Egyptian industry was too feeble to threaten Britain’s economic interests

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. (St. John in his tour of the country in the 1830s said that “the mills are in ruins, and immense heaps of machinery, no longer employed, are covered with rust, and mouldering to decay.”53) Nor was Britain concerned about Mehmed Ali closing off the Egyptian market to British goods for, as Marsot states, the Pasha “tried to woo British friendship by promising all manner of facilities to British trade.” Partly as a result of this assistance the value of British exports to Egypt increased from £49,377 in 1827 to £237,444 in 1840, while its exports of cotton textiles, supposedly the one item that the Pasha’s “factories” were most efficient at producing, increased from £27,939 to £179,328 over the same period. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1567

Categorization

• XREF: This revisionist economic argument connects to the broader historiography on the ‘myth’ of Mehmed Ali’s industrialization, and to dependency-theory debates about Egypt’s economic history.
• QUESTION: If economic rivalry wasn’t the cause of Palmerston’s hostility, what explains it — worth tracking the author’s alternative explanation in subsequent paragraphs.