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Usurpers of Technology: Train Robbery and Theft in Egypt, 1876–1904

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2021

Xiaoyue Li Open the ORCID record for Xiaoyue Li [Opens in a new window]
Xiaoyue Li*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines banditry, embezzlement, and other insider crimes along Egyptian railway lines during a period when British officials exerted centralized control over the Egyptian railway and financial austerity had a negative impact on the rail sector. By exploring the motives and tactics of railway crimes, I posit that criminals, by making claims on and use of the technology outside the purview of state regulations, expressed their heterogeneous desires to redistribute social wealth, repurpose the technological promise of modern railways, and confound intentions of colonial governance. Using new archival materials, this article utilizes a bottom-up approach to examine grassroots activism, everyday knowledge, informal networks, and the social mores and norms that criminals harnessed to discern infrastructural vulnerabilities and elude surveillance from the colonial state. Ultimately, I contend that criminal acts uncovered social crises otherwise hidden under the shadow of the exterior prosperity and stability of late 19th-century Egypt.

Keywords

colonialismbanditsEgyptinfrastructurerailways
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 195 - 212
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 The Arabic word ghafīr is rooted in the verb ghafar, “to watch, to guard.” In the Egyptian context, it denotes a wide range of security personnel outside the government police system. In this article, ghaffirs vary from railway staff responsible for public safety to privately hired security guards, or young male sentries at the service of village shaykhs. As I use the term, ghaffirs were decentralized forces who protected the train's safety in stations and villages, supplementing the modern centralized police force (shurṭā or ḍābiṭ) that was becoming widespread during the late 19th century. For British reform of the ghaffir system in Egypt, see Tollefson, Harold H., Policing Islam: The British Occupation of Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Struggle over Control of the Police, 1882–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 29–32Google Scholar; and Bakr, ʿAbd al-Wahab, al-Bulis al-Misri: Madkhal li-Tarikh al-Idara al-Misriyya, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub wa-l-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya, 2016), 311–12Google Scholar.

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3 Ibid.

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6 Ibid.

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9 Hayʾa al-ʿAmma, Egyptian Railways, 10.

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21 The dominant types of freight locomotives in late 19th-century Egypt were 0-4-0, 0-6-0, and 2-4-0, with maximum speeds that ranged from 35 to 45 kilometers per hour. At the turn of the 20th-century, the ERA started to introduce 2-6-0 “Mogul” and 4-4-0 “American” types of locomotives. These more advanced and powerful engines could reach a maximum speed of above 60 kilometers per hour. DD, DWQ [2001-021082], 1876; Wiener, Lionel, L'Égypte et ses chemins de fer (Brussels: M. Weissenbruch, 1932), 251–84Google Scholar.

22 DD, DWQ [2001-021584], 1884. Zeinab Abul-Magd also records a handful of banditry cases that targeted European steamships prior to the 1882 British conquest. See Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 107–11.

23 DD, DWQ [2001-021584], 1884.

24 DD, DWQ [2001-021135], September 1889.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Hobsbawm clearly states that bandits “are not regarded as simple criminals by public opinions.” See Bandits, 1.

28 The local police said they “were unable to take measures” regarding the gang. But they did not specify their difficulties. DD, DWQ [2001-021135], September 1889.

29 Ibid.

30 Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires, 149–54.

31 According to ʿAbd al-Wahab Bakr, Muhammad Ali Pasha intended to build a system of “collective responsibility” (al-masʾūl al-jamāʿiyya) such that centralized police officers and local ghaffirs jointly maintained local security in rural Egypt. However, the system deteriorated into a “system of local guards” (nizām al-khafr al-ʾahālī) out of the control of the central government. See al-Bulis al-Misri, 79–83.

32 DD, DWQ [2001-021570], December 1883–March 1885.

33 DD, DWQ [2001-012195], October 1893. For similar cases of placing obstacles on the rail, see DD, DWQ [2001-021089], June 1883; DD, DWQ [2001-021092], date unknown; and DD, DWQ [2001-021112], June 1884.

34 DD, DWQ [2001-021265], November 1881.

35 More complicated designs were introduced to increase traffic efficiency. For instance, at some point in the rail a loop could be formed to allow two trains to cross simultaneously. For details of the block signaling system, see Insell, R. J., “Signalling and its Connection with the Construction and Management of Railways,” in The Institution of Railway Signal Engineers for the Advancement of the Science of Railway Signalling, Proceedings: Inaugural Session, 1913 (Manchester, UK: H. Rawson, 1914), 14–22Google Scholar.

36 DD, DWQ [2001-021626], January 1885–February 1889; DD, DWQ [2001-021628], January 1885; DD, DWQ [2001-021649], October 1885.

