Introduction
In 1870, Egypt was already half a century into transformation from a vital component of the Ottoman Empire’s resource management economy into a quasi-independent commodity frontier.Footnote 1 This was a period marked by Egypt’s integration into global capitalism and British-centered financial capital,Footnote 2 alongside the sudden shift to steam power in irrigation.Footnote 3 That same year, Khedive Ismail (1863–1879) secured a loan of seven million pounds sterling from European bondholders—13 percent of his combined loans in the 1860s–1870s—to finance the mass production of refined sugar. The loan came in the wake of the collapse in cotton prices, which had inflated during the early 1860s, fueling Ismail’s policy of recurrent borrowing from Europe, only to fall sharply after the end of the American Civil War. The British press dubbed it “the sugar loan.”Footnote 4 As one palace historian later observed, Ismail sought in sugar a remedy for the economic crisis brought on by the cotton bust: “For when he saw the demise of the kingdom of cotton, he built right beside it the kingdom of sugar.”Footnote 5 The twenty sugar factories Ismail imported to Middle and Upper Egypt absorbed an estimated six million pounds sterling. By comparison, railway construction accounted for thirteen million pounds, while the extension of irrigation canals required an additional twelve million.Footnote 6
The Khedive’s agrarian economy—encompassing both state and personal estates—rested heavily on corvée labor (sukhra), a coercive labor tax. Prior to the nineteenth century, a more limited but still compulsory system, known as “‘auna,” had been employed to mobilize rural labor for the maintenance of agrarian public works across Egypt.Footnote 7 Following the trend, beginning in the 1820s, of expanding the use of unpaid rural labor for state projects—a development that radically intensified the corvée as a labor tax—Ismail further extended the exploitation of unfree labor on the sugar plantations and in the factories, as the literature broadly acknowledges.Footnote 8 There remains, however, a marked underestimation within labor history scholarship of the sheer scale and technological sophistication of these sugar works. Egypt’s sugar exports to Europe increased from an annual average of 21,338 cantars between 1853 and 1862 (one cantar is roughly 100 lbs) to 54,982 cantars in 1866, and then surged to 456,851 cantars by 1872. In that year, total sugar production exceeded 1.5 million cantars.Footnote 9 In 1873–1875, exports rose above 900,000 cantars per year.Footnote 10 In 1871–1875, Britain received an annual average of 28 percent of Egypt’s sugar exports.Footnote 11 This expansion was driven by approximately 15 modern factories with a combined nominal capacity of two million cantars, to which six additional factories were to be added by 1874–1875, with a further nominal capacity of one million cantars.Footnote 12 Had these capacities been fully realized—though they never were, as production in 1872 reached only 55 percent–65 percent of the nominal figure—Egypt might have accounted for roughly 7.5 percent of the global output of sugar refined from sugarcane by 1874.Footnote 13 The factories constructed in the early 1870s were “believed by competent persons [to be] perfect specimens of machinery,” and, “larger than they need be.”Footnote 14 Evidence from contemporary primary sources indicates that they were among the most technologically advanced sugar factories across the world at the time, powered by state-of-the-art steam engines.Footnote 15
This constituted a model of industrial mass commodity production sustained—overwhelmingly—by unfree labor. Yet this hybrid situation proved short-lived. Following Egypt’s default on its foreign loans portfolio in 1876, and its subsequent occupation in 1882, a number of imported factories were never installed; instead, they were sold as scrap metal or left in their crates to rust in the open. The sugar industry revived in the 1890s on a smaller scale, which was still enormous, with sugarcane cultivation carried out on rented Khedival land administered under the French–English debt commission. It was only in the years 1892–1895 that wage labor began to be employed in the sugar factories.Footnote 16
While the history of the sugar workers from the 1910s onward has been incorporated into Egypt’s labor historiography, the literature has comparatively little to say about this earlier phase of the 1870s—or indeed about industrial labor in rural regions prior to the 1880s (Jennifer Derr’s work on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ history of the sugar industry, including its labor, is a recent much-welcomed exception).Footnote 17 One might expect that closer attention to the labor history of these factories and plantations would yield insights into a critical transitional phase when hybrid forms on a spectrum between unfree and free labor were deployed, and into the ways in which free labor emerged as the dominant system of labor outside the urban contexts typically associated with factory production.
This is the gap this article seeks to address, focusing on how wage labor appears to have evolved from coerced, unfree, and unpaid labor in rural Middle and Upper Egypt, and on the forms of the workers’ resistance to this coercion that can be discerned from the case. I next consider the analytical value of recent developments in labor history for understanding this history, precisely because their absence at the time when most of Egypt’s modern labor history was produced (roughly from the 1970s to the 2000s) may help explain why this case was not taken up by labor historians of Egypt.
The deadlock and the way out
How has Egypt’s modern labor history been approached thus far, and why has it excluded the sugar factories of the 1870s, which would appear to fall within the history of modern industrial work? The historiographies on labor in Egypt do not look in their analyses before the 1880s for connections between the emergence of the rural-industrial wage labor after Mehmed Ali’s industrialization (which ended in the 1840s) and the later formation of the working class.
