page_title: Muhammad Ali of Egypt
section_title: Reinventing Egypt
hierarchical_section_title: Muhammad Ali of Egypt / Reinventing Egypt
context_page_description: Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas'ud ibn Agha, known as Muhammad Ali of Egypt and the Sudan, was the Albanian Ottoman governor and the de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848. At the height of his rule, he controlled Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, Sudan and parts of Arabia and the entire Levant. Though not a modern nationalist, he is regarded as the founder of modern Egypt.
  Muhammad Ali was born in Kavala, Ottoman Macedonia, to a family of Albanian origins. He was a military commander in an Albanian Ottoman force sent to recover Egypt from a French occupation under Napoleon. Following Napoleon's withdrawal, Muhammad Ali rose to power through a series of political maneuvers, and in 1805 he was named Wāli of Egypt and gained the rank of Pasha.
  As Wāli, Muhammad Ali attempted to modernize Egypt by instituting dramatic reforms in the military, economic and cultural spheres. He also initiated a violent purge of the Mamluks, consolidating his rule and permanently ending the Mamluk hold over Egypt.
  Militarily, Muhammad Ali recaptured the Arabian territories for the sultan, and conquered Sudan on his own accord.
context_section_description: Sultan Selim III (reigned 1789–1807) had recognized the need to reform and modernize the Ottoman Empire, specifically the military, along European lines to ensure that his state could compete. Selim III, however, faced stiff local opposition from an entrenched clergy and military apparatus, especially from the Janissaries, the Ottoman infantry formed from the devshirme system. Consequently, Selim III was deposed and ultimately killed in 1808. Muhammad Ali, too, recognized the need to modernize, but unlike Selim, he had dispatched his chief rivals, giving him a free hand to attempt reforms similar to those first begun by Selim III.
  Muhammad Ali's goal was for Egypt to leave the Ottoman Empire and be ruled by his own hereditary dynasty. To do that, he had to reorganize Egyptian society, streamline the economy, train a professional bureaucracy, and build a modern military.
  His first task was to secure a revenue stream for Egypt. To accomplish this, Muhammad Ali 'nationalized' all the iltizam lands of Egypt, thereby officially owning all the production of the land. He accomplished the state annexation of property by raising taxes on the 'tax-farmers' who had previously owned the land throughout Egypt. The new taxes were intentionally high and when the tax-farmers could not extract the demanded payments from the peasants who worked the land, Muhammad Ali confiscated their properties. The other major source of revenue Muhammad Ali created was a new tax on waqf endowments, which were previously tax-free. Through these endowments, personal income could be set aside for schools or other charitable purposes. As well as raising revenue to fund his new military, this tax took revenue away from the local elite, Mamluks and the ulama, weakening opposition to Muhammad Ali's reforms.
  In practice, Muhammad Ali's land reform amounted to a monopoly on trade in Egypt. He required all producers to sell their goods to the state. The state in turn resold Egyptian goods, within Egypt and to foreign markets, and retained the surplus. The practice proved very profitable for Egypt with the cultivation of long staple cotton, a new cash crop. To help improve production, he expanded the land used for agriculture and overhauled the irrigation system, largely completed by the corvée, or forced peasant labor. The new-found profits also extended down to the individual farmers, as the average wage increased fourfold.
  In addition to bolstering the agricultural sector, Muhammad Ali built an industrial base for Egypt. His motivation for doing so was primarily an effort to build a modern military. Consequently, he focused on weapons production. Factories based in Cairo produced muskets and cannons. With a shipyard he built in Alexandria, he began construction of a navy. By the end of the 1830s, Egypt's war industries had constructed nine 100-gun warships and were turning out 1,600 muskets a month.
  However, the industrial innovations were not limited to weapons production. Muhammad Ali established a textile industry in an effort to compete with European industries and produce greater revenues for Egypt. While the textile industry was not successful, the entire endeavour employed tens of thousands of Egyptians. Muhammad Ali used contracts called concessions to build cheap infrastructure - dams and railroads - whereby foreign European companies would raise capital, build projects, and collect most of the operating revenue but would provide Ali's government with a portion of that revenue. Ali also granted Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin permission to build technical schools modeled after the Ecole Polytechnique. Additionally, by hiring European managers, he was able to introduce industrial training to the Egyptian population. To staff his new industries, Muhammad Ali employed a corvée labor system. The peasantry objected to these conscriptions and many ran away from their villages to avoid being taken, sometimes fleeing as far away as Syria. A number of them maimed themselves so as to be unsuitable for combat: common ways of self-maiming were blinding an eye with rat
caption: Muhammad Ali by Jean-François Portaels, 1847
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