A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham Page A

Duckworth then sailed to Alexandria and landed an expeditionary force to forestall an expected new French offensive in the Mediterranean.
    However, the British were rebuffed. Al-Jabarti records that Muhammad Ali’s officials told them that they had no interest in letting them land to protect Egypt from the French, for this was the sultan’s territory. The Mamlukes refused the British offer of support because they would not join Christians to fight Muslims. Popular resistance was aroused and inflicted a sharp defeat on the British at Rosetta. Muhammad Ali astutely avoided a full confrontation with the British at Alexandria and agreed on lenient terms for the withdrawal of their naval and military forces. He retained a permanent suspicion of British intentions towards Egypt, and ultimately Britain would be his nemesis – but that was many years in the future.
    Muhammad Ali still had to face the Mamluke challenge to his rule, and his campaign against the beys lasted several years. It was no simple matter as, despite their unpopularity, they were entrenched in Egyptian society and his own Ottoman troops were unruly and demanding. He persuaded some Mamluke beys to settle on the outskirts of Cairo, where he could supervise them. Some remained in Upper Egypt, which they tried to make their stronghold. Muhammad Ali then defeated them in a series of small engagements. There remained a rump of beys in Cairo of whose loyalty he was justifiably uncertain. On 11 March 1811 he invited them to a reception at the Citadel, where he had them massacred. Tradition has it that only one escaped – by leaping with his horse from the Citadel.
    The way was now open for Muhammad Ali to realize his dream of turning Egypt into a powerful centralized state which, while nominally an Ottoman province, would in reality be independent. Several factors were favourable to his aims. Although the Egyptian people had become accustomed to instability after more than two centuries during which the Mamlukes had struggled for power bothamong themselves and with a series of Ottoman governors, they longed for the security on which the country’s prosperity depended. Although the
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and other notables had played an important role in bringing Muhammad Ali to power, few of them had any relish for official responsibility. Moreover, Egypt – ‘the gift of the Nile’, as Herodotus observed – lends itself to centralized rule: anyone who could control the river and its delta would dominate the country. All the aspiring despot needed was to dispose of his rivals.
    Muhammad Ali made liberal use of the sword and the gallows to stamp out the lawlessness which had plagued the country for many decades. The natural commercial and agricultural wealth of the country was then at once displayed. He set up a highly centralized administrative bureaucracy with the aim of raising revenues and combating the corruption and tax-fraud which had become endemic. At the same time he tried both to modernize and to expand the economy. The growing of high-quality long-staple cotton and sugar was introduced during his reign. He was prepared to seek advice and technical expertise from any quarter, including Christian merchants in Egypt and Europeans. As an admirer of France he invited French engineers to Egypt and with their help built dams and canals and introduced in the Delta a system of perennial irrigation to replace the ancient basin irrigation using the Nile flood. One million new acres of land were brought under cultivation. Hitherto, Egyptian industry had been confined to the manufacture of textiles; he now established a range of factories, protected with heavy tariffs against imports. The factories were crude and primitive, but they were the first of their kind in Egypt.
    Muhammad Ali learned to read only at the age of forty-seven, but he understood the importance of education. He sent several hundred young Egyptians to Paris (and a few to London) to study industry, engineering,