There are two reasons, one related to labor, the other to the peculiarities of the history of sugar. First, research concentrated on wage labor as the category through which a working class and unions emerged, without questioning how wage labor itself evolved, particularly in rural contexts.Footnote 18 Meanwhile, historiographies of nineteenth-century Egypt did not adopt labor history lenses. Although many of these works examined forms of labor exploitation through pre-capitalist coercion among the peasantry, or the organization of—predominantly—urban labor through the early modern institution of artisanal guilds—where wage labor was to be expected—they nonetheless left unexamined the dynamics of rural industrial labor.Footnote 19 More recently, historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have approached labor questions primarily through the perspectives of race, colonialism, gender, and materiality, thereby pushing to the margins explicit labor questions like the transformations of the modes of labor exploitation.Footnote 20
Second, there was little attempt to connect sugar as a commodity—along with its specific materialities and steam-powered production technologies in 1870s Egypt—to labor questions. Sidney Mintz treats the New World’s sugar-refining clusters as agro-industrial complexes that predate industrial capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. His analysis rests on the “time-consciousness” intrinsic to sugar production, since sugarcane begins to lose productivity immediately after being cut. From this coupling of materiality and temporality, Mintz traces the emergence of factory discipline and new forms of labor organization in both mills and plantations. He thereby demonstrates how early modern sugar refining offers a promising vantage point for excavating labor histories wherever sugar was produced.Footnote 21 In the 1980s, Ellis Goldberg incorporated sugar’s materiality into his pioneering work on the sugar laborers of early twentieth-century Egypt, linking it to workers’ bargaining power. Yet his analysis remained limited, due to his focus on wage labor politics.Footnote 22 More recently, Jennifer Derr traces the long career of Egypt’s sugar industry from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. With a focus on the materialities, geographies and ecologies of Egypt, Derr provides an unprecedented examination of labor in the sugar industry as it evolved with colonialism, situating it in the context of “the relationships among authority, capital, and the materiality of the perennial Nile River.”Footnote 23 This approach accounts for the materialities of cane cultivation and the production of sugar. While historicizing the transformations of unfree and unwaged into formally free waged labor remained outside Derr’s agenda, her analysis of hiring processes for the factories in the late nineteenth century is an important contribution this article draws on.Footnote 24 It should be noted, however, that despite the neglect of the khedival sugar factories of the 1870s as sites of labor history, the labor history literature of Egypt published before the 2010s raised important questions on technology and rural wage-earners in urban industrial sites, yet interest in historicizing labor waned before these questions were answered.Footnote 25
Finally, the literature on the end of corvée labor does not examine the continuities and ruptures between free and unfree labor in industrial-scale commodity production, but it provides a broad context for engaging the particular questions on labor in the sugar industry. Nathan Brown’s study of the formal abolition of corvée in 1892 problematizes the abolition of corvée labor, showing that the transition was non-linear and extended from the 1880s to post-WWI, but frames it as a state-wide institutional phenomenon that expanded and contracted in response to the demand for agrarian labor by the landowning class and the needs of the British occupation.Footnote 26 Aaron Jakes, who has revisited the question of abolition, situates it within the broader context of colonial economic governmentality.Footnote 27 Jakes demonstrates that the abolition of corvée was never pursued categorically. Rather than advancing free labor as such, the British administration sought to universalize compensation for labor, be it free or unfree. Improvements by the British rule in land and labor rights—he argues—were, in part, concessions meant to teach the peasantry the merits of British rule.Footnote 28
*
This is likely how the sugar mills of the 1870s, as a site for labor history, fell through the cracks: they belonged neither to the temporal range in which earlier labor historians expected to locate working-class histories, nor did they provoke explicit questions related to transitions in labor regimes, for the next generation of historians.
The Global Labor History (GLH) program and the critique it has provoked offer a framework for broadening the range of questions posed to Egypt’s labor history, breaking with the traditional focus on wage labor by integrating the longer histories of coerced labor in the nineteenth century. Rather than seeking to identify the moment when labor and working class politics started in a modern sense—as in the work of the earlier generation of labor historians—GLH advances an agenda for historicizing continuities between different modes of labor exploitation, in relation to a country’s incorporation into global capitalism. In this respect, Marcel van der Linden’s formulation of GLH as a renewed program for studying global labor history, together with the debates and criticism it has generated, informs this article analytically.Footnote 29
With the rise of postmodernism and the waning academic interest in labor and working-class history in the late 1990s, GLH emerged to challenge the cultural turn. It proposed studying the history of all forms of work that contributed to capitalism, rather than adhering to the narrower, Eurocentric focus on wage labor that had guided earlier research.Footnote 30 For revisiting Egypt’s modern labor history, there is a substantial tradition that explores the imbrication of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of labor.Footnote 31 Here, however, I focus on an insight from the GLH debate that is most relevant to our case: continuities and transitions in labor forms. GLH emphasized the situatedness of wage labor within other forms of work and the continuities between different ideal types of labor—most of which, across the global landscape, are unfree, while the freedom in free wage labor is questionable.Footnote 32 In practice, pure forms of different categories of coerced labor are difficult to locate. For instance, the position of a certain wage laborer might in fact be one of coerced wage labor, enforced through debts or through physical force by the state or powerful employers.Footnote 33 This is an assumption that connects to geographies of labor, too. GLH challenges nationalist methodologies to labor histories, which it sees as the hallmark of traditional labor histories, by asking “how could the history of wage earners in [certain] countries be written without an eye for the history of other labor relations, like slavery (and the slave trade) or the exploitation of coolies?”Footnote 34 GLH’s focus on hybrid and transitional situations has been criticized on the grounds that combinations between unfree, indentured, and other forms of unorthodox wage labor were “rather transitory.”Footnote 35 Yet this is in fact a fascinating promise of GLH (but not unique to it)Footnote 36: it lies in the quest to understand the transitions in labor history—and, by extension, in global capitalism—through which unfree and/or unpaid labor metamorphosed into wage labor. However, while striving to fill this gap left in “classical labor history”—critics of GLH warn—one should seek a continuation between GLH and the tradition it critiques.Footnote 37
Thus, the following analysis proceeds from two assumptions: First, labor history should be attentive to the tensions and continuities between coerced and free wage labor; in the case of the sugar industry, it should also be attentive to continuities with the work of Egypt’s labor historians. Second, the analysis adopts a framework proposed by Christian G. De Vito et al, building on Marcel van der Linden, for analyzing contexts of coercion across three moments: a) recruitment into labor relations; b) the period of work and the worksite; and c) exit from the labor relation—aiming thereby “to observe the multiple implications of coercion across these [three] moments.”Footnote 38
As the analysis below will demonstrate, this categorization helps to illuminate continuities across regimes of labor exploitation, culminating in moments when waged labor may have emerged as the outcome.
