Dismantling Egypt’s army and tariffs opened it to British economic dominance

Evidence

Having been deprived of its “colonies,” and losing the army which constituted a large market for its products, the Egyptian factories found it difficult to produce commodities that could compete with foreign, mostly British, goods. In Egypt itself, local industries were closed down after losing their protective tariff barriers. At the same time foreign merchants flooded the Egyptian market with their cheap goods after the collapse of the Pasha’s monopoly system. Soon afterwards they established financial houses and started extending numerous loans to members of the ruling family as well as to the rural population that triggered a debt spiral that forced Egypt to become more and more economically dependent on the West. Nearly thirty years after the death of Mehmed Ali a severe financial crisis offered a pretext for foreign intervention which eventually led to an invasion by British troops, thus effectively reducing Egypt to the position of a British protectorate and ushering in a period of military occupation that lasted for seventy years. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 78

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of how European free-trade pressure dismantled non-European industrialization, echoing the reader’s interest in Ottoman-Egyptian decline.