37 DD, DWQ [2001-021626], January 1885–February 1889.

38 DD, DWQ [2001-021041], April 1892.

39 Khaled Fahmy has extensively discussed ḍābiṭiyya as regional centers through which the Egyptian state expanded its power. See “The Police and the People in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Die Welt des Islams 39, no. 3 (1999): 340–77.

40 DD, DWQ [2001-010866], November–December 1885.

41 DD, DWQ [2001-012157], February 1893.

42 Two cases show that provincial governors had to inform the Minister of Interior when railway policemen broke the regulations, and the minister made the final decision on how to handle issues. See DWQ [2001-012203], December 1893; and DD, DWQ [2001-024771], January– June 1895.

43 State-employed railway policemen followed the Ottoman military ranks, i.e., bimbashi (binbaşı), shawish (çavuş), ombashi (onbaşı), and nafar (nefer). DD, DWQ [2001-021162], 1893.

44 Ibid.

45 Wiener, L'Égypte, 170–71; “In the Nile Valley: Train Operation in Modern Egypt,” Railway Wonders of the World 2, part 41 (1935): 1314; Hayʾa al-ʿAmma, Egyptian Railways, 156–57.

46 The first application of the automatic signaling system was on the New York—New Haven—Hartford Railroad in 1866. For technical details and history, see The Institution of Railway Signal Engineers for the Advancement of the Science of Railway Signalling, Proceedings: Session, 1917 (Manchester, UK: H. Rawson and Co., 1918), 9–35.

47 Railway Signaling and Communications, vol. 13 (New York: Simmons-Boardman, 1920), 269.

48 During the colonial period, the City Police existed in Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, Suez, and Port Said. Other Egyptian cities and towns were under the jurisdiction of their respective provincial police. See Bakr, al-Bulis al-Misri, 255.

49 DD, DWQ [2001-012204], January 1894.

50 DD, DWQ [2001-024969], October 1892–November 1893.

51 DD, DWQ [2001-021099], August 1883.

52 Ibid.

53 Boghos Nubar was the son of the Armenian-Egyptian politician Nubar Nubarian Pasha who was in control of the Egyptian railway system in the 1850s and early 1860s and served as the prime minister twice, from 1884 to 1888 and from 1894 to 1895. His son Boghos was appointed Egyptian director of the ERA during the 1880s, alongside a British and a French director. Goldschmidt, Arthur, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 157–58Google Scholar; Adalian, Rouben P., Historical Dictionary of Armenia, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 226Google Scholar.

54 DD, DWQ [2001-021099], August 1883.

55 Ibid.

56 For E. P. Thompson's concept of “the moral economy of the crowd,” see “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, no. 50 (1971): 76–136. For James Scott's concept of “subsistence ethics,” see The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 2–3.

57 For inadequate payment of Egyptian policemen in general, see Tollefson, Policing Islam, 13, 31–33, 56, 92, 118.

58 DD, DWQ [2001-021162], 1893.

59 DD, DWQ [2001-021024], April 1880. For a similar case, see DD, DWQ [2001-021099], August 1883.

60 DD, DWQ [2001-024969], October 1892–November 1893.

61 DD, DWQ [2001-021047], 1881.

62 DD, DWQ [2001-021626], January 1885–February 1889.

63 Kantar is an Egyptian unit used for weighing cotton. One kantar is equal to 99.05 pounds, or 45.02 kilogram. The statistics of lost goods are derived from DD, DWQ [2001-021047], 1881.

64 DD, DWQ [2001-021020], April 1880.

65 DD, DWQ [2001-021079], February 1883.

66 DD, DWQ [2001-021123], October 1886.

67 DD, DWQ [2001-021626], January 1885–February 1889.

68 Ibid.

69 Administration des chemins de fer, des télégraphes et du port d'Alexandrie, Résumé du rapport du conseil d'administration sur l'exercice 1881 (Alexandria: Imp. Du Journal al-Ahram, 1883), 1–2; Owen, Roger, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1969), 186, 207–11Google Scholar.

70 DD, DWQ [2001-012204], January 1894.

71 Hall, J. W., The Outbreak of Pseudococcus Sacchari, Ckll., on the Sugar Cane of Egypt (Cairo: Government Press, 1922), 1–5Google Scholar.

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73 Owen, Cotton, 102.

74 At the turn of the 20th century, the main crops of Egypt were rice, corn, and sorghum. Wheat and barley were massively imported. Foaden, Notes, 51–53; Archives nationales d'outer-mer, Aix-en-Provence, France [4101COL889], 1914; Amin, Galal A., Food Supply and Economic Development, with Special Reference to Egypt (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 107–11Google Scholar.

