Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, Roger Owen, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp436 "As much a part of Egypt's history as he is of Britain's," writes Roger Owen in the introduction to his fine new biography, Sir Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, ruled Egypt in all but name from 1883 in the aftermath of Britain's crushing of the nationalist movement led by Ahmed Orabi to 1907, when he retired due to ill-health. Appointed ostensibly only to oversee the evacuation of British forces from the country and the restoration of the Khedive Tawfiq, Cromer managed to entrench both himself and the British presence in Cairo, setting up a system of British control the last remnants of which only disappeared some 70 years later. How he did so, and the parts played by local politics, British official policy and Cromer's own agenda, makes a fascinating story, with, as Owen, points out, some intriguing parallels with the present. Cromer, like many others of his class and generation, cut his teeth in India, serving under successive British viceroys in the 1870s and early 1880s. An otherwise undistinguished military career, helped along by his membership of the Barings banking family and marked only by periods of service in Corfu and Malta, suddenly gave way to something quite different when a cousin, Lord Northbrook, was appointed viceroy of India in 1872, he in turn appointing Evelyn Baring, as Cromer then was, as his private secretary. In India, Baring showed a ready talent for the kind of work expected of him: chiefly, manipulating the press and learning how to present Northbrook's policies in the best possible light both in Calcutta, then seat of the British government of India, and in London, where the often considerable latitude allowed proconsuls abroad depended on good relations with the British government and Foreign Office. Northbrook resigned as viceroy in 1875, following disagreements with the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, and this brought Baring's first stint in India to an end. Owen says that the lessons learned from Northbrook, "the importance of low taxation, of sympathy with the peasant population, of keeping just in advance of local public opinion, and of listening carefully to the uncensored views to be found in the vernacular newspapers," informed Baring's subsequent career, as did the lesson of keeping on the right side of the London Foreign Office, disagreement with which could stymie viceregal initiative. Baring's second stint in India, under another viceroy, Lord Ripon, from 1880 to 1883, was of much greater significance to his career, but of greater import still was the period Baring spent in Egypt from 1877 to 1880 "controlling Egypt's finances" as British commissioner at the Caisse de la dette publique, the debt administration set up in 1875 as part of the arrangements to deal with Egypt's failure to meet the interest on its international debt, held chiefly by French and English bankers. In 1876, Owen writes, this debt "stood at just over �68 million, necessitating annual interest payments of nearly �5,700,000, or some sixty per cent of what were then believed to be the country's yearly revenues. Like the leaders of the Ottoman Empire and many large states in Latin America, Egypt's rulers, Said Pasha (1854-62) and Ismail Pasha (1863-79), had taken advantage of the fast-growing capital markets of London and Paris to borrow increasingly large sums of money both in support of their own dynastic ambitions and for the development of their country's infrastructures in terms of the railways, canals, and ports which they believed necessary for future economic progress." Unfortunately, poor management, European sharp practice and the "hand-to-mouth financial expedients" practiced by Ismail had allowed this situation to get out of hand, attempts at consolidating the debt in 1868 and 1873 having failed and led to the crisis situation of 1875/76. The European powers then intervened, imposing a schedule of debt repayments on the Egyptian government and setting up an office within the ministry of finance, more or less taking over Egyptian financial affairs, to ensure that this schedule was met. The British representative in this office was Evelyn Baring. Regarding Baring's role while British commissioner at the Caisse, Owen makes the point that, having handed over effective control of his country's finances to the European debt commissioners, Ismail had signed over much more than simply control over debt repayments. For debt repayment on this scale to work, Baring argued, a much more reliable method of calculating and taxing the country's revenues was required, and this in turn would require the modernisation of the administration and the systematic interference of the Caisse in all aspects of the country's financial affairs, from revenue collection to government expenditures. In particular, Ismail would be required to surrender all his personal property to the state in return for the institution of a civil list. When, in 1879, Ismail refused to agree to the Caisse 's instructions, pressure was put on the Ottoman Sultan, who duly issued a firman replacing him with his son Tawfiq and ushering in a more pliable Egyptian government. It was under Tawfiq that a law was passed in 1880 implementing the Caisse 's instructions. Of these developments, Owen says that "much of this sounds vaguely familiar", noting both the parallel present indebtedness of the countries of the Southern hemisphere to Northern bankers, and the pressure brought upon them to reform their finances, and much else, as a result. Indeed, "the mid-nineteenth-century European response to the growing indebtedness of non-European states had already produced its own justification