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Egypt Rural Society
Muhammad Ali had attempted to take Egypt directly from a
subsistence agricultural economy to a complex industrial one. He
failed because of internal weaknesses and European pressures.
Ironically, Muhammad Ali, whose goal was to make Egypt
economically and politically independent of Europe, set the
country on the path to economic dependence and foreign
domination.
In the industrial sector, Muhammad Ali's factories did not
last past his death. In the agricultural sector, Egypt's longstaple cotton became increasingly attractive to British textile
manufacturers. Between 1840 and 1860, the export of cotton
increased 300 percent. During the American Civil War, the area
devoted to cotton cultivation in Egypt increased almost fourfold
and cotton prices rose along with cotton production.
The transformation of the rural economy from subsistence to
cash-crop agriculture caused dramatic changes, including the
privatization of land in fewer hands and the dispossession of
peasants. The privatization of land began during the reign of
Muhammad Ali, who in the 1840s distributed half the agricultural
land to royal family members, Turco-Circassian officials, and
Egyptian notables or village headmen. Although many land grants
were rescinded during the reign of Abbas, consolidation of
landholdings proceeded during the reigns of Said and Ismail at
the expense of small and middle-sized peasant proprietors. By the
1870s, the royal family owned one-fifth of all the cultivated
land in the country. The largest royal estates could be as large
as 10,000 feddans (a
feddan is slightly more than
an acre--see Glossary). By the 1890s, 42.5 percent of all
registered land was held in tracts of more than fifty
feddans. The largest landowners included members of the
royal family, and the Turco-Circassian elite of officers and
officials. Their estates were worked by sharecroppers or
agricultural laborers. By the time of Ismail, these landowners
had developed into a landed aristocracy. Another group of
landholding elite originated with Muhammad Ali's appointment of
Egyptians as village headmen (umada; sing., umdah),
the state's agents in the countryside. This was Muhammad Ali's
attempt to reduce the power of the Turco-Circassians. With the
privatization of land, the Egyptian notables became substantial
landowners with considerable political influence.
Historian Judith Tucker has described the nineteenth century
as a time when the peasants were transformed from independent
producers with rights to use the land to landless peasants forced
to work as wage-laborers or to migrate to the cities where they
became part of the urban dispossessed. The development of
capitalist agriculture and a monetized rural economy spelled
disaster for many peasants. Despite land laws like those of Said
in 1855 and 1858, which gave peasants legal ownership of their
plots, peasant land loss occurred at an unprecedented rate,
chiefly because of indebtedness. Forced to borrow at high rates
of interest to get the seed and animals necessary for sowing and
to pay monthly installments on their taxes, the peasants had to
repay these loans at harvest time when the prices were lowest.
The American Civil War put a premium on Egyptian cotton, and
the price increased. When the war ended, the inflated prices
suddenly dropped. For the first time in Egypt, a serious problem
of peasant indebtedness appeared with its inevitable
consequences: mortgages, foreclosures, and usurious loans. The
village headmen and the owners of great estates profited from the
crisis by purchasing abandoned land. The headmen also profited as
moneylenders.
Peasants also lost land because taxes on peasant land were
higher than on estate land. Large landholders sometimes paid as
little as one-fourth of the taxes paid by the peasantry. In
addition, peasants fled the countryside to escape corvée (forced
labor) on the state's public works projects and military
conscription.
At the turn of the century, the population of Egypt was about
10 million. Of this total, between 10 and 20 percent were
landless peasants. In 1906 less than 20 percent of the privately
held and waqf (religiously endowed) land was held by 80
percent of the population while 1 percent owned more than 40
percent. Most landowners owned between one and five
feddans, with three feddans being necessary for
subsistence.
Data as of December 1990
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