75 Frederick Engels exemplifies a classical Marxist approach to crime studies. In his observation of the 19th-century British working class, he concludes that poverty and capitalist exploitation were accountable for moral decline and increasing theft. See Engels, Frederick, The Condition of the Working Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources (London: Panther Books, 1969), 159–62Google Scholar.

76 Austerity is often related to post–World War I European economic policies that led to the Great Depression (1929–39). However, Mark Blyth shows that the intellectual origins of austerity can be observed as far back as the 17th century. See Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 104–31. I suggest in this article that from 1876 to 1904 colonies like Egypt served as laboratories for experimenting with various austerity policies before they were systematically adopted in Europe after WWI.

77 Khedive Ismaʿil borrowed £3,000,000 from Messrs. Frühling and Göschen to build the Cairo-Minya line. For the Minya-Asyut line, Ismaʿil used a portion from his borrowing of £32,000,000 from the Imperial Ottoman Bank and other European banks. Of the actual £20,000,000 that Egypt received, the majority was used to pay off prior bank interest. In comparison, public investment in railways between 1876 to 1904 was minimal. The largest public project during the British colonial years was extension of the Upper Egypt line from Asyut to Qina between 1892 and 1897, which cost 942,050 L.E. The exchange rate of the British pound sterling to the Egyptian pound between 1885 and 1914 was 1:0.975. See Clinton Dawkins, “The Egyptian Public Debt,” North American Review 173, no. 539 (1901): 487–507; and Wiener, L'Égypte, 98–99.

78 Tunçer, Sovereign Debt, 48–49.

79 For a list of expenditures from Ismaʿil's infrastructure projects, see Pierre Crabitès, Ismail: The Maligned Khedive, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 130.

80 Aaron Jakes has provided detailed accounts of the rise of agricultural financing in late 19th-century Egypt. See Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 84–112.

81 Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's ʿUrabi Movement (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999), 190–212.

82 The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir was an armed conflict between the ʿUrabists and the British military at a strategic point on the railway between Ismailia and Cairo, which ended with British victory. See War Office, The National Archives, United Kingdom, 33/40 no. 209, “Report on the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir,” 10 September 1882.

83 Partha Chatterjee argues that “political society” differs from the Western model of “civil society” in its emphasis on family and neighborhood as the primary attachments of individuals within the local community, creating a form of community-based participatory politics. See “Community in the East,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 6 (1998): 277–82; and also Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

84 Mohammad Ramadan Salama, “Reading the Modernist Event from the Margins of History: The Denshawai Incident, the Trial of Djamila Bouhired and the Question of Egyptian Modernity” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2005); Luke, Kimberly, “Order or Justice: The Denshawai Incident and British Imperialism,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 278–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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89 DD, DWQ [2001-021128], 1887.

90 Yacoub Artin, The Right of Landed Property in Egypt, trans. Edward Abbott van Dyck (London: Wyman, 1885), 202. The boundary of land expropriation by the government-owned Egyptian State Railway increased to 40 meters by 1891. See DD, DWQ [2001-011875], 1891.

91 Tignor, Modernization, 244.

92 These new privately owned railway companies included but were not limited to the Alexandria and Ramleh Railway Company (est. 1863), the Cairo Metrpolitan and Helwan Railway Company (est. 1888), Société Anonyme des Chemins de Fer de la Basse Egypte (est. 1896), the Egyptian Delta Light Railways (est. 1897), and the Fayoum Light Railways (est. 1898). See Wiener, L'Égypte, 409–631.

93 Alleaume, Ghislaine, “An Industrial Revolution in Agriculture? Some Observations on the Evolution of Rural Egypt in the Nineteenth Century,” in Agriculture in Egypt from Pharaonic to Modern Times, ed. Bowman, Alan. K. and Rogan, Eugene (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 335Google Scholar.

94 Majlis al-Nidhar collection (Council of Ministers; hereafter MN), DWQ [0075-008643], June 1907.

95 Gerber, Haim, The Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987), 103Google Scholar; Brown, Peasant Politics, 25–31; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 69–70; Henry Habib Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, rev. ed., trans. John A. Williams (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 18.

96 For instance, a case of forced eviction occurred in Sharqia province in which peasant houses were removed and replaced by houses for road menders. See DD, DWQ [2001-021555], March 1883.

97 For instance, some fifty land-deprived peasants looted the station of Abu Hammad. See DD, DWQ [2001-021105], September 1883.

98 DD, DWQ [2001-021576], January 1884; DD, DWQ [2001-021594], March 1884.

99 For the administrative structure of the ERA, see Hayʾa al-ʿAmma, Egyptian Railways, 9–24.

100 For a few examples of such cases, see MN, DWQ [0075-017640], date unknown; MN, DWQ [0075-015920], 1905; MN, DWQ [0075-011341], 1908; and MN, DWQ [0075-017639], 1910.

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102 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 2.

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