Recruitment
Who worked on the sugar mills, and how were they recruited? At the center stood Ismail Pasha, who ruled over a quasi-independent state within the Ottoman Empire. In the prospectus for the sugar loan of 1870, Ismail declared ownership of 200,000 acres of prime agricultural land across three governorates in Middle and Upper Egypt (excluding Esna, where several mills were located).Footnote 39 These holdings formed part of the Daira Saniya, the vast viceroyal plantations—“the personal estate of the Khedive”—which by 1870 amounted to 435,000 acres across Egypt.Footnote 40 After Ismail’s reign, the Daira plantations south of Cairo—with their lands, mills, railways, and administrative apparatus—were described as a financial organization that produced sugar for his personal profit.Footnote 41 All the modern sugar factories were situated on these lands. Before bankruptcy in 1876 and the ensuing financial and administrative reforms, the large bureaucratic and technocratic apparatus that administered the Daira was regarded as a rival to state bureaucracy, though scarcely distinguishable from it.Footnote 42 One junior official in the Daira administration remarked that the estates’ senior inspectors “got the absolutely upper hand over government officials. Their power was limitless.”Footnote 43 The sugar factory in each inspectorate across the Daira was “its beating heart,” he added.Footnote 44
In 1873, two–three years after securing the sugar loan that financed most of the new factories, the Khedive appointed a supreme commission of three British experts to “examine the sugar manufactories and their various works and processes” with a view of achieving the most perfect operations possible.Footnote 45 They were likely selected by John Fowler, the engineer who designed London’s subway and was Ismail’s consulting engineer for several years.Footnote 46
District governors often served as factory superintendents, who supported English and French Chief Engineers in overseeing operations.Footnote 47 European engineers had been active in Egypt since the 1820s, supervising Mehmed Ali’s foundries and factories; this pattern of recruitment continued in the 1850s and expanded under Ismail Pasha.Footnote 48 With the establishment of the sugar factories in the 1870s, the British press emphasized a new connection: “sugar factories sprung up all over [Egypt], in which many of [Her] Majesty’s subjects were employed.”Footnote 49 Skilled mechanics, machine operators, blacksmiths and other artisans arrived not only from Britain and France, but also from other European countries.Footnote 50 Their wages ranged from double to triple those earned back home.Footnote 51 Some of the British and French Chief Engineers had originally been dispatched by the manufacturers to install the factories, but remained to manage them.Footnote 52 European staff were able to negotiate their contracts: compensation was reportedly adjusted for service in hotter districts; sick leave was paid; and in cases of incapacitation, employers covered repatriation expenses and settled outstanding payments through the relevant European consulate.Footnote 53
The unskilled laborers—drawn from the villages—were brought to the factories and plantations by coercion. Unskilled labor required for public works and for viceroyal agrarian interests—between which no distinction was observed—were requisitioned through sukhra (literally a requisitioned/dedicated something or someone, but in the labor context: subservience, and servitude) or corvée.Footnote 54 Officially, government engineers assessed seasonal labor needs, and reported them up the chain of command to Cairo. Upon approval, orders were issued to the sheikh al-balads (village headmen) specifying the number of corvée workers required from each village. The same process applied to the sugar factories, with the Daira Saniya administrative body in Minya replacing Cairo. It was then left to the sheikhs to provide the workers by whatever means available.Footnote 55 Sheikhs, landowners, and landless peasants who spoke to an Irish labor reformer, Villiers Stuart—whom the British government dispatched to investigate conditions in Egypt after occupation—revealed a sophisticated body of arrangements governing the corvée across the Delta and the Nile valley, arrangements not limited to the recruitment of laborers for the sugar factories. Landowners with holdings of up to 100 acres were legally required to provide corvée labor by sending one or more members of the household. The corvée burden, however, fell unevenly on poorer villages, as powerful landowners frequently deflected corvée orders away from the peasants who worked their estates. In poorer villages with modest landholdings, peasants shared the corvée obligation within and between households: adult men rotated service so that others could return and maintain their lands. Landowners who could afford it collectively paid the sheikhs to procure replacements (at P.T. [Piastre Tarif] 4–5 per day) from among the local landless, who were themselves needed for the village agrarian work, particularly during the peak seasons of cultivation. The smaller landholders, the indebted, and the more vulnerable, were the ones most often taken. The corvée and its replacement fee functioned in practice as an additional heavy land tax, assessed on the village’s collective holdings and borne disproportionately by the poorest.Footnote 56 Sheikhs, meanwhile, were accused both of profiteering from their authority to decide who would be sent on corvée and of bribing their way into office in the first place.Footnote 57
At the factories, unskilled seasonal laborers were officially reported to be paid.Footnote 58 Nominally, this was the case: P.T. 1.5–2 per day according to one account from the early 1880s, or P.T. 2.5 a few years earlier, according to another.Footnote 59 In practice, however, they were often compensated in-kind, in the form of treacle or grain, while more skilled laborers—such as factory cooks, machine operators, locomotive drivers, and stokers—were paid in cash, albeit usually with delays.Footnote 60 Testimonies closer to the operations reveal more complex arrangements. In 1873–1875, a French factory chief engineer reported that the workers on his floor received slips indicating deductions from their tax debts to the state; yet tax collectors refused to register these deductions unless bribed, and only a quarter or a third of “dailies” were formally recorded for payment.Footnote 61 At another factory, in 1883, laborers stated that although they were nominally paid, the money “passes through the hands of sheikhs,” who withheld it on various pretexts, including alleged tax arrears. At the same factory, a clerk disclosed the existence of categories of laborers who, in principle, remained entirely unpaid.Footnote 62
Sugarcane cutting and refining took place from December–January to April–May. This capital, energy, and labor-intensive “sugar campaign” was when the vast majority of workers were required. In the early 1870s, however, laborers were also mobilized in the summer and fall to construct the light railways planned between factories and plantations across the Daira.Footnote 63 Men and boys arrived on foot, in convoys of dozens, accompanied by sheikh al-balads, drawn from nearby and distant villages. It was common for peasants to walk for twenty-four hours to reach their corvée worksites—often shackled and/or escorted by armed guards—where they remained for weeks and months.Footnote 64
By 1876, the year of bankruptcy, the established corvée process was being supplemented by other forms of recruitment. Reports described batches of hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls taken like “herrings in a barrel” by soldiers and transported on barges towed by governmental river steamers. Soldiers were said to descend suddenly on riverside villages and seize people at random, in operations that flanked the official process of coerced recruitment organized through the sheikhs.Footnote 65 At the same time, Ismail established military colonies in Minya—the district with the largest concentration of sugar factories—to cut cane and operate some of the factories.Footnote 66 He even contemplated importing coolies from China, but abandoned the idea as too costly, remarking that it would only be feasible: “if they [i.e. the workers] come of their own accord,”Footnote 67 without having to pay recruitment fees. The question of why the regular mass corvée was supplemented by more extreme measures is to be found by examining the worksite, factory, and plantation, and how labor there was resisted, which I pursue in the next two sections.
