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Character and imperialism: The british

financial administration of Egypt,
1878–1914
Professor P. J. Cain
Published online: 06 Jul 2010.
To cite this article: Professor P. J. Cain (2006) Character and imperialism: The british financial
administration of Egypt, 1878–1914, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 34:2,
177-200, DOI: 10.1080/03086530600633405
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086530600633405
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The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
Vol. 34, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 177–200
Character and Imperialism: The

British Financial Administration of
Egypt, 1878 – 1914
P. J. Cain
Downloaded by [University of Sheffield] at 01:56 29 October 2013
The main purpose of the article is to try to show how British governing elites constructed
their world through a complex mental grid summed up in the word ‘character’ and how
this impacted upon imperial governance. The latter theme is then illustrated through a
detailed study of the financial policies of the small cadre of British officials who controlled
Egyptian government in this period. They used the language of character to justify being in
Egypt in the first place and it clearly influenced the financial policies they adopted. More
fundamentally, as we shall see, the character grid gave them a very negative view of Egyp-
tians and their society and made it impossible for them to recognise that nationalist claims
for autonomy had any validity.
‘National character is a plant of slow growth . . . All that can be said is that no effort
should be spared to foster the growth of all those moral and intellectual qualities
which, collectively, tend to the formation of character’.1
Edward Said and his supporters have argued that Britain’s positive image of itself was
constructed out of its contact with the Oriental ‘other’ which it saw as its opposite:
representations of the Orient as stagnant, despotic and corrupt served to confirm
the British in their sense of themselves as industrious, free, morally disciplined and
progressive.2 In the context of this article, the most acute critique of Said comes
from those who are concerned with how British images of themselves, formed out
of their internal historical experience, impacted on their view of colonial subjects at
different times. While not denying that many Britons perceived the world in the
way described by Said, David Cannadine has recently suggested that Victorian and
Edwardian political elites often thought of colonies as overseas versions of their
own world, itself pictured as a monarchical, hierarchical, deferential society, contain-
ing numerous gradations of rank and status, whose chief strength was perceived to
come from its rural heritage. Cannadine believes that these domestically derived
Correspondence to: Professor P. J. Cain, School of Cultural Studies: Historical Studies Subject Group, Sheffield
Hallam University, Parkholme, 30 Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield, S11 8UZ. Email: p.j.cain@shu.ac.uk
ISSN 0308-6534 print=1743-9329 online/06=020177–24

