This work is an attempt to write the history of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, when the country was ruled by Muhammad Ali. There have been countless works written throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on that period, but no major work has appeared since 1961. In the light of recent developments in scholarship in the last ten years, I have undertaken this work as a means of opening research once again into that period of history, for, while many books deal with the period, few of them deal with it properly or even adequately. Many of them were written either by supporters of the Egyptian royal family (indeed many were commissioned by Egyptian rulers) or by detractors, so that we do not possess an unbiassed record of the age; neither is there much on the economic and social aspects of that period of Egyptian history. That is why I call my work ‘an attempt’, for we need a generation or more of researchers producing various monographs on different spects before we can claim to know the period. If one may level a major point of criticism against most of the works of the past on the Muhammad Ali period, it is that they were written without consulting the Egyptian archives, except for the pioneering work of a handful of scholars, among whom are M. Sabry, M. Fahmi, A. A. al-Giritly and A. Rustum.

Independent Egyptian rulers in the past had constantly sought to overstep the boundaries of Egypt, to occupy neighbouring countries and control trade routes that fed into Egypt. Muhammad Ali's regime, following precedent, sought to insert itself into any actual or potential vacuum in the regions surrounding Egypt and lying along her trade routes. Unlike Ottoman notables such as Jazzar, Dhahir and others who had merely sought quasi-automony for their provinces but were content to remain within the empire, Muhammad Ali sought independence. None of these provinces had the potential that Egypt possessed in terms of resources and man-power. Egypt's resources were sufficient to render the country independent, as Ali Bey had found, that is, to finance an army and a navy, to invest capital in agriculture and in industry, in brief to turn it into a state.

Had the Egyptian ruler contented himself with aspiring towards independence and a reliance on Egyptian resources alone he may not have aroused foreign antagonism. Once Muhammad Ali had acquired the trappings of a state – an army and a navy to protect his territory from invasions – and had invested capital in expanded agriculture and in starting industry, he wanted to go further. Economic expansion necessitated markets.

Muhammad Ali conceived of Egypt as a mulk, a possession he had won by the sword. A legitimate monarch can take his time in planning for the future, secure - sometimes - in his knowledge that continuity will prevail. Muhammad Ali was neither a legitimate monarch, nor was he even secure, and he had strong doubts about any continuity for his line unless he took steps to establish and institute such continuity, by the sword if necessary. His actions were geared towards improving his mulk and making it yield greater profits, and towards establishing firm foundations for its government that would resist change and time. Such foundations led to the creation of a centralized bureaucracy, and involved a series of ad hoc decisions in response to circumstances, which in the final analysis created the trappings of a modern state. It was a piecemeal progression, a series of trials and errors that established a centralized authority, brought about a control of trade and commerce, the total reform of agriculture, the establishment of industry, and finally expansion beyond the frontiers of his territory.

The corner-stone of Muhammad Ali's internal policy in Egypt was law and order. That was the prime reason for which he had been supported by ulama and tujjar, who saw in him a potential Ali Bey ushering in a period of stability and security wherein they could go about their business.

Intellectual histories of the origins and content of Arab nationalism abound and insofar as these histories deal with the birthplace of Arab nationalism they must discuss political life in Syria just before World War I. Few histories, however, investigate the social conditions which gave birth to this ideology and which rendered it uniquely useful to Syrians, enabling Arab nationalism to become the reigning political idea in the Arab East after the War.

This study will attempt to situate Arab nationalism in the social and political environment in which it evolved in its infancy. It is a study of one social class in one town, Damascus. It is my argument that Damascus supplied a disproportionate share of the leading lights guiding the growth of the Arab nationalist movement in the early years of the twentieth century and that most important nationalist politicians in Damascus emerged from a single class in that city. This class, which I shall call the ‘landowning-bureaucratic class’, began to assume its shape in the last half of the nineteenth century–that of a fairly well-integrated network of propertied and office-holding urban families which was to produce the political leadership in Damascus and other Syrian towns for several generations. And it was out of a struggle for power and position between two factions of this leadership that the idea of Arabism emerged as a political movement, one ultimately with widespread appeal in the Arab countries.

