Muhammad Ali of Egypt

Muhammad Ali was an Albanian-born Ottoman officer who made himself master of Egypt in 1805 and ruled it, formally as the sultan's governor but in practice as an independent sovereign, until 1848. He built a modern army and navy, state-run farms and factories and new schools, conquered Sudan and, at his peak, held Syria, Arabia and Crete, even threatening the Ottoman capital. He is widely called the founder of modern Egypt, though critics stress the heavy burden his projects placed on Egyptian peasants.

Muhammad Ali was born on 4 March 1769 to an Albanian family and grew up in the Ottoman port of Kavala, where his father, a tobacco merchant, commanded a small local unit. He collected taxes for his uncle and married a wealthy cousin. In 1801 he went to Egypt as a junior commander in an Albanian contingent sent by the Ottoman Empire to restore its rule after the French occupation begun by Napoleon.

The French withdrawal left Ottoman troops and the Mamluk beys, the old military elite, fighting for control. Muhammad Ali played the two sides against each other and courted Cairo's religious scholars and notables, who in 1805 demanded that he replace the Ottoman governor. The sultan agreed, and he was appointed governor, or wali, that May. On 1 March 1811 he invited the Mamluk leaders to a ceremony at the Cairo Citadel, where his troops surrounded and killed them, and then hunted down the rest across Egypt.

To pay for a European-style army, Muhammad Ali took control of almost all farmland and made the state the sole buyer and seller of crops, profiting especially from a new long-staple cotton. Irrigation canals were dug by forced labour. He built arsenals, a shipyard at Alexandria and textile mills, sent students to Europe, opened military, technical and medical schools, and founded the Bulaq press, the first in the Arab world. Conscription and forced labour were deeply resented; some peasants fled their villages or maimed themselves to avoid the army.

At the sultan's request his son Tusun led an expedition against the First Saudi State in 1811, retaking the Hejaz the following year; another son, Ibrahim, crushed the Saudis in a two-year campaign. In 1820 he sent an army of 5,000 to conquer Sudan for its gold and slaves, and captives were forced into his army. During the Greek War of Independence he sent Ibrahim to Greece with 16,000 soldiers, but on 20 October 1827 a British, French and Russian fleet destroyed the Egyptian navy at Navarino.

Denied Syria in compensation, Muhammad Ali invaded it in 1831. Ibrahim took Acre after a six-month siege and routed the Ottoman army at Konya in December 1832, leaving the road to Constantinople open. European diplomacy produced a settlement in 1833 that gave him Crete and the Hejaz and made Ibrahim governor of Syria. When the sultan attacked again in 1839, Ibrahim destroyed his army at Nezib. This time Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia intervened; after a naval blockade and the fall of Acre, Muhammad Ali gave up Syria, Crete and the Hejaz in 1840 and cut his army to 18,000 men. In return he and his descendants received hereditary rule over Egypt and Sudan.

After the Treaty of Balta Liman forced Egypt to give up its trade monopolies, Muhammad Ali's health and judgement declined. In 1848 his son Ibrahim took over government but died within months, and power passed to his grandson Abbas I. Muhammad Ali died at Alexandria on 2 August 1849 and was buried in the mosque he had built in the Cairo Citadel. His dynasty ruled Egypt until the revolution of 1952 led by officers including Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egyptian historians and public opinion generally see him as a nation builder, while others regard him as a foreign ruler who used Egypt for his family's ambitions.

Our 1815 map shows Egypt early in his rule, still nominally an Ottoman province, while the 1878 map shows Egypt and Sudan under the rule of his descendants.