Egypt’s economy collapsed into single-commodity cotton export dependence for Europe

Evidence

Since the latter part of the eighteenth century the Nile valley too had been undergoing a transformation, associated principally with the European textile industry. From a country which formed one of the hubs in the commerce of the Ottoman world and beyond, and which produced and exported its own food and its own textiles, Egypt was turning into a country whose economy was dominated by the production of a single commodity, raw cotton, for the global textile industry of Europe. By the eve of the First World War, cotton was to account for more than ninety-two per cent of the total value of Egypt’s exports. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 89

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the moral-panic/commodity-dependency literature and to contemporary debates about monoculture export economies.
• ADDENDUM: Complements ‘On Sacrifice’ theme of how colonial economies restructure labor and land toward single crops.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 89