. 362 f, says both, though he describes the
economic objective as perhaps unwitting and possibly deliberate.