Ottoman Egypt and the Emergence of the Modern World: 1500-1800

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Egypt from 1600 to 1800: Between Local and Global

The Multiple Narratives of Modern World History

The mainstream textbooks about modern world history have for a long time described the three centuries from 1500 to 1800 as a dynamic period that was the basis for the emergence of the modern world. Their narratives focus on some of the important scientific, cultural, and economic developments that took place during these centuries. Among these the most important were the Renaissance and the Reformation, which ushered in scientific and intellectual inquiry; the technological advances that opened the way for the Industrial Revolution; the Scientific Revolution, which was brought about by the discoveries by great thinkers like Copernicus (d. 1543), who questioned the earth as center of the universe, Galileo (d. 1642) and his telescope, Bacon (d. 1626; sometimes called the father of empiricism), Newton (d. 1727; a key figure in the scientific revolution), and William Harvey (d. 1647; the English physician famous for his discoveries about blood circulation). The diffusion of ideas was greatly facilitated by the invention and the spread of the printing press. Moreover, the creation of trading companies, such as the East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, eventually led to colonial domination of large parts of the world. The period was consequently portrayed as the prelude to European world hegemony, which had its sources in the great discoveries and in European expansion into the New World. Many of these developments were made possible by emerging centralized states, which supported the trading companies and encouraged intellectual and scientific discoveries. In different parts of Europe, powerful states emerged, like that of Philip II of Spain (d. 1598), Peter the Great in Russia (d. 1725), and Louis XIV in France (d. 1715), with strong rulers, often supported by strong military powers. To a considerable extent, the focus tended to privilege elites, whether thinkers who had an impact on intellectual life or the princes and rulers at the head of these growing states.¹

This narrative of the emergence of the modern world was the standard way of understanding the period from 1500 to 1800. Its explanation was, to a large extent, European oriented. In fact, its analysis leaves out most of the world beyond Europe. This view on the centrality of Europe is clearly articulated by the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who, some forty or so years ago, wrote, The history of the world, for the past five centuries, insofar as it has any significance, has been European history. I do not think that we need to make any apology if our study of history is European-centric.²

The non-European world was considered to be more or less outside of history, in a state of limbo or stagnation, until the moment that it came into contact with the west. A recent book by Toby Huff, a scholar whose work has been translated into many languages, reflects a similar view, indicating that this approach continues to have considerable weight in academic circles.³ In many studies, it still represents the dominant view.

Many of these views can be attributed to nineteenth-century thought. Writers with different intellectual leanings seem to have been in agreement with each other when it came to understanding the non-European world. Marx, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, saw China as a giant empire . . . vegetating in the teeth of time, insulated by the forced exclusion of general intercourse and thus continuing to dupe itself with delusion of Celestial perfection.⁴ His opinion bears a lot of similarity to the Hegelian view, which considered many parts of the non-European world, such as India, Africa, Siberia, and so on, to be ‘outside history.’ That these views have persisted up to the twenty-first century could in part be due to the intellectual weight of these thinkers.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the histories of the ‘other’ regions of the world were histories of decline. When great civilizations are mentioned in surveys of the modern or the early modern world—the Chinese, Islamic, or Indian civilizations—they are usually not integrated as active agents or partners, but rather as regions in decline. Thus, these non-European regions only entered history at the moment that they started to follow the European model. This meant that entering world history was equivalent to becoming western. In other words, the history of the emergence of the modern world is a history of the west, and of the way that other peoples learned from or imitated Europeans.

Implicit in these works was a diffusionist approach, which perceived culture as having one center (Europe) from where it was diffused to other regions of the world, with variable degrees of success. This approach was consolidated with the development of imperialism—especially in the form it took in the nineteenth century. It was then projected backward two or three centuries, as a way of understanding the Ottoman Empire or Mughal India. Clearly, alternative approaches need to be developed.

Consequently, the history of many formerly colonized countries was, until a few decades ago, written to make them appear to have reached the depth of decline just before the period of colonialism or European penetration. For a long time, the historiography of Egypt and the rest of the Ottoman Empire emphasized the negative aspects of the period. In many such studies, the focus was on the despotic nature of rule and the conditions of decay, disorder, or disintegration of society and economy, of culture and learning. The three centuries preceding the French Expedition of 1798 were for a long time portrayed as one of the lowest points of the history of Egypt. The despotic sultanic or state power as the main mover in history left little or no space for society, and as a result the historical development was habitually portrayed as a top-down process. In other studies, the focus was on the inability of the region to keep up with the numerous developments taking place in Europe at the time, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As a result, while Europe experienced cultural and political progress, the region did not undergo these same developments and sank into decay. It was difficult to try to find a place for Egypt in relation to the regional and world transformations taking place at the time. The decline paradigm negated the possibility of an active role in world history.

