Mehmed Ali sabotaged the British Euphrates expedition despite promises of aid

Evidence

However, the problem as far as Palmerston was concerned was that Mehmed Ali was controlling these lands and “while promising aid to the Expedition ‘as far as his authority extended,’ he actually employed every possible device to thwart the success of the experiment. In this he was largely successful.” 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: Connects to the reader’s interest in Anglo-Egyptian and Ottoman-British maneuvering in the 1830s-40s.