Before proceeding, it is important to situate the corvée of the 1870s sugar factories within the broader contexts of coerced labor across Egypt since the early nineteenth century: how it developed in connection with the spread of mechanized irrigation and the rise of the cotton sector in the Delta, and how—paradoxically—it was intensified on the sugar worksites precisely at the moment when debates over its abolition were gaining momentum nationwide and the pool of peasants available for corvée was shrinking (1870s–1880s).
Corvée was employed intensively throughout the nineteenth century, serving from the early 1820s as the principal source of labor in Mehmed Ali’s factories and in the building and annual maintenance of the expanding irrigation network, primarily for the summer irrigation of cotton.Footnote 68 The Pasha turned the corvée system employed for local maintenance of irrigation—through which peasants maintained the lands of their villages—into a state-wide system that used this labor tax extensively and in the process created an administrative system for the acquisition of labor that his successors extended even further.Footnote 69 Mehmed Ali may have hoped that modern technology would free corvée laborers for use in cotton cultivation, as he once remarked to one of his factory superintendents,Footnote 70 but the absence of inexpensive coal supplies and the technical expertise in steam machinery kept Egypt’s rural economy largely unmechanized until the end of his reign.Footnote 71 In the early 1860s, amid the American Civil War and the resulting global cotton famine, cotton became more lucrative to cultivate. This profitability spurred the mechanization of irrigation across the Delta, particularly as the importation of engines, machinery, and coal became more economical: higher cotton prices offset the costs of their integration into the production cycle. A cattle plague that swept rural Egypt in the mid-1860s further reinforced the incentive to invest in metal and steam-powered irrigation devices, as a hedge against the devastating capital losses caused by the death of cattle, which had powered the traditional waterwheels (saqia). By 1873, steam engines were driving the summer irrigation of more land than that irrigated by human and animal power across the northern provinces, according to Ali Mubarak, the chief engineer of irrigation at the time.Footnote 72 The ginning of cotton was also mechanized around the mid-1860s across mostly privately-owned factories, many of which were established by European businesses and by many of the richest Egyptian landowners of the Delta.Footnote 73
The 1860s and 1870s were decades of agrarian transformation marked by the rise of privately owned estates, many of which in the Delta grew the labor-intensive cotton. The spread of steam technology for irrigating and ginning cotton coincided with mounting calls from estate owners for the abolition of the corvée. With the expansion of cotton cultivation into the summer months—made possible by the perennial irrigation networks constructed over decades through corvée labor in the Delta—an increasing number of peasants, who might otherwise have been subject to corvée, were instead needed for cultivation.Footnote 74 Between the 1860s and the 1880s, politicians and writers across Egypt’s political spectrum called for the abolition of the corvée. Meanwhile, the pool of peasants available for service—many of whom were now employed in the operation of private estates—declined by nearly half in the Delta between 1848 and 1882. At the same time, peasants from Upper Egypt, where perennial irrigation was only beginning to take hold, were increasingly mobilized to maintain the irrigation works of the entire country.Footnote 75
Ultimately, in the Delta, steam technology became embedded in the infrastructures of perennial irrigation, redirecting the exploitation of peasants toward private estates rather than subjecting them to the harsher demands of corvée labor. By the 1880s, Egyptian technocrats and British officials alike expressed hope that steam technology and the scientific management of irrigation might soon provide viable alternatives to the corvée.Footnote 76
In Middle and Upper Egypt, however, where perennial irrigation had not yet extended and where Khedive Ismail held substantial lands (at least 200,000 acres, or 100,000 hectares, in 1866)Footnote 77 corvée continued to be used intensively both before and after the establishment of the new sugar factories of the early 1870s. In the 1860s, Ismail employed corvée labor on a large scale from across Egypt—with peasants from Upper Egypt disproportionately represented—to dig the Ibrahimiyya canal (1865—1873), which primarily served the Khedival estates.Footnote 78 In the 1870s, corvée labor on the Daira lands and their sugar factories was carried out on an enormous scale.
So while corvée was gradually receding from the Delta, it was being deployed with greater intensity in the Nile Valley. The chief reason for its decline in the Delta appears to have been the rise of cotton cultivation on private estates, made possible through perennial irrigation—a process initiated in earlier decades—and reinforced by the spread of steam technology in irrigation and cotton ginning. In Middle and Upper Egypt, by contrast, irrigation infrastructures and steam technology generated a different trajectory for corvée. More summer canals were dug to serve the Khedival estates during this period, including to make it possible to grow sugarcane on a large scale, with heavy reliance on corvée labor, and the commodity in question—sugar rather than cotton—was more labor-intensive. As a result, corvée was employed with even greater intensity, both to build the infrastructures for the industry (light railways, the assembly of the factories themselves, and so forth) and to operate the factories, which were by their nature labor-intensive.
