The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism During the Muhammad 'Ali Period.

• Author: Jankowski, James

It is important to note what this book is not. It is not an examination of Egyptian expansion in the reign of Muhammad Ali. There is no discussion of either the diplomatic or the military aspects of Egyptian foreign policy in the early nineteenth century; readers interested in these subjects will have to look elsewhere. Nor is it based on new source materials. It draws its information from the impressive secondary literature concerning the Muhammad Ali era which has appeared in recent years, supplemented by occasional use of the contemporary accounts of such authors as al-Jabarti, and Nicolas Turc, and European travellers.

What it is is a study of the domestic conditions of Egypt in the early nineteenth century and an argument that domestic factors were the main cause of Muhammad Ali's attempts at foreign conquest. Professor Lawson's fundamental concern is the theoretical one of how to explain the adoption of expansionist foreign policies. "The basic question this study addresses can be thus phrased in the following way: given a favorable set of international circumstances, what are the domestic political conditions that lead a regime to act upon an opportunity for a policy of foreign expansionism?". Muhammad Ali's Egypt is the specific instance of foreign expansionism which he has chosen to use as a case study in answering this question.

The first two chapters of the work are primarily theoretical. Chapter one offers a critique of both the "conventional" explanations found in the historical literature for Muhammad Ali's foreign policies and the weaknesses of "structural" interpretations of expansionism when applied to early nineteenth-century Egypt. Chapter two lays out the basic framework of Lawson's alternative explanation of Egyptian expansionism under Muhammad Ali. Building upon recent neo-Marxian analysis, he maintains that the roots of Egyptian expansionism are to be found in a combination of "accumulation crises" in the rural as well as the urban economy of early nineteenth century Egypt which produced increased competition over economic resources between different social groups, and the concomitant emergence of "subordinate groups" (primarily the urban artisanat) who challenged the political and economic hegemony of the landlord-bureaucratic-merchant coalition dominating Egypt at the time. "Under these circumstances extending the regime's control over adjacent territories to the south, north, and northeast provided the country's...