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

1. Crafts and Guilds before 1863

1 Crafts and Guilds before 1863 ⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗⠖⠗ he patterns of restructuring and collective action in which I am interested had their origins in the first half of the nineteenth century . During these decades, the projection of European power overseas, state building, and unequal world economic integration started to alter the conditions under which crafts and service workers pursued their livelihoods in Egypt’s towns and cities. Market relations began to deepen, consumption tastes started to change, and certain trades in particular areas started to come under pressure from imports, prompting the beginnings of a new kind of craft restructuring in response to new opportunities and tougher competition. As for the guilds, Baer showed many years ago that these institutions survived the dynasty and empire-building policies of Mehmet Ali, Ottoman governor of Egypt (1805–1848), and continued to hold monopolies and discharge public functions until midcentury and beyond . However, as this chapter will argue, the character of the guilds was transformed in an important way during the decades that preceded the cotton boom. Under Mehmet Ali, these venerable institutions were co-opted in the name of dynasty building, and their capacity to protect the livelihoods of their members, or to act as vehicles for protest, was undermined. The weakening of the guilds, which preceded the 1860s, and continued thereafter, set the stage for crafts and service workers’ search for new forms of protection and mobilization, the story of which this book picks up in detail from the 1860s onwards. 15 T Crafts and Guilds in the Ottoman Empire In spite of mercantilist expansion from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries , European influence in Ottoman lands until the early nineteenth century remained weak relative to later years. European merchants built far-flung mercantilist commercial networks, but these sustained a trade that in comparison with the later nineteenth century was puny and uncertain. Indeed, even in the later eighteenth century, the great bulk of Ottoman external commerce—perhaps six-sevenths—was carried on not with Europe, but with Africa and Asia.1 European merchants existed in only small numbers in Ottoman cities. The Portuguese blockade certainly cut off much of Egypt’s pepper trade during the early sixteenth century, but the irritant was short lived, had few long-lasting or systemic effects, and was nothing like as ruinous as some have suggested.2 Furthermore, European military power in the region was limited. The Portuguese and Spanish, unable to colonize North Africa because of stiff resistance there, set sail across the Atlantic. The balance of military power in the Balkans only started to tip towards Russia and Austria towards the end of the eighteenth century. And until Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt in search of wealth and Empire (1798–1801), not since the Crusades had a European military presence been felt in the region. Thus, even as European mercantile overseas expansion took place, the Ottomans retained a substantial measure of political , economic, and social independence from external forces. Until the early nineteenth century, the bulk of Ottoman commerce was in the hands of Ottoman merchants, and, notwithstanding an impressive international trade, most of the crafts consumed within the empire were made locally. Ottoman cities from Cairo to Istanbul housed numerous crafts workers, known in Egypt as those who “possessed” a skill or a craft (ashab al-hiraf wa-l-sana‘i’).3 In 1800, the savants of the French occupation estimated that “established artisans” (including masters and journeymen) numbered twenty-five thousand in Cairo, or a little less than a tenth of the population of the city,4 which was the center of manufacture and commerce in Egypt.5 Most produced textiles, food, furniture, and pottery in order “to satisfy the every-day needs of the urban population.”6 A smaller group of more specialised crafts workers made products requiring “more capital and a greater degree of craftsmanship and skill,” such as the linen weavers of Damietta.7 Weaving and dyeing employed about a third of all crafts workers in the eighteenth century in Cairo, and weavers left legacies that were above the artisanal average during the eighteenth century.8 Less well-off leather workers, such as shoemakers, tanners, and saddlers, were the next 16 The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories most numerous group of artisans in Cairo. Food trades (especially milling and baking) wood, metal, and construction work occupied most other crafts workers. Workshops tended to...