for what would now be called 'free- market' reforms, to be carried through, in the teeth of a strong nationalist reaction, by a handful of local politicians identified by their western financial advisors as the leaders of the 'reform' party." In Egypt's case, "strong nationalist reaction" was not far away, with British forces bombarding Alexandria and occupying Egypt in 1882 in order to put down the nationalist movement led by Orabi in protest at the country's apparent takeover by European financial interests, and to restore a government in Egypt that would carry out European wishes. Called upon to return to Egypt from India in the wake of these events in May 1883, this time with the rank of British Consul- General, Cromer at first advised his superiors in London that the occupation should end as swiftly as was practicable and the previous system of indirect interference in Egyptian affairs reverted to once the Khedive had reasserted his authority. He was, he said, "strongly opposed to the establishment of a protectorate." Nevertheless, the interest of Cromer's subsequent career derives from the fact that while a British protectorate was not declared in Egypt until 1914, the British being content until then to preserve the fiction that the country was a province of the Ottoman Empire over which they exercised no special control, he not only changed his mind on the matter of evacuation but also increased his own personal power in the country such that little of importance could happen in Egypt without his say-so. Not for nothing does Owen head his account of Cromer's early years as British Consul in Cairo with the words "digging in". Yet, in developing his ideas about how Egypt should be run and the nature of the British presence in it, Cromer faced three problems. The first of these, the still notionally independent Egyptian government, proved the easiest of the three to manage: required to place its financial affairs under European tutelage in order to meet the terms of its debt obligations, little effective resistance could be mounted to British encroachment on every field of policy and administration. Moreover, the presence of British troops in Egypt, not withdrawn despite promises to do so, and the example that had been made of Ismail and Orabi, provided useful additional pressure, if such were needed, even though their presence had nothing to do with the work of the debt commissioners or of the Caisse. The possibility of this additional pressure proved particularly valuable when Abbas Hilmi became Khedive following the sudden death of Tawfiq in 1892 and showed an alarming desire, for Cromer, of wanting to run his country's affairs. More important, at least in the short term, than the attitudes of the Egyptian government to Britain's new role as occupier of the country, was the hostility of other European powers, especially the French, to any permanent increase of British influence in the region, as well as the attitudes of the British Foreign Office in London. Regarding the former, Cromer's task soon became to minimise the role played by the debt administrators in Egyptian affairs, since the bulk of the country's debt was held by the French, and France was impatient at what it saw as British attempts to establish the "facts on the ground" of British rule in Egypt despite official protestations to the contrary. From an initial position sympathetic to speedy British evacuation once the Khedive's rule had been re-established, Cromer moved to one considering that Britain had a special role to play in Egyptian affairs and that this should be strengthened despite the protests of the other European powers. "Baring's actions and arguments ... had helped to place Egypt on a path along which the only logical destination was not self-government but annexation," Owen writes. "In other words, the country would now be subject to the familiar colonial process by which the more reforms were implemented, the more further reform was seen as absolutely necessary; and that the more extensive these reforms became, the more Baring and the British believed they could only be executed by European personnel." In the event, French obstruction of British actions in Egypt only ceased in 1904, when the signature of the Entente cordiale between the two countries recognised French influence in Morocco in return for British in Egypt. Regarding the relationship between Cromer's growing sense of his own, and the official policy carried out by the British government and Foreign Office in London, Conservative governments under Lord Salisbury could more easily be prevailed upon to look the other way, or at least not greatly interfere, in whatever it was that Cromer was doing in Egypt, while Liberal administrations could be more difficult to influence. Radical elements on the Liberal party's backbenches were generally unsympathetic to expansionism abroad, especially if it meant public expense, and they were more liable to listen to Cromer's, and the occupation's, foremost British critic, Wilfrid Blunt. In sections headed "Convincing London" and "Managing the News", Owen shows how Cromer skillfully targeted both Salisbury, at first sceptical of the need to garrison Egypt indefinitely, bringing him round to his point of view, and the British newspaper-reading public, by stressing "the value of British-inspired reforms," while developing "views of the country and its people, which suggested that Egyptians were incapable of managing their own affairs without European assistance." Cromer's period of greatest influence in Egypt's affairs came in the 1890s and early 1900s, before the Dinshawi incident in 1904 began raising questions regarding the true character of the British occupation and the return of a Liberal government to power in Britain in 1905 