HISTORY GONE WRONG? 405
ern industrial economy—by command from above.^14
The extent of Muhammad Ali's success and the reasons for his ulti
mate failure have been sharply debated. On the one hand, Egypt's cot
ton manufacture apparentiy grew smartly. An estimate of 400,000
machine spindles in 1834 would put it ninth in the world, ahead of Bel
gium, and fifth or sixth in spindlage per head of population.^15 At the
end of the 1830s, Egypt was producing 1.2 million pieces of calico a
year. On the other hand, visitors were struck by the crudeness of the
machinery, the want of maintenance, the poor quality of the finished
product. Jumel cotton was made for high counts, but Egyptian yarn
was notoriously coarse and yet fragile. Some foreign observers, though,
gave a favorable opinion, and we even have reports of shipment of
these products to India, ancestral home of cotton manufacture.*
Whom to believe? The optimistic view leans toward a conspiratorial
theory of Egyptian failure. Muhammad Ali's project threatened Euro
pean industrial supremacy. Egypt should stick to cotton-picking and let
the big boys make yarn and cloth (comparative advantage again). So
the Europeans, Britain in the lead, took the first opportunity (1838)
to deprive Egypt of those tariff barriers and market constraints neces
sary to its infant industries. Capitalism, the argument runs, coolly and
cannily stifled a potentially dangerous competitor.
The pessimists retort that Egypt was never a serious competitor. The
whole project was a loser and survived only so long as the state poured
money into it. Nothing could be done without foreign technicians and
machinists, and even then. Also, the prices of materials and products
were set, not by the market, but by the authorities. The meager evi
dence of sales abroad proves nothing.
The primary problem, say the skeptics (realists), lay in Egypt's social
and cultural incapability. Native entrepreneurs were rare. Most of them
were drawn from the Coptic, Jewish, and Greek minorities—outsiders
who had good reason to be discreet. Local manufacturing was done in
shops and cottages, by owners lacking knowledge, money, and desire
to shift to machine technologies. Foreign investors had better and
quicker ways to make money, by lending, for example. The viceroy
alone could imagine factories in Egypt, and he established them by fiat.
But where would he find the motor energy? Egypt had neither wood
nor coal fuel, and water had to be raised before it could be used to
- But Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes, p. 189 and n. 31, based on reports to
the British Foreign Office, says that Egyptian cottons could sell only in Egypt, and in
Syria after the Egyptian conquest.