On sugar production sites across the world, it was common knowledge among capitalists and experts that these worksites suffered from chronic labor shortages. Peasants could not be induced to work in sugar production for minimal wages, and this gap was remedied through the importation of slaves and later coolies.Footnote 79 The persistent demand for labor in sugar production was in fact a defining feature of the plantation complex—encompassing both farm and factory—the organizational form that marked the sugar industry as the worksite from which factory discipline first emerged.Footnote 80
In the following section, I describe the specific ways in which sugar factories in the 1870s stood out in their need for corvée labor, in contrast to a reduced reliance on corvée in the late nineteenth-century Delta.
The worksite: Factory and plantation
The refining operations in the 1870s Daira unfolded on an enormous scale. Alongside assembling the factories, Ismail extended new stretches of light railway around them. How did the materiality of sugar, combined with this large-scale advanced technology, shape labor? Both sugar materiality and the new technology pushed for intensified and transformed practices of corvée; yet within the factories, coercive work seemed to give way to wage labor in response to the resistance of the laborers.
Sugar refining involves crushing the canes, extracting their sucrose content, purifying and condensing it through boiling, and finally crystallizing it into fine grains of sugar of varying quality. Once harvested, however, sugarcane immediately begins to lose sucrose—and thus productivity—as the clock ticks. In earlier centuries, in Barbados, for example, when mills were smaller and unmechanized, English colonial planters serialized their plantations into parcels. This allowed them to harvest manageable batches of cane at the optimal stage of ripeness for milling, with successive parcels ripening in turn for processing.Footnote 81 By the 1840s, the French manufacturers Derosne et Cail—who supplied factories to the Daira from the 1840s to the 1870s—pioneered the concept of usines centrales: central factories that combined greater capacities with railways across plantations to transport sugarcane quickly to the central mills before sucrose evaporated.Footnote 82 While there is no evidence that the factories established in the 1840s operated on a large scale with extensive rail networks or steam-powered machinery inside the mills, by the 1870s such infrastructures were integral to the Daira. In 1871, Engineer Fowler sampled in England a tramway “arranged to be moved slowly forward following the sugar-cane as it is cut in the field.” This system was intended to deliver 1000 tons of cane per day to “the new mills now being constructed in England for the Viceroy of Egypt.”Footnote 83 By 1878, the Daira had usines centrales (central factories) served by 250 kilometers of railways, 50 locomotives, and 1500 wagons.Footnote 84 Before this network was fully completed, or in tandem with it, hundreds of camels were seen lined up at factories laden with sugarcane.Footnote 85 Boats and Nile steamers likewise transported freshly cut canes to the factories.Footnote 86 The urgency of this operation is evident in the fact that just one of the factories was designed to process 1000 tons of cane per day, for several consecutive months.Footnote 87
Sugar historians argue that sugar production—when coupled with centralized fossil-fuelled factories in the nineteenth century and their reliance on coerced labor arrangements—exhibited a certain hybridity in labor arrangements, which radically differed from the model of England’s spinning mills of the Industrial Revolution. Across the world’s leading sugar industries, slaves, then coolies and other forms of indentured labor, bore the brunt of production well into the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 88
This production arrangement had long been a sugar factory that was not capitalist in the conventional sense. Yet it was within the early modern sugar mills that factory discipline and the modern organization of labor were first forged—born of the inherent urgency to process cut cane within narrow timeframes; an urgency that demanded discipline and organization.Footnote 89 In Egypt, the factories mass-produced sugar through a sophisticated sequence of processing phases—from pressing the canes to sugar crystallization—using advanced steam-powered technology, yet they relied predominantly on unfree labor.
To grasp how the central mega-sugar factory of the 1870s was embedded in its agrarian setting, one may picture it as a black hole, drawing in vast amounts of energy, labor, and natural materials unique to Middle and Upper Egypt.Footnote 90 This portrayal of the sugar factory as not fully capitalist—at least in its labor arrangements—and of the hybridity of precapitalism-capitalism produced by embedding this technologically-advanced project in the Nile valley’s rural context, emerges most vividly in the detailed testimony of a French engineer who supervised one of the Khedival mills in the mid-1870s.
In late 1873, M. H. Gallo was hired to install and operate the sugar factory of Dab’iyah in Armant, Upper Egypt. He was appointed by M. Jubeau, a representative of Derosne et Cail. The factory was assembled by late January 1874, when its first sugar campaign started. To power the steam engines, large quantities of straw were needed, in combination with imported English coal, as both were burned in the large boilers that powered the steam engines operating the factory. For the chemical processes of purifying the cane juice before it was crystallized, mountain rock rich in lime was needed, as well as animal bones collected from the nearby desert.Footnote 91 According to Gallo, corvée laborers supplied these materials and “did not touch money,” while boat captains who transported these inputs to the factories were paid monthly—though not consistently, since at one point greater quantities of straw were needed and Gallo requisitioned any boat that appeared near the site.Footnote 92 Camels used to carry sugarcane and various other materials to the factory were likewise requisitioned coercively from nearby villages, with sheikhs charged with delivering them.Footnote 93
Other operations that occurred in relation to the sugar campaign but outside the factories used all sorts of corvée labor, of women, men, boys, and girls. Women and girls were observed heaving coal into river steamers and carrying bricks produced at factory sites for building the mills and train stations of the Daira. Footnote 94 They may also have labored on extending railways around the factories, though evidence for this is slim.Footnote 95 Women and girls were further engaged in cutting and loading sugar onto trains and camels across the plantations, even into the 1890s, alongside men and boys.Footnote 96 These were likely the very sites to which the women and girls who were thrown like “herrings in a barrel” into the governmental boats were taken, briefly breaching the settled corvée rules as a gendered labor and land tax, whereby only males were taken coercively to labor while the rest of the household remained to maintain the land at home. For a time, instead of, or alongside, the emergence of wage labor, coercion was not only intensified but also broadened as an emergency measure to keep pace with the temporality of the central factories.
