Egyptian industrialization posed no real threat to British manufactures

Evidence

This, however, is to misread British interests in the Middle East in the nineteeth century and her entire foreign policy during the crucial decades of the 1830s and 1840s. There is no doubt that Britain opposed Mehmed Ali strongly and resolutely and that this animosity was best represented by Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary for most of the 1830s (1830–4, 1835–41, and later 1846–51) who took a strong personal dislike to the Pasha. It is also true that in his fight against Mehmed Ali Palmerston wanted to abolish his monopolies and that the Balta Liman Convention was categorical in its insistence on banning all commercial monopolies throughout the Empire. Yet British hostility and Palmerston’s personal animosity could not have been caused only by any perceived threat posed by the nascent Egyptian industry to the mighty British manufactures. For at the peak of the Pasha’s “industrialization” schemes the country had no more than seven or eight steam engines, most of the power of the thirty-odd “industrial” establishments being supplied by the workers themselves. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1567

Categorization

• QUESTION: If not industry and not tariffs, what drove British hostility and the Balta Liman Convention? The paragraph sets up a puzzle that must be resolved elsewhere.