The broad lines of this approach to the history of Egypt were similar to the historiography of most other formerly colonized countries. The histories of India and of Persia, for instance, which were written at the start of the twentieth century by colonial administrators like Henry Dodwell (d. 1946), or by military persons like Percy Sykes, also a diplomat and scholar (d. 1945), emphasized all that was negative before the coming of Europeans and showed the positive sides of colonial government. They had in common, whether they were referring to the Ottoman Empire, India, Persia, Southeast Asia, or China, a similar line of thought and a common vocabulary, with often repeated terms like ‘backwardness,’ ‘stagnation,’ and ‘decline’ in relation to Europe, which was always the point of comparison. Eighteenth-century India was, for example, described as a place of chaos and anarchy.

Colonial government was portrayed as an enlightened government with solid achievements in medicine and education, among other fields, bringing modernity to ‘backward’ countries. The very justification of colonial domination was its civilizing mission; it brought enlightenment and education to so-called primitive societies, such as those in Africa, and to ‘backward’ societies, like Egypt or Mesopotamia, which were known as great civilizations in the past but which had long since fallen into decline. Colonialism helped them to move these societies from tyranny to enlightenment and the rule of law.⁵

The historical writings that emphasized the weaknesses of these non-European countries during the period from 1500 to 1800 tended to posit a break in continuity between this period and the following one, the nineteenth century and the beginning of the modern period. The moment of European penetration formed the dividing line between the traditional, or static, condition of a society and economy and the entrance into a modern world. Implicit in these views was an emphasis on the incapacities of these regions to modernize or to confront the changes that the modern world brought; traditional societies were incapable of innovation; they were isolated from the developments taking place in the world and consequently could not benefit from new ideas and technologies or contribute to them. There was also a denial that these regions could either construct their own modernity or even contribute to its construction; the possibility that they might have a role in constructing the modern world was not considered. Consequently, modern world history was shown as being created entirely in and by Europe. From there it was diffused to the regions where Europeans had an influence.

To a large extent, these histories failed to show the historical realities of the countries on which they were focused. There was hardly anything written about society, about the way that people ran their lives, or about economies or the way people earned their living. Rather, they reflected the approaches of the nineteenth-century hegemonic or colonial powers toward the countries that they had penetrated or colonized. Such histories were in keeping with the discourse of power that accompanied such penetration or colonialism. This can explain the similarity of the descriptions, sometimes even of the vocabulary, that were applied from areas as diverse as India, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. These narratives did not consider the possibility that these three great empires, with their diverse populations, their enormous productive activities, and their intensive trade that extended across many parts of the world, might have a transformative role from 1500 to 1800. The absence of great scientists or intellectuals and of men whose names were well known or who had undertaken acts of some notability tended to emphasize the picture of decline.

The emphasis on Europeans as givers and non-European as recipients distorts a much more convoluted, and lesser known, reality. What was perceived as being specifically European and modern was in fact far more complex. In the nineteenth century, once the Industrial Revolution was well under way and colonial powers dominated much of the Third World, numerous inventions and technical innovations initiated in Europe were transferred to regions outside this continent, for instance, in the field of communications, steamships, railways, and telegraphs; in the field of science and technology; and in the field of medicine. The importance of these transfers was considerable and transformative. Nevertheless, to project this backward to the early modern period distorts the realities of the time.

This narrative remained dominant until recent revisionist scholarship proposed an entirely different picture that showed, on the contrary, a period of great dynamism outside Europe, during which there was a significant expansion in both trade and production, as well as growth in the use of money.⁶

Alternatives to Eurocentric Approaches to Modern World History

At present, these ideas are being seriously reconsidered by a number of historians, and their work is changing the way we think of the period as a whole. As a result, these older paradigms are gradually being rehabilitated. Recent studies on Ottoman Egypt, for instance, including my own work, are showing a different picture from that of a despotic sultan, a corrupt Mamluk ruling class, and a society in a state of apathy. Rather, they portray a dynamic society, which was creative, functioned well with its ups and downs, and made sense to those that lived in it. We now have an important body of scholarship on Egypt in the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, written in Arabic, English, and French, by European scholars such as André Raymond on merchants and artisans; Nicolas Michel on peasants and rural conditions; Michel Tuscherer on the Red Sea trade; and Egyptian scholars like Magdi Guirguis on Copts; Husam Abdul-Mu‘ti on textiles, trade, and production; Nasir Ibrahim on relations between Mamluks during the French expedition; and others. This body of scholarship has moved away from the state-oriented writings of an earlier period, and show a different picture of rural and urban economy and society. What we see is a vibrant society and a working economy. Globally, these studies have changed the way we look at the Ottoman period, arguing against the earlier Orientalist views and challenging their basic precepts.