Inside the factories, men and boys—exclusively—show up in the surviving accounts. The mills themselves were built of iron, glass, and bricks.Footnote 97 The Aba al-Wakf complex, typical of the 1870s mega-factories, is described in minute detail.Footnote 98 It was fitted with several steam engines and boilers delivering hundreds of horsepower. Its massive crushers, fitted with automatically moving belts, had wheels of 3.5 meters in diameter. Steam power pumped the juice inside the factory. It was chemically purified by lime and bones, then moved to stages of concentration where temperatures were claimed to approach 70°C. One engineer described this stage as “almost tropical.”Footnote 99 Another eyewitness likened it to “the stoke-hole of a Red Sea steamer.”Footnote 100 From there, the thick syrup was carried in small rail-mounted trucks—installed inside the building—to twenty-four big centrifugal machines, which separated granular sugar from treacle. Finally, heavers shoveled the sugar into sacks for storage and shipping. Across these stages, crews of hundreds to thousands of men and boys labored in sequence, driving the process forward on and around the factory floor.Footnote 101
It is useful here to contrast these sugar worksites with those of the commodity that had earlier driven steam-powered industrialization in Egypt’s rural regions—and, with it, the organization of industrial labor: cotton in the Delta during the 1860s boom. How did the 1870s sugar regime differ from labor on the cotton frontier? And in what ways does this difference complicate the view of Egypt as a commodity frontier of global capitalism? To answer, we must look closely at the worksites of the two commodities.
The cotton that reached international markets was grown and ginned through decentralized processes that remained integrated within existing rural labor arrangements. Different classes of farmers cultivated and sold it. Ismail was among the top producers, yet even on his Delta estates, the crop was tended by peasants who also maintained subsistence plots, in line with long-established practices on large estates. The steam ginning factories that spread across the Delta in the 1860s were owned by a mix of European and local investors, and steam ginning was not essential for commanding higher cotton prices; in fact, it was initially associated with lower-quality cotton, ginned mechanically by poorer farmers who lacked the laborers for manual ginning. Crucially, the Khedival cotton project did not entail alienating thousands of peasants from their land for months on end. Moreover, the ginning factories were situated near Delta towns (in contrast to the sugar factories embedded in vast plantations), and they employed men, boys, and girls, who were paid weekly wages. Work in cotton ginning extended for most of the year—250 days by one account—since cotton, unlike sugarcane, did not lose value after harvest. There was therefore no need for massive centralized processing facilities, nor for compelling huge groups of laborers to work under strict time pressure. At the height of the cotton boom in 1865, privately-owned ginning facilities in the Delta processed nearly one-third of Egypt’s crop. Mechanized ginning was a simple two-step process: separating the seed from the fabric by steam-powered gins, then using hydraulic presses to press the cotton bales.Footnote 102 Farmers themselves bore the cost of transporting their cotton to and from the ginning mills. The final product was little more than a cleaned and compressed version of the plant grown in the field. By contrast, sugar emerged as something entirely new—smaller in volume and weight than the cane but requiring a complex sequence of energy and labor-intensive mechanical and chemical operations. It was this centralized, multi-stage production, planned by Ismail as a quasi-state enterprise on his Daira, that demanded and intensified corvée labor.
Being a commodity frontier then did not preclude the emergence of modern industrialization. The degree of industrialization depended on the commodity in question. To supply the working classes of England’s mills with cheap sugar (England imported 28 percent of Egypt’s sugar in the early 1870s)Footnote 103 Egypt invested substantial capital itself, in the form of modern mega-factories financed through European loans. By contrast, Delta cotton did not require centralized or comparable capital-intensive processing at its point of origin. Steam gins could be operated by smaller investors, production was decentralized, and labor remained organized through existing agrarian arrangements without mass coercive recruitment. In other words, while both cotton and sugar tied Egypt into global capitalism, the technological and labor demands of sugar generated far more disruptive forms of industrialization in the countryside. It is also important to recall, however, that unfree labor was necessary for digging and maintaining the irrigation canals that brought perennial irrigation to the Delta, which formed the very precondition for cotton’s expansion from the 1860s onward. In both cases, sugar and cotton, unfree labor was indispensable at different stages of production. As shown in the earlier discussion on corvée, it was deployed as a normal institution—uncontested in principle as a form of labor organization since the early nineteenth century.
Yet the coercive labor demanded by the centralized sugar industry provoked strong resistance when it exceeded the bounds of earlier corvée practices. As the following section shows, it was precisely at the moment when unfree labor was intensified that wage labor began to emerge—initially as an emergency measure to prevent the breakdown of unfree labor tied to large-scale machinery. This shift unfolded alongside harsher incarceration practices inside the factories, which made escape more difficult and compelled workers to adopt new strategies of resistance: first striking, then slowing down production. The Gallo report captures this process of exiting the unfree and unpaid labor relation of the corvée.
Exits of flight, fight, and wage earning
Between February 1874 and November 1875, significant transformations in labor organization emerged at the Dab’iyah factory. While highly contingent, these changes were not random, as they arose in response to recurring patterns visible elsewhere: large-scale, technically sophisticated operations dependent on coercive and unpaid labor devised to sustain production under the material constraints of sugar.
The Dab’iyah factory in Armant was assembled by the end of January 1874. On February 1, according to Chief Engineer H. Gallo, corvée laborers filled the factory, yet within a few hours “a certain number of workers had already escaped, and day by day my staff [of dailies] decreased,” despite the presence of watchmen monitoring them outside their shifts.Footnote 104 Two weeks later, Gallo wrote to his superiors disclaiming responsibility for maintaining production, as workers continued to flee. Additional workers were requisitioned from five nearby villages, but, as he reported, “at the end of a few hours, the men were no longer at work.”Footnote 105
Escaping the factory remained the primary way out of its corvée, though by the following weeks, incarceration procedures grew tighter. Yet flight continued, accompanied by violence rather than stealth. By May 1874, only 200–300 men were still required on the floor after the refining season ended. These men, Gallo reported, “were dying of hunger, thirst, and heat, and had not yet received a penny.” They “rose up and smashed everything” before leaving the factory together.Footnote 106 A few months later, Gallo shifted to extending the railway lines around the factory. Thousands of workers were brought in to build the embankments, but within days, they fled when they ran out of food.
