Ghalwash analyzes 1848-63, a period of Egyptian history usually skipped over, coming as it did between the dramatic 1805-1848 rule of Muhammad Ali and the boom when the U.S. Civil War caused Egypt to suddenly become a major cotton exporter. Successive chapters treat land laws, taxes on peasants, tax collection system, land tenure, and inheritance by women.
Muhammad Ali had imposed on farmers a government monopoly that brought all the crops and then resold them at much higher prices, using the profits to finance his ambitious wars. But in 1840 the European powers [England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and later France] forced him to give up his dream of an empire and agree to follow the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Convention and the related 1840 Convention of London (Egypt was technically part of the Ottoman Empire even if its rulers were in more or less open rebellion against Istanbul). Until his 1848 death, he used various strategies to resist doing so, but his successors increasingly fell in line.
For years, the historiography of this period was about Egypt’s greater integration into the world economy, with increased trade with Europe leading to the commercialization of agriculture and a resulting stratification of rural villages between the peasant producers and landowners. Ghalwash builds on the more recent approach by historians to attribute the changes in rural society to state policy, not to modernization and market forces. She argues the rulers of this period wanted to preserve a traditional notion of justice in which the ruler had absolute authority but also the responsibility to protect the ruled from abuses. She argues that aggrieved peasants not infrequently complained within legal channels about government decisions, contrary to the older view that peasants vacillated between docile quiescence and open rebellion.
She also argues that, contrary to the long-standing view that this was a period in which much land taken from peasants was given to politically well-connected large landholders, in fact the peasants often voluntarily gave up near barren land to concentrate on much more fertile parts of their holdings, with the large landholdings generally being poor quality land requiring much work to be suitable for crops.
Perhaps so, but in that case, the period she examines was the exception that proved the rule. The overall picture of nineteenth-century Egypt was one of dramatic growth in cash crop agriculture and massive concentration of landholdings in large estates, admittedly with the two most active periods of those processes being in Muhammad Ali’s time and the Civil War boom, that is, before and after the periods Ghalwash examines.
Furthermore, however much peasants were active in complaining and demanding changes as Ghalwash argues, the fact remains that power in a rapidly expanding economy was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the elite. Similarly, while the local records she examined in detail show that women often had a more active economic role than shown in the land-tax registers—with women landholders often registering their holdings in the name of male relatives—women faced many barriers and often had a precarious economic position.
It is refreshing and reassuring to find a historian who bases her work on detailed archival research and who is unafraid to go against the political tides which see the rich and powerful—and modern capitalism—as an all-powerful evil force. In many ways, Ghalwash’s theses are what would expect from a conservative defender of traditional methods of rule and power, that is, she argues that concepts of justice guided state policy and that peasants had considerable input into decision-making. That is not at all her approach: she is a careful scholar without a political axe to grind. Indeed, in many ways, her approach is like the grand tradition of historians breaking the mold so as to provide a revisionist interpretation that significantly differs from long-standing views.
