Mehmed Ali organized sabotage of Britain’s Euphrates navigation expedition.

Evidence

Protective towards the overland route to India that he already controlled, the Pasha was determined not to have the expedition succeed. In spite of repeated remonstrations from the British consuls in Syria and Egypt and in spite of presenting the Pasha with a firman from the Sultan himself permitting the expedition to go ahead, Ibrahim Pasha, on orders from his father, did everything possible to obstruct it. “The most astonishing accidents occurred: waggons were overturned, machinery was broken, draft animals were stampeded – all without rime or reason – … Very soon it became obvious that an organized system of sabotage was in operation … ” These moves were not lost on Palmerston: when Samuel Briggs, who was acting as an agent of the Pasha in London, presented a report urging Palmerston to support the Pasha’s bid for independence and arguing that the Pasha’s rule in Egypt was important for British “valuable possessions in India,” Palmerston wrote in the margins to that memorandum “Mehemet Ali controls the Euphrates route.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1578

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the reading purpose’s causal question of how Egyptian expansion collided with British imperial strategy.
• SEED: Possible article angle: sabotage of a steamship navigation project as an overlooked flashpoint in the Egyptian-British confrontation.