Come the next sugar campaign, in January 1875, the French Chief Engineer of the Inspectorate visited the factory as Gallo was receiving newly rounded-up factory workers. He distributed one or two piasters to each, and for a brief moment, the men were said to be happy—perhaps anticipating further irregular payments. But once the inspector departed, “the void was renewed and it was necessary to use force again and brutality to get men.”Footnote 107 By January 30, 1875, Gallo himself assumed control of the payroll books. He arranged for unskilled laborers to be paid the equivalent of eight days’ wages per month, but they kept escaping.
During this second season (January to April–May), some workers who had acquired sufficient skill to wield leverage appear to have gone on strike. In response, they were either promised or granted monthly wages. At the same time, escape continued on a large scale, prompting Gallo on March 30 to order the recruitment of “all the men who remained [in the five surrounding villages] and were not used in cultivation.”Footnote 108 This leakage of labor was compounded by competition among sugar factories for unskilled labor, as Jennifer Derr’s account shows for Middle Egypt in 1875.Footnote 109 In October of that year, Gallo reported to a French superior a strike by a group of laborers who had been promised pay once their labor tax was fulfilled, but who then received nothing for five–fifteen months. They were effectively retained—freely since they did not escape like many others, or coercively in tightened incarceration—as ostensibly paid laborers.Footnote 110 They were perhaps on their way to becoming differentiated as skilled laborers: machine operators, furnace stokers, or others entrusted with more demanding tasks. Osman Bey, the Esna Daira Inspector (the district that included Dab’iyah), reproached Gallo for recording “these things officially” in writing, insisting that he should instead have sent word by messenger so the inspector would have come to suppress the strike. This exchange suggests that strikes and their unofficial resolution were already a recurring problem across the factories, well enough known that they were expected to remain off the record. The strike nevertheless escalated: in October 1875, workers requisitioned for railway construction around the factory also went on strike, having received no pay after seven months of work.Footnote 111
By November, presumably after Osman Bey had violently suppressed the October strike, the workers slowed production inside the factory, before they told Gallo that, “if we paid them, they will go faster.”Footnote 112
This is roughly the information this rare account of labor in the sugar factory provides. It shows how resistance to coerced labor gradually shifted from flight to confrontation, becoming increasingly sophisticated. Although it leaves out many details, it reveals a pattern: free wage labor for industrial production in rural areas appears to have emerged in tension with coerced, unpaid labor extracted from agrarian producers. This transition occurred precisely as the coercive labor regime for sugar reached its limits and entered into crisis, culminating in 1876 with Ismail deploying army units to cut cane and even considering the recruitment of Chinese coolies.
Peasants conscripted from nearby villages fled home in large numbers. This leakage intensified coercive recruitment—already strained by the ticking clock of sugar temporality and the enormous capacity of the factories—as ever more laborers were rounded up to cover the shortages. Incarceration grew stricter, and small payments were promised, while some workers, having acquired skills in operating the time-sensitive, multi-phased process, began to wield leverage. They organized strikes, then slowdowns; in response, factory management expanded the category of paid labor, which had initially been reserved for skilled laborers and permanent staff.
We do not know exactly how unfree and free labor intersected and coexisted over the following decade. Later evidence nonetheless points to the persistence of coerced and unpaid work. In 1876, wages were reported for unskilled men and boys in the factory and on the plantation, but were said to have been paid exclusively in kind.Footnote 113 In 1883, after Britain’s occupation of Egypt and Ismail’s exile, unskilled laborers complained that their sheikhs withheld the payments issued to them for two daily six-hour shifts, even as they remained incarcerated. At the same time, some—perhaps many—unskilled workers were still, in principle, entirely unpaid.Footnote 114 Jennifer Derr concludes that after the British occupation commenced, sheikhs of laborers should be understood as labor contractors, distinct from the earlier sheikh al-balads who had recruited corvée workers for the factories.Footnote 115 By 1892, the corvée was formally abolished across Egypt, though it persisted on a selective and smaller scale, while capitalist private enterprises increasingly relied on wage labor.Footnote 116 When Villiers Stuart returned in 1895 to conduct another investigation, he was convinced that the factory workers—by then more than a dozen years into the Daira’s transfer to British administration, and two decades after the end of direct Khedival control—were paid regularly and joined the mills voluntarily. By this decade, private capital had penetrated the sugar industry in Middle and Upper Egypt, establishing new factories, investing in the extension of perennial irrigation to sugarcane farms, and hiring wage laborers for the mills.Footnote 117
What continuities exist between this case and pre-2010s labor historiographies? And how might these continuities help us understand the emergence of rural free labor—through a protracted transitory nonlinear hybrid phase—out of unfree labor? One such continuity lies in the endurance of corvée recruitment practices at the household level, which appear to have evolved under conditions of paid seasonal labor. Goldberg shows that after French-Egyptian private capital acquired the Daira’s factories, in the early 1900s, rural households expected that the factories would make hiring decisions for families, rather than individuals. At one factory, “any [permanent] position belonged to a family, whose members successively filled in.”Footnote 118 This insight from Goldberg, when combined with GLH’s emphasis on tracing transitions to wage labor, proves especially rewarding. It suggests that even as coerced, unpaid labor gave way to wage labor, the notion of work as a right or duty appertaining to a household, rather than an agreement between worker and employer, persisted in another form. It survived as what Goldberg terms a “sugar tradition” in the villages surrounding the factories, where “fathers of the families request […] places for their sons,”Footnote 119 the counterpart to the earlier household practice of distributing coerced labor as a shared burden. At the same time, the temporality of sugar continued to provide a central point of leverage. Strikes remained frequent,Footnote 120 and by the mid-1920s, the “peasant-workers [were] extremely willing to strike,” especially during the harvest and refining season.Footnote 121