The city as the locus of political power and influence in Syria dates from antiquity.

Prior to the events of 1860, the political configuration in Damascus included both a traditional sociopolitical leadership competing directly with the Ottoman central authority for control of Ottoman-imposed institutions, and disparate power groups, socially differentiated from the traditional leadership, whose power base was rooted in control of certain autonomous organizations such as local garrisons and the grain trade.

The events of 1860 gave the Ottoman government an opportunity to alter the local political configuration to facilitate its program of centralization and modernization. Already the earliest institutions established by the Tanzimat (after 1841) had begun to break down the local paramilitary power base of leaders outside the traditional leadership; these individuals and some of their followers were, at the same time, offered a new power base within the local bureaucracy. Then a decisive Ottoman intervention to check the traditional leadership's attempt to shift the local balance of power in its own favor occurred in 1860. The ‘honorable citizens’ were punished for failing to prevent or control the militant outburst of the populace and the erosion of their local power was drastically illustrated and their lack of zeal in implementing Ottoman policies severely acknowledged. The events of 1860 permitted the Ottoman government to forge a new and more useful political élite by expanding the local bureaucracy and supporting upcoming families not previously a part of the traditional leadership.

During the next fifty years the Ottoman government managed to remold the Damascus power structure in three important ways. First, with a stronger provincial administration controlled more efficiently by Istanbul, the exercise of local political power became a function of position in the bureaucracy.

Following the 1860 events, but particularly after the commercial depression of the 1870s which had aggravated tensions between the Ottoman central authority and the local leadership in Damascus, the Syrian Province of the Ottoman Empire ‘enjoyed a measure’ of tranquility and prosperity absent in the first half of the century. Pacification throughout Greater Syria was carried out through the implementation of widespread modernization schemes. Roads, railways and telegraphs improved the transportation and communications network linking Syria to Iraq and Arabia, and to Istanbul. Rural security improved as beduin tribes were encouraged to settle in greater numbers. Agricultural production and rural population grew in many districts as the margins of cultivation were pushed eastward. Even some hardpressed industries began to enjoy a revival by finding increased demand in the towns and countryside. Regional and international commerce continued to expand. Modern elementary, secondary, technical and military schools, departments of justice, and a modernized gendarmerie were other derivatives of the consolidation and extension of reforms stemming from Istanbul during the reign of Sultan ‘Abd ul-Hamid II.

In Damascus and other Syrian towns, an ascendant landowning-bureaucratic class benefited from the series of modernizing reforms. This class came to identify with the ideology of Ottomanism and emerged as the agent of Ottoman centralization and modernization. The urban notables aligned with and defended the policies emanating from Istanbul fully cognizant that obstruction no longer served their interests.

In the heat of July 1860, an outbreak of violence rocked Damascus. Mobs of beduin, Druzes and other neighboring villagers, Kurdish auxiliaries, and street toughs perpetrated eight days of massacre and pillage mainly in the ancient Christian quarter of Bab Tuma–eight days that would have resounding effects on political developments in Damascus for generations.

This event gave the Ottoman government an opportunity to reassert its control over Damascus. Fu'ad Pasha, the reformist Foreign Minister who had negotiated a temporary settlement of the civil war in Mount Lebanon, followed the newly appointed Ottoman governor into Damascus, backed by four thousand troops. Fu'ad knew his task well. In order to obviate French intervention in the name of ‘oriental Christendom’ he hammered out a settlement which compensated the demoralized Christian community and distributed the burden of guilt equitably and swiftly. On one hand, he set up a committee of prominent Damascenes, both Muslim and Christian, to assess compensation for the vast losses suffered by the inhabitants of Bab Tuma. On the other, he jailed, exiled or hanged scores of high-ranking Muslim notables and functionaries for their failure to prevent the bloodbath that had caused some six thousand deaths.

