THEHUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIP is an essential aspect of understanding the past and present of all societies. This chapter offers an account and analysis of one small slice of this relationship—a history of veterinary medicine in nineteenth-century Egypt. The human application of medical knowledge and technology to the lives of other animals has been a constant in the history of interspecies relations in Egypt. Indeed, some of the earliest sources from Egypt evince the beginnings of this long history of veterinary knowledge. The story of veterinary medicine in Egypt is obviously therefore an enormous and complicated one with many twists and turns. In focusing on just one recent piece of this history, I will show that the nineteenth century was a period of marked change in the kinds and techniques of veterinary medicine used in Egypt. There were two reasons for this change in the nineteenth century.

First, veterinary knowledge was centralized in an institution—the Egyptian School of Veterinary Medicine. The school sought to regulate, regularize, and monopolize how veterinary medicine was used in Egypt. Instead of the animal body being approached through experience, localized knowledge, and home remedies as had previously been the case, in the nineteenth century animals came to be seen as disease carriers that had to be understood primarily through epidemiology and zoology, knowledge held, deployed, and controlled by the school of veterinary medicine. Second, as never before in Egypt, the history of animal diseases in the nineteenth century was a global one. That is, to understand why and how Egypt's animals became sick, we must understand Egypt's place in a global economy and network of connections. The influence of these global ties on Egypt's animals is an essential aspect of its nineteenth-century history, one indeed unprecedented in the millennia of human-animal interactions in Egypt.

The Egyptian School of Veterinary Medicine

The school of veterinary medicine was founded in 1827 to address one of the oldest issues affecting the human-animal relationship—disease—through several new techniques. The first was the employment of French expertise to help with the founding and operation of the new animal institution—an outgrowth of both the French expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1801 and the many educational delegations that took Egyptian students to France in the nineteenth century.

After the completion of the Maḥmūdiyya's reconstruction in 1819, a stone tablet was placed at the canal's mouth and another at its end in Alexandria to commemorate the project. The tablet at the canal's start claimed that “the glories of the Sultan had brought life to dead lands” near the waterway and had “reanimated” them through a return to cultivation. The tablet at the end of the canal continued this theme by asserting that the Ottoman dynasty had caused the Nile “to flow once more.” These triumphalist declarations by the Ottoman bureaucracy that described the Empire as the source of agriculture's rebirth and of the return of water to Egypt contributed to the notion that an irrigation work like the Maḥmūdiyya could serve as the single necessary magic solution to the very complex ecological problems of water scarcity, siltation, seepage, and salinization. The idea of the renewal of land and water through public works in Egypt began with the Maḥmūdiyya and would prove a fundamental conceptual cornerstone of similar projects throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Renewal, rebirth, and revitalization of course all mark both an end and a beginning. In the case of the Maḥmūdiyya, its reconstruction represented the end of an early modern system of Ottoman imperial natural resource management that served to move food, wood, and other items around the entirety of the Empire.

No land ever depended on water management more than Egypt. Its irrigation system is among the world's oldest. When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, they inherited a complex system, the result of millennia of careful trial and error, accumulated knowledge, and hard labor. Their prior experience in Anatolia and the Balkans, although it included irrigation, did not suffice to allow them to grasp the Egyptian situation fully. They thus needed expert help with the management of water in Egypt, and they got it from Egyptian peasants.

In the Ottoman imperial system of natural resource balance and extraction, irrigation in Egypt created sets of connections, tensions, and relationships that tied the province to the rest of the Empire. Egypt could function as the most agriculturally and financially productive area of the Empire only if its fields had adequate supplies of water. Thus, throughout the long eighteenth century, Egyptian peasants came to the network of Islamic courts maintained throughout Egypt by the Ottoman administration of the province to stake claims to water usage in the countryside. Using only a necessarily tiny fraction of the vast wealth of archival materials related to irrigation in eighteenth-century rural Egypt, this chapter charts the history of Egyptian peasants' and Ottoman bureaucrats' efforts to organize water usage and the repair and maintenance of irrigation works.

I make three main arguments in this chapter. The first is that water usage created community.

Water lends itself to cliché – its beauty, its power, its abundance or absence, its transformative capabilities. Long before and after Herodotus observed Egypt to be “the gift of the Nile,” others have offered clichés about the role of the Nile's waters in Egypt's history. This book avoids those and other clichés altogether in favor of a social and environmental history of water usage and irrigation in the Egyptian countryside in the long eighteenth century (1675 to 1820). Water, however, is only one part of this environmental story of Egypt. Timber, plague, animals, wind, grain, and microbes all have their roles to play as well in this account of struggle and community, of want and excess, of import and export, and ultimately of literal life and death.

In the chapters that follow, I first detail an Ottoman imperial system of natural resource allocation and balance that served to move grains – the products of irrigation – out of Egypt and wood supplies – vital material needed for Egypt's rural irrigation infrastructure – into this most lucrative of the Empire's provinces. Water bound Egyptian peasants in even the most rural locations to the center of the Empire in Istanbul because the status of a dam or canal in Egypt held wide imperial consequences. The disrepair of irrigation works and the destruction of agricultural land that would surely ensue meant less food and less money for this early modern land-based, agrarian polity.

As we have seen in the preceding two chapters, various sets of transformations over the course of the long eighteenth century served to shape the rough outlines of a new conception of society in Egypt as the province moved further and further away from its previous centrality in the Ottoman system of imperial natural resource management. Changes in the organization of labor formed the bases for ideas of an Egyptian population – its size, potentials, and resources. The advent of quarantine to address plague in Egypt not only represented a different conception of the place of disease in the environment but also served to define the physical realm of the social as opposed to that of the diseased and dying. This chapter returns us more squarely to irrigation works to examine how several of these new processes, ideas, and institutional formations came to bear on the development of a new imaginary of what Egypt was and into what it could be fashioned. The event around which these processes and ideas coalesced was the reconstruction of the Maḥmūdiyya Canal in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

The project of rebuilding what would come to be known as the Maḥmūdiyya Canal was one meant to serve the society defined by technologies such as quarantine. It was a canal that would feed water to Alexandria, thus making the city a thriving economic and cultural metropolis to rival Cairo.