Another element that appears to have endured into wage labor was the figure of the recruiter. The sheikh al-balad, who had once delivered workers coercively to the sugar factories seems to have evolved into the labor contractor who recruited and supervised the coalheavers at Port-Sa’id. Numbering between 1000 and 2000 wage-earners from Upper Egypt, these workers supplied coal to steamers passing through the Suez Canal from the early 1870s until WWI. Earlier labor historiographies have agreed that this group represents one of the earliest recorded instances of protest by Egyptian workers.Footnote 122 While John Chalcraft describes the sheikhs of coalheavers as guild masters, the grievances voiced by the workers over their exploitation suggest striking parallels with the experience of sugar factory workers, pointing instead to rural labor lineages rather than the urban artisanal traditions of guilds. In a self-critical reflection on the state of the field of Egypt’s labor history, Zachary Lockman highlighted the categorization of the coalheavers as guild members as an example of the field’s blind spots that persisted until the 1990s. He argued that the fact that the coalheavers were “Sa’idi [i.e. from Middle and Upper Egypt] peasants recruited by labor contractors for low-skill employment” should be taken as evidence that their sheikhs were not guild sheikhs nor were they part of a guild.Footnote 123 Subsequent historical research has largely borne out Lockman’s suggestion. According to Derr, beginning in late 1889 the Public Works Ministry contracted some of the very same sheikhs who had earlier recruited corvée workers in Upper Egypt, as labor recruiters. They organized teams of waged workers for irrigation canal maintenance, a task for which corvée was not yet categorically abolished.Footnote 124 The coalheavers, for their part, often did not know how much they actually earned (sheikhs distributed wages differently among workers, and irregularly); those who opposed illegal wage cuts (the central grievance those workers had) were denied piecework; sheikhs took bribes to re-admit workers returning from their visits home.Footnote 125 The sheikhs also established groceries at the worksites and compelled the coalheavers to buy from them, at twice the market price. This arrangement reveals a backdoor mechanism of profiting, echoing the in-kind payment of the 1870s sugar factories. The continuity goes beyond resemblance. Nathan Brown shows that with the abolition of corvée at the turn of the century, wage laborers from Upper Egypt—recruited through contractors—replaced corvée for public works and other labor needs across the Delta.Footnote 126 This finding is consistent with Derr’s work on the outsourcing of labor recruitment at sugar mills to unspecified sheikhs after 1876, when the Daira and its factories were placed under European financial commissioners.Footnote 127
Extending the line from Derr’s concrete evidence and Brown’s broader conclusion, one can infer that the wage labor contractors who recruited and supervised the work of coalheavers were powerful rural figures. Many labor contractors in Upper Egypt today trace their lineage to the same families of sheikh al-balads. If not direct descendants of these village headmen, they were local elites who relied on the same power imbalances that had anchored the institution of corvée sheikhs. Ultimately, individuals who once coerced others through unpaid contractual obligations under the corvée likely became adept at organizing and exploiting recruitment when it shifted to paid contracts. In this sense, the corvée sheikhs may have exited corvée along the same paths by which the corvée workers themselves exited into wage-earning.
Conclusion
This article has sought to open a conversation between the debates of GLH and the history of sugar, on one hand, and Egypt’s labor historiography, long centered on the rise of urban wage labor and trade unions at the turn of the twentieth century, on the other. By examining the 1870s steam-powered central sugar factories, where rural coerced labor began to transform into wage labor, it extends the temporal and spatial scope of Egypt’s modern labor history back to earlier decades of the nineteenth century and into the rural landscapes of Middle and Upper Egypt.
Rather than asking how urban artisans or dispossessed rural wage-earners formed or joined the working class, the question becomes: how did this massive sugar enterprise reshape coerced labor and cause the emergence of rural wage-earners in an important mechanized industry? In this short-lived hybrid industry, intensified coercion drove unskilled corvée peasants to exit corvée through flight and to escalate resistance into strikes and slowdowns—pressuring factory management to concede partial wage arrangements, sufficient only to keep operations running through the refining season. The materiality and temporality of the sugar commodity frontier thus reveal both the structural pressures behind the intensification of coercion and the leverage that coerced workers exercised in resisting it. Meanwhile, insights from later labor historiographies reveal the extent to which the coercive relations of mechanized rural industry endured and metamorphosed into forms of wage labor. Household-level hiring practices in the sugar industry of the early twentieth century, the continued propensity of unskilled wage laborers to strike, and the likely transformation of corvée recruiters into exploitative labor contractors are but a few examples. A more extensive study—of sugar as well as other industries and commodities—holds the potential to further illuminate the shifting configurations of labor regimes.
Finally, following GLH’s agenda, one concluding reflection on labor, global capitalism, and the materiality of mass-produced commodities is in order. This article has shown that continuities between labor forms across geographies of work did not map neatly onto the dichotomies of the industrial/agrarian or capitalist/precapitalist. For the spinning mills of England, which imported cotton from Egypt (among other places), relatively simple—even if steam-powered—cotton processing could be integrated into the existing fabric of rural labor in the Nile delta. Yet for the reproduction of the waged laborers who worked the spinning mills in England, peasants in Upper Egypt were compelled to operate equally sophisticated industrial processes, to provide them with cheap sugar. In this case, the link between global capitalism and production technologies both shaped the emergence of rural wage labor in Upper Egypt and subsidized capitalism’s ability to reproduce its core labor force while expanding surplus.
Acknowledgements
Three anonymous reviewers provided feedback and suggestions that greatly enhanced several drafts of this article, and the editors’ generous support was invaluable during the review process. I also acknowledge feedback from Hanan Sabea, Dina Makram-Ebaid, and Andreas Malm. The article benefited from research seminars held at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (NVIC), the Center for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ), and the SOAN-SEA lectures series at the American University in Cairo. The article was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship at CEDEJ and Ifao.
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