The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914

5. Strikes and Protests under Colonial Rule

5 Strikes and Protests under Colonial Rule ⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗ Eh! Eh! Eh! Quick, quick, quick!/ O my eyes, why do you cry? Eh! Eh! Eh! Quick!/ To find money! O my eyes, it’s useless/ No son, no money. Eh! Eh! Eh! Quick, quick, quick!/ It is in my eyes That we will see a king one day. Eh! Eh! Eh! Quick, quick, quick!/ At the gate of Paradise Is found one who pardons faults./ At the gate of Hell There is money. —Construction workers’ song, Upper Egypt, 1900s rafts and service workers did not engage in the economic processes of restructuring without entering into, affecting, and being impacted by social and political relations. In particular, after 1882, just as during the 1860s and 1870s, they attempted to associate, organize, and act collectively in order to change the terms of restructuring in ways which conformed to their perceived interests. They tried to cooperate with one another and to some degree with outsiders in order to protect themselves against unwanted state intervention, competition, self-exploitation, and labor squeezing. This chapter examines first a period of demobilization during the 1880s and 1890s which accompanied the dismantling of Ismail’s self-strengthening, tax remissions, the abandoning of the guilds, and the construction of the colonial state. It then goes on to discuss how crafts and service workers, faced with heavy-handed colonial intervention and intensi fied restructuring during the boom of 1897 to 1907, and inspired by the 145 C political opportunities presented by middle-class nationalism, found new ways to organize and protest. In one of the most widespread cycles of collective action prior to the 1919 rebellion, and in the wake of a mass strike by Cairo’s cab drivers, crafts and service workers came out onto the streets in their thousands during the spring of 1907. These protests were linked to the subsequent formation of new kinds of organization, syndicates and unions, which began to replace the long co-opted and now largely disaggregated guilds. Protests joined by crafts and service workers also had an important impact on an emerging activism among industrial workers, and even shaped the larger construction of Egyptian nationalism itself. Demobilization As we have seen, the colonial state was assembled in Egypt above all in the interests of bondholders and empire. The British retained and worked through the state apparatus inherited from Ismail, while establishing a modus vivendi with the Turco-Circassian aristocracy and the Egyptian provincial notables. As for the rebels, the constitutionalist and popular forces of the Urabiyyin were crushed by force, ‘Urabi himself being exiled to Ceylon. But newly mobilized crafts and service workers in the cities, who through the 1860s and 1870s had started to develop a language and practice of citizenship, and who, during the sociopolitical crisis of 1878 to 1882 had marched in the streets in the name of ‘Urabi’s patriotism, were far too numerous to be similarly exiled.1 Nor could they simply be thrown into prison by the notorious Brigandage Commissions of the 1880s, which were principally used by the British for imposing order in the countryside.2 Furthermore , although strikes and demonstrations in the cities did come to an end after the British broke the ‘Urabiyyin, crafts and service workers continued to complain through petitions in a newly unleashed protonationalist discourse about the privileged situation of European subjects who engaged in the crafts and trades. The local subject weighers of Alexandria, for example, complained vigorously in collectively organized petitions during the mid-1880s about the fact that they were hit by the weighing tax which their European counterparts could get away without paying by simply refusing to do so. These complaints were not simply dismissed by prominent Egyptian politicians whose sensitivities to European privilege may have been reinforced by the British invasion on the one hand, and protonationalist sentiment on the other. The minister of finance argued to the president of the Council of Ministers that the complaints of the local subjects were “fully justified,” and 146 The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories that “it has long been remarked that regarding the weighing tax, Europeans are placed in a privileged situation.” Petitioners also argued that European subjects could refuse to have their weights checked and their registers examined , and could “know nothing of the trade of weighing” and have no proper authorization to practice without the government having the teeth to reign them...