On a broader level, scholars of world history have made important contributions to this debate. They have tried to write histories that integrate nonwestern perspectives, thus enriching and deepening the study of the modern world. Their work can help us to understand local histories (i.e., the history of Egypt) in a different perspective. One line of argument has been to identify some of the broad features and to describe this period of change that touched many parts of the world without being necessarily initiated by any one entity. Such works have focused on the global sea passages that linked the various parts of the world, on the emergence of a world market, and on the creation of large political entities.⁷

Another related line of argument upheld by a number of scholars has been to question the idea that the modern world was created only by Europe. This important body of literature has proposed alternative ways to write modern world history than those histories that viewed Europe and the west as the center of development, enlightenment, and capitalism. Many studies regarding India, Asia, China, and Southeast Asia have successfully questioned these histories, which had dominated scholarship about non-European regions for a long time, portraying Europe as the norm. This literature rejected the models of these non-European regions as places without history, as autonomous in the sense of being impervious to changes going on around them, as being stagnant and in decline, and as awakening only with the emergence of colonialism, when they became the recipients of European culture and technology. This historiography challenged the idea that the experience of the west was the standard for others to follow; it also challenged the idea that Europe, in extending its hegemony, could be considered the core for the transmission of knowledge to the rest of the world.

These studies have initiated different approaches to the subject, both theoretical and empirical. Theorists like Peter Gran argued against these Eurocentric views by showing that European societies were not essentially different from any other societies. Comparisons could be made between European and non-European societies by studying the various paths by which different sets of countries entered the modern world—that, in other words, they reached the twentieth or the twenty-first centuries by channels other than those followed by Europe.⁸ Challenges to Eurocentric views of the world also came from other theoretical thinkers such as Samir Amin. He also rejected the idea of a dynamic Europe and stagnant east, considering that capitalism could not be regarded as a uniquely European phenomenon since India, China, the Islamic East, and the Mediterranean all had forms of protocapitalism and had the potential to develop into capitalism. Capitalism was, in other words, a worldwide phenomenon. As it developed into an advanced core and a backward periphery, he considered that regions outside Europe were not in a lesser stage of development toward modernity, but rather they were part of this modernity, albeit a modernity that was different from that in Europe, since the emergence of capitalism created growing inequalities between core and periphery.⁹ Scholars like J.M. Blaut have argued against diffusionism, rejecting the idea that there was a single culture, that this culture was formed in Europe, and that it was subsequently diffused to other parts of the world.¹⁰ Historians have convincingly demonstrated that neither India nor Southeast Asia were obscure zones during this time of transformation, but that on the contrary, their trade played a major role in the world economy. The claim that the non-European world was the recipient of this culture but did not contribute to its formation had now definitely been put into question.

New methodologies were developed which gave weight to often neglected parts of the world and integrated them into the major transformations that took place between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Works such as Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, Jack Goody’s The Theft of History, or André Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age are part of a growing literature that, in different ways, tries to integrate into world history the peoples and civilizations that are often left out of the historical narrative, whether natives of America or other non-European civilizations, such as the various civilizations in India, China, and Japan, and to identify ‘core’ regions outside those in Europe.¹¹

These works were further consolidated by arguments from scholars who did not agree that modernity distinguished Europe from other traditional societies and that only Europe had the appropriate universal qualities that could be spread worldwide.¹² Others argued that many of the features of modern world history had their origins outside Europe, and to understand modern world history, these origins have to be included in the picture. Christopher Bayly, for instance, found that competition from Indian textiles worldwide was one of the main triggers of the British Industrial Revolution, a view that basically challenges the way this revolution has long been understood.¹³ Another challenge to this narrative came from Eric Williams, the late prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and one of the earliest writers on this subject. Like Bayly, Williams questioned the idea that the Industrial Revolution was a purely British phenomenon, arguing that in the seventeenth century, Caribbean sugar production not only funded British industrialization but also contributed to the development of modern methods of industrial production. The large number of workers in one place, the strict labor discipline, the division of labor into work units, all these were elements that had their origin in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, not in Manchester, and they were later implemented in industrial practices.¹⁴ Williams’s work shows the impact that the periphery had on the core, by indicating how the Caribbean experience was a predecessor of the British Industrial Revolution. Such revisionist views have contributed to changing some of the basic precepts of the traditional narrative.

As a result of these initiatives, the historiography of some regions of formerly colonized countries has taken huge steps forward, and the way that their histories are now written has changed radically.

The worldwide concern to counteract Eurocentrism by proposing alternative ways of writing history has nevertheless left out many regions.