(^406) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
drive wheels. So he began with animal power—1,000 oxen to drive
250,000 cotton spindles. The English had done that at the start of
their Industrial Revolution, but it is a cosdy and inefficient technique,
especially in hot climates. It is one thing to use beasts for the inter
mittent tasks of agriculture and transport; quite another to make them
drive insatiable machines.
And where would Muhammad Ali find managers? He hired numer
ous Europeans at good salaries, but what he wanted from them was
know-how rather than direction. For this latter, he chose Muslims,
Turkish and Egyptian, for reasons that may have had to do with work
ers' sensibilities and the building of a vested interest in the new indus
try. These nazirs received honors, medals, and generous salaries, but
corruption was rife. "Being entrusted with the regulation of the ex
penses, and the paying of the workmen, they accept bribes to favour an
indifferent artisan at the expense of the government, and commit in
numerable other frauds difficult of detection."^16 All this entailed the
appointment of inspectors to examine accounts and niggling regula
tions to prevent waste and theft. In this way, time, quality, and main
tenance were sacrificed to form and order.
And where would Muhammad Ali find the workers? In the best
Egyptian tradition, he started by using slaves (in England, remember,
they began with women and children, the people who could not say
no). But these slaves died in large numbers, which says something
about working conditions. He then had recourse to forced labor torn
from family and household, scantily fed and housed, much abused by
tyrannical superiors. (The one generosity was in blows of the kurbash.)
Some recruits mutilated themselves to avoid conscription. Most, how
ever, found that repugnant as well as painful and life-threatening; so
they mutilated the machines instead. Arson was an abiding threat,**
and maintenance was systematically neglected, the more so as bureau -
- "At first no persons were employed in the factories but black slaves from Darfour
and Kordofan, who displayed great intelligence, and quickly acquired a competent
knowledge of the business; but so great a change of life, co-operating with the pecu
liar unhealthiness of the occupation, gradually thinned their ranks, so that the Pasha
was shortly compelled to have recourse to the Fellahs"—Saint-John, Egypt of Mo-
hummed Ali, pp. 410-11.
f Others fled the country, in spite of efforts to close the frontiers. Issawi, "Economic
Development," p. 362, attributes the flight to hard times and military conscription.
But labor conscription may well have been worse.
** "Of the twenty-three or twenty-four cotton-mills existing in Egypt, there is not one
which has not, at various periods, been accidentally or designedly set on fire"—Saint-
John, Egypt, p. 413.