ended the cosy relationship Cromer had been able to establish with the Conservatives. Cromer's detachment of the Sudan from the Ottoman Empire and his establishment of "a separate Anglo-Egyptian position by right of conquest" following Kitchener's defeat of the Mahdist forces at Omdurman in 1898 had ended French attempts at establishing influence in the region, and his economic and social reforms, strongly defended in the two volumes of Modern Egypt, Cromer's account of his rule, that appeared following his retirement in 1907, had received high praise not only in London but also in the pro-British Egyptian press, chiefly The Egyptian Gazette, founded for the purpose in 1880, and the Lebanese-Syrian controlled Al-Muqattam, founded in 1889 by Faris Nimr. ( Al-Ahram was considered to be "pro- French.") Yet, the publication of Blunt's Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt in 1906, to which Cromer's Modern Egypt was supposed to be a reply, together with the Dinshawi incident, during which four villagers from Dinshawi were hanged, and others imprisoned or flogged, following the death of a British officer during a shooting trip in the Delta, cast a pall over Cromer's administration, "popular outrage orchestrated by the nationalist press [helping] to turn a group of individual critics of the occupation into a popular movement with its own parties and programmes". Young nationalist leaders, such as Mustafa Kamil, began increasingly to scrutinise, and protest against, the policies Cromer was carrying out on the country's behalf, and it must have begun to seem obvious that Cromer's idea of the Egyptian "national interest", or of Egypt itself, while sometimes different to ideas entertained in London, did not correspond to that of growing sections of the Egyptian population. In his summary of the results of Cromer's rule, Owen points out that Cromer was unwilling or unable to recognise that "that there could be any basic contradiction between the interests of Britain and those of its colonies", drawing on his Indian experience to downplay the significance of nationalist movements and to refuse to implement protectionist measures that would have stimulated local industry if that meant interfering with free trade and thus affecting the interests of British manufacturers. It was, Owen says, "all too easy for his opponents in India and Egypt to make the... case... that local interests were being sacrificed to British ones and industrial interests to the notion that large parts of the Empire were, and should remain, predominantly agricultural economies." Furthermore, Cromer, perhaps "trapped in the British Indian notion that the education of more than a small Indian elite was leading to the production of a surplus of over- educated, underemployed agitators," restricted educational opportunities "to a tiny number of children from well-to-do families...educated in the state schools in foreign languages without any reference to their own history and culture, while the bulk of the population had to make do with the rudimentary training provided by the kuttabs," or village elementary schools. Owen quotes Mustafa Kamil to the effect that this policy was designed to destroy "all patriotic sentiments" among the Egyptian population, and Muhammed Abdu, whom Cromer appointed to the country's Legislative Council in 1899, to the effect that "its purpose was to provide training for bureaucrats rather than a good general education with proper moral and spiritual training." Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayad wrote in Al-Jarida, the leading nationalist paper of the time to which many of the country's leading figures contributed, that there was no "'Egyptianness' in the state school system and no study of the real political world." "One thing Cromer lacked," Owen writes, "like almost every member of his generation, was a model of capitalist development in a non-European setting which might act as his guide. With his eyes firmly focused on the interests of the rural population, he could not understand the speed and intensity with which increasing agricultural prosperity, combined with the huge growth in foreign investment in Egypt during the decade 1896--1907, helped to create an expanding middle class of bankers, investors, merchants, and would-be entrepreneurs. Nor, perhaps, did he want to envisage such a phenomenon. Far easier to present his British audience with the picture of a mongrel nation full of peasants and sheikhs so stuck in their traditional ways that only a European outsider could bring them the law, order, water, and regular taxation they needed to make best use of their simple assets...Like the British in India, he was caught, in David Washbrook's trenchant phrase, 'between inventing an Oriental society and abolishing it'". Finally, this excellent new life of Cromer, the first since 1932, will be required reading for anyone interested in modern Egyptian history. It shows with admirable clarity and attention to detail the margins of manoeuvre enjoyed by one of Britain's proconsuls during the high point of the British Empire, demonstrating how decisions were the result of a complex process of negotiation involving local politics, the wider international balance of power and the changing personnel and opinions of the British Foreign Office. Not least, however, it also shows how the accidents of one man's life, together with his personal convictions, acted to extend and solidify Britain's occupation of Egypt, whereas, had Cromer not been what he was, and circumstances not been so propitious to his imposition of personal rule, one can perhaps imagine Britain's keeping its promise to withdraw from Egypt after 1883, thus affecting the entire future course of Egyptian development. By David Tresilian
