Introduction: A ‘Noble Inclination’

Nowadays, the Arabic word isti'mar serves as the standard calque for ‘colonialism’. Since at least the era of decolonisation and the high tide of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, the term has become an unambiguous catch-all for the evils visited on Arab lands by the illegitimate rule of foreign powers. But a century ago, it retained another meaning. Given the word's overwhelmingly negative connotations in the present, instances of this older usage can be jarring. Take, for example, the short biography of Mahmud Sabri Basha, with which ‘Abd al-Latif Shukri al-Iskandari opens his Dalil al-Minufiyya [Guidebook of Minufiyya], published in 1900. After detailing Sabri's meteoric rise from mathematics instructor at the Khedivial Engineering School to mudir [provincial governor], first of Fayyum Province in 1889 and then of Minufiyya in 1894, the biographer praises his subject for maylihi al-sharif lil-isti'mar (‘his noble inclination towards isti'mar’). Though some contemporary critics did attribute Sabri's professional success to an opportunistic complicity with the British occupation, Shukri was not, here, praising the mudir for being a British flunky. Rather, by isti'mar, he meant something more akin to infrastructural development – a process of building and thus providing provincial territory with roads, bridges, canals and schools. Throughout, Shukri is at pains to downplay the eventful rupture of 1882, avoid questions of politics and let long lists of public works appear as self-evident testament to noble character. Yet his striking turn of phrase raises a crucial question: why, in these decades, did al-ihtilal [the occupation] assume the specific form of al-isti'mar?

The standard answer to this question, reproduced in many works on the British occupation of Egypt, reduces the zealous embrace of ‘public works’ to a basic fiscal logic of revenue extraction. As the argument goes, Lord Cromer's top priority was to regularise payments of Egypt's public debt to European banks, so he slashed other government services – most notably, education – and allocated funds to projects that would at once boost tax revenue from agricultural lands and reinforce Egypt's economic dependency as a producer of raw cotton for English mills.