A ruler’s land endowment leveraged thousands of Egyptian landowners into funding state schools

Evidence

In the first session, a deputy who was close to the government proposed the setting up of primary schools in the provinces. It was announced at the same time that the Khedive Ismail had endowed to just such a project the entire income of the new agricultural land in Wadi Tumilat, the valley created across the Eastern desert by the construction of the Ismailiyya Canal, which carried sweet water to the new towns on the Suez Canal. With this incentive, a group of landowners and local officials from the towns and villages of Lower Egypt formed together to raise among themselves and fellow landowners similar donations. There was an enormous and highly publicised response. In the ensuing months over two thousand of the medium and large landowners of the Delta donated funds towards the founding of schools according to the government plan. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 268

Categorization

• CANDY: The Khedive funding schools with the entire income of canal-created agricultural land is a neat, tweetable historical detail.