7 - Agricultural changes

Summary

The concept that economic systems are self-regulating and that in time they will work out for the greatest benefit of man is one that came in with laissez-faire reasoning and post-dated Muhammad Ali's thinking. Muhammad Ali thought in economic terms, as does every merchant; to him and to his age the congruence of economics and politics was obvious as it had been obvious to the mamluks and the tujjar when they had tried to control the resources of the country, with less success than the wali had.

A mercantilist approach to government could work only when the government was centralized and had a free hand in managing its trade. Two requirements arose from that approach. The first was that such a government must needs become independent from the Ottoman empire in order to run its financial affairs as it pleased. That was also the conclusion reached by Ali Bey al-Kabir. A second and equally important requirement was that pursuit of such a policy should not conflict with the economic interests of other, more powerful, mercantile countries.

The first steps taken by the new administration were then in the direction of restoring fiscal equilibrium in the country and raising money. When the mamluks in the immediate past had been faced with a similar problem of how to raise money, they had come up with an easy answer: forced loans and increased taxation.