The Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Rise of Egyptian Nationalism : Introduction To The Region

When the gates of Vienna closed on Ottoman armies in 1683. Turkey began worrying about the fate of its increasingly decrepit empire. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt, however, shocked even the grumpiest pessimist. While Europe had grown more and more powerful economically and militarily, the Ottoman Empire had languished. The animated ports of Aleppo, Palestine, and Egypt had once provided the sole access to the East; now, they were relegated to insignificance as Portuguese sailors ftnagled their way around the Horn of Africa. Egypt’s economy-for two centuries buttressed by the Arabian and Yemeni coffee trade-collapsed when European investors cultivated their own, cheaper coffee in the Java islands and, turning the tables, sold it to Cairene merchants. At the same time, the European discovery of alternative silk sources hurt Palestine’s economy and Spanish silver from the New World was inundating the world, paralyzing agrarian economies. The once-formidable Ottoman Empire became “the sick man of Europe.”

The French occupation of Egypt, although a failure, marked the first intrusion of modern European colonialism into the Middle East. Upon the withdrawal of the French army in 1801, resurgent Mamluks sought to regain former prerogatives. A Circassian slave named Muhammad ibn Ali fortified the power structure, crushing his rivals in a bloody, invitation-only dinner party’ at the Citadel in Cairo. Muhammad Ali built upon the administrative apparatus left by the French, modernized the civil service, created a regular tax system, and attempted to introduce land reform aimed at the vast feudal estates of his enemies. To stock his army, in lieu of buying more potentially rebellions slaves, Muhammad Ali conscripted peasants. Those who managed to avoid the army labored under watch to build a new, massive irrigation network indispensable to the modernization of Egyptian agriculture.