The Christian committee members formed a powerful lobby under Fu'ad Pasha's protection and managed to gain ample compensation for themselves and their clients. Reconstruction in Bab Tuma commenced immediately and the inhabitants were encouraged to return.

The immediate political impact of the 1860 disturbances was a weakened traditional leadership in Damascus. During the next forty years two new developments–the spread of private landownership and the growth of the state in the life of the town and province–stimulated the recomposition and integration of urban political forces. By the turn of the twentieth century a reconstituted political élite had emerged in Damascus, the product of a recently consolidated, fairly well integrated and socially cohesive landed upper class, which had aligned itself more closely with Istanbul.

The development of private landownership

During the first half of the nineteenth century the Syrian economy began to feel the impact of commercialization. Dislocations in the urban economy caused by the competition of European manufactured goods, coupled with the spread of cash cropping, helped to stimulate land acquisition.

In the Biqa‘ Valley and the Ghuta, members of the religious establishment and a group of secular dignitaries, who were center-city merchants and tax farmers, controlled the land system. Some had used their posts on the majlis to extend their holdings by auctioning tax farms to themselves and their families. There also emerged another group of merchant-moneylenders–recently enriched by the forces of commercialization–who acquired lands through the manipulation of usurious capital in these areas and in the Hawran grain belt. Aghawat in the peripheral quarters of the city or lesser dignitaries from the center city, these merchant-moneylenders came to dominate the Hawran and joined the more socially prominent notable tax farmers in the Biqa‘ and the Ghuta.

No idea has captured the imagination or expressed the hopes of the Arabs in the twentieth century as has Arab nationalism, and perhaps no subject has received so much attention from historians of the Middle East. But while many historians have explored its sources, few have considered the social and political environment in which Arab nationalism evolved as an ideological movement. This study attempts to correct the imbalance.

Its focus is on the social and political life in Ottoman Damascus and, in particular, on the great notable families of that city who were to play a disproportionate role in politically activating the Arab nationalist idea before World War I. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the ways such long-term factors as the Ottoman reformation, European economic expansion and agrarian commercialization in Syria encouraged rival and socially differentiated networks of locally influential families in Damascus to merge into a socially cohesive upper class. Under the umbrella of a reinvigorated Ottoman central authority, this class of landowners and bureaucrats produced a new urban leadership which dominated local politics after 1860.

Although this leadership faced no serious challenges from further down the social scale in Damascus, it was by no means free of internal conflicts. Economic and political competition between and within upperclass family networks was always rife. Chapter 3 focuses on the ways this factionalism comes to be expressed in ideological terms, after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 shook the established balance of power between the Arab provincial elites and the Turkish authorities.

Most members of the Syrian political élite opted to identify with Arabism only after European and Sharifian troops occupied the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. For these men the occupation signified the final defeat of the Empire. Consequently its prevailing ideology, Ottomanism, no longer served their interests. Their switch to Arabism was a convenient one, designed both to fill an ideological void and to protect their standing in local society. With no other viable option left, they embraced Arabism hoping to mold it in their own image and thereby to continue practicing politics from a position of strength.

In the case of the older generation of Damascus notables, who had collaborated closely with the CUP until the Turkish defeat, shifting allegiance to Arabism was particularly difficult. The extermination, exile or quasi-conversion of their chief Arabist political rivals before and during the War, some of whom were relatives, created a considerable amount of bad blood. The draconian measures adopted by the CUP aroused the anger and hatred of many young Arab nationalists and turned several prominent older notables against the Turks and their allies in Damascus before the end of the War. But since the Arabists were accused of intriguing with the declared wartime enemies of the Ottoman state–France and Britain–the accusation of treason against Islam and the Empire could be used against them. As long as the CUP was in control, and the Empire still alive, anger and discontent with the Unionist notables, who had been unable to save their own, remained subdued.