Egypt’s mercantile elite fortunes tracked the rise and fall of Red Sea trade.

Evidence

The history of the family is worth mentioning, for it illustrates the fortunes of this mercantile class. The Muwailihi’s had grown prosperous in the eighteenth century with the prosperity of Egypt’s Red Sea trade, and in the nineteenth century had become close political allies of the Egyptian ruling family. Such alliances, however, were unable to secure the country’s large merchant families against the expansion of European commerce. In the 1870s, after being rescued from commercial ruin by the Khedive, the Muwailihi’s were among those who led the nationalist opposition to Egypt’s commercial and financial control by the European powers. By the 1890s the son was employed as a government official under the British, who had responded to the nationalist uprising in 1882 by placing the country under military occupation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 372

Categorization

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