Muhammad Ali Pasha
Muhammad Ali arrived in Egypt as a junior officer in an Ottoman expedition, took the country for himself within four years, and spent forty building a state that nearly destroyed the empire he nominally served. He was an Albanian from a small port on the Macedonian coast, the son of a tobacco trader, and he came to Egypt in 1801 with the force sent to expel the French. What he found was a vacuum: the French had broken the Mamluk military caste that had governed Egypt for five centuries, and the Ottoman governor could not restore order. He manoeuvred between the factions for four years, and in 1805 the clerics and notables of Cairo declared him governor themselves and the sultan confirmed a fact he could not reverse. The Mamluk beys were still there. In March 1811 he invited some five hundred of them to the Citadel for a ceremony, and had them shot in a defile on the way out. What followed was the first attempt anywhere outside Europe to build a European-style state, and it was thorough. He conscripted the Egyptian peasantry into an army drilled by French veterans, which had never been done; he made the state the sole buyer and seller of cotton and grain, and used the proceeds for factories, arsenals, a fleet, canals, a medical school and the first Arabic printing press in the country. Cotton became Egypt's cash crop and its dependency. He then used the army. He conquered Sudan for gold and slaves, destroyed the first Saudi state in Arabia on the sultan's behalf, and lost a fleet at Navarino intervening in Greece. In 1831 he turned on the empire itself: his son took Syria, destroyed two Ottoman armies and reached within striking distance of the capital, and did it again in 1839. Both times the European powers stopped him, because a strong successor state was more dangerous to them than a weak empire. The settlement of 1841 took Syria back and gave him what he had really wanted, hereditary rule of Egypt for his family, which lasted until 1952.
- Lived: 1769 CE – 1849 CE
- Nationality: Egyptian
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