DOI: 10.1080=03086530600633405 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
178 P. J. Cain
perceptions were supportive of British imperial strategies such as ‘indirect rule’ that
were intended to preserve the traditional structures of native society.3
Cannadine’s emphasis on the deep domestic roots of British imperial represen-
tations is very welcome but the argument here is that he puts too much weight on
the landed, pre-industrial component within them. Most colonial officials undoubt-
edly thought of themselves as gentlemen.4 But although they had a feel for tradition
they also had a very modern itch for efficiency which frequently implied the need
for change that sometimes tended to undermine the traditional structures they
sought to maintain.5 More fundamentally, Cannadine’s approach does not recognise
the fact that the bulk of colonial administrators were drawn from a professional,
not a landed, elite and that they carried with them a vision of Britain – and of
their ‘civilising mission’ – based on a view of the world that was strongly influenced
by urban modernity and industrial capitalism.6 The professionals had links with aris-
tocracy through education and other forms of social connexion, and they recognised
the need for aristocratic military virtues in the colonial context, but they were suspi-
cious of the leisured independence and the inherited wealth on which landed power
rested as undermining of ‘character’.7
For British imperial servants, as for the broader professional elite, that character was
not only the outcome of centuries of external experience but also the result of a
complex of internal struggles and developments running deep into the nation’s past.
Some could discern its origins in Saxon times: rather more thought that it reflected
Britain’s unique response to the Protestant reformation, to the Civil War, and to the
constitutional and religious structures that had evolved after 1688.8 And by the
1880s there was a large school, led by J. R. Seeley, who saw the opportunities presented
by the discovery of the New World as the catalyst to modern character formation and
empire itself as its chief forcing house.9 British statesmen and administrators firmly
believed that, in shaping ‘men of character’, these epochal events had provided the
basis for the agrarian, commercial and industrial transformations that had made
Britain the foremost global and imperial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. In forging this dubious connection between the moral and the material they
went on to make the common but momentous error of assuming that the technologi-
cal ability and military power that allowed them to intrude upon Africa and Asia also
gave them a moral superiority over the native populations. From there it was an easy
step to assert that such ethical superiority10 gave them the right to impose their own
civilisation upon the nations they had conquered. The men who ran the British
Empire and guided the fortunes of those who fell under Britain’s informal sway
were alarmingly sure they had the right and the duty to mould the societies they domi-
nated precisely because they were ‘men of good character’ and the natives were not.
To Victorians and Edwardian elites, character was a multi-faceted concept that
included industry, energy, self-help and self-discipline, thrift, honesty, integrity, devo-
tion to duty, and manliness in the face of difficulty.11 As the list indicates, much stress
fell on the disciplines associated with work as key elements in character formation.
Such qualities of character, honed in the marketplace, were supposed to encourage
co-operation between private individuals and thus to be a training ground for the
The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 179
public action that had created the liberal institutions in which the Victorians took such
pride. The market was, however, also the place where the disciplines of competition
had to be faced by the individual with the possibilities of failure and deprivation
ever present. It was in this economic context that character was seen to embody ‘man-
liness’, a facing of the harsh facts of everyday life without the cushion of aristocratic
patronage or of state support.12 Developing character was an arduous, even hazardous,
process dependent on the slow inculcation of good habits from childhood onwards
and the strenuous elimination of bad ones:13 the Victorians’ concern with habit-
forming behaviour was almost as obsessive as the Puritan’s concern with sin.
Without a constant striving to cultivate the good habits that formed character, it
was believed that the individual and the society to which he belonged would
become lax. The worst fear of the Victorian intelligentsia was of a moral and material
collapse into that stagnation which Oriental societies were thought to exhibit. Hence
John Stuart Mill’s nightmare that without the strenuous pursuit of the good life,
Western societies might descend into what he termed a ‘Chinese stationariness’.14
These notions were reinforced in the public schools, where Victorian elites were
largely trained, by a games culture in which strenuous, even rough, exercise stimulated
individual competition and manliness. At the same time, however, games were relied
upon to generate ‘team spirit’.15 Such concern with the group as much as with the indi-
vidual indicates that, for elites, market disciplines offered no excuse for an unbridled
concern with self-interest and self-preservation. Rather, they were constantly made
aware of the need to strive to be altruistic and to search for the common good. It
was widely accepted that, if wealth creation was a sign of character in action, an obses-
sive concern with wealth accumulation was not only vulgar but dangerous to society
because it led to enervating luxury that corroded character and because it exacerbated
class divisions rather than promoting the social harmony that elites believed was within
society’s grasp. The call to do one’s duty to the community was insistent and it moulded
the ethic of service that was so characteristic of British professional and administrative
elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And so, in the colonial sphere,
British administrators who were ‘proud of their honourable poverty’ strove to create the
atmosphere of trust in government wherein the private virtues of industry and thrift
could flourish and thus ensure material and moral progress.16 Strongly reinforced by
a ‘Broad Church’ Christianity that emphasised good works rather than doctrine, Victor-
ian and Edwardian elites saw it as their duty to work for the good of British society, and
for the peoples of the empire, even if elements of that society or that empire were indif-
ferent to, or even antagonistic to, the good that was thrust upon them.17
In order to understand fully how this compound of attributes summed up as
‘character’ showed itself in the ideas and actions of British officials in Egypt it is import-
ant to understand how it was, in many ways, the driving force behind ‘Gladstonian
finance’, the rigid financial regime that replicated in the public sphere what most
took for granted in their private lives. In the Gladstonian scheme it was assumed
that the free market was critical to the nation’s prosperity, its social stability and also
its moral character. To maintain the right conditions for market freedom government
expenditure and taxation had to be kept low.18 Sound finance was thus ‘an essential of
180 P. J. Cain
good government . . . Without it you cannot have good government – and with it you
almost always get good government’.19 As such, it was ‘the root of liberty’,20 and it
depended ultimately on good character. That a thorough enforcement of financial
disciplines was seen as vital to the survival of both public and private morality and,
ultimately, to national prosperity and social order is strikingly affirmed by Gladstone’s
alarmed reaction to the rising expenditure and the borrowings of the Tory government
of the 1870s as Disraeli pursued what his opponents called his ‘imperialist’
programme.21 Gladstone portrayed the growing budget deficit as the material cost of
Disraeli’s failures in moral discipline, a failure that threatened to undermine the public’s
trust in government. Such aggressive policies not only drained away the nation’s wealth
but also created false, morally dubious, wealth in its place. At Midlothian, Gladstone
called attention to the rapid growth in Disraeli’s time in the growth of incomes of
the wealthiest portion of the population, supporters of Toryism, which he saw as

directly related to the budget deficits. He argued that the wealth of these elites, ‘has
made an advancement wholly out of proportion to any advancement they may
have affected during the last quarter in mental resources or pursuits’, and that this
had produced ‘derangement’ in the ‘moral and social world’ and led to a rash of
speculative investments and other doubtful undertakings.22
Without financial restraint at both the private and the public level – and the two
levels were clearly interlinked in Gladstone’s eyes – character would be undermined,
trust and confidence eroded and material wealth squandered. Indeed, some Liberals,
including Gladstone and a former chancellor of the exchequer, Robert Lowe, believed
that Disraeli’s policy of imperialism might, if left unrestrained, plunge Britain back
into the militancy, authoritarianism and economic stagnation that the nation had
emerged from in the previous two centuries.23 It was this kind of failure of moral
discipline – much more deeply embedded in the structures of society and magnified
a hundred fold – that the British officials who took command of the Egyptian govern-
ment saw at the heart of Egypt’s economic crisis in the 1870s and 1880s and, for them,
both explained and justified Britain’s presence there.
I
Egypt was initially occupied by Napoleon but was fully opened to European
penetration only after Britain forced a free trade treaty on the country in 1841.
After that the Khedives, the rulers of Egypt, did their best to develop their country
on Western lines, borrowing in Europe, encouraging European immigration and
enterprise and developing the sugar and cotton industries for the world market.
Growth was rapid in the 1850s and 1860s but fell off in the 1870s when exports
declined just as Egyptian borrowing in Europe began to become extravagant.
During the reign of Khedive Ismail from 1862 to 1879, Egypt’s long-term debt
increased from £3 m to £68 m. Since much of it stuck in the hands of intermediaries,
effective rates of interest were very high; and, in addition, by the late 1870s Egypt had
also acquired a short-term debt of about £30 m.24 By the end of the decade more than
half of Egypt’s public expenditure was spent on debt repayment and taxes had been
raised to the point where serious social unrest was threatened and much anti-Euro-
pean feeling was being generated. Egypt’s indebtedness first attracted the interest of
the bankers in 1876 and then from 1878, when the bankers’ solutions were seen to
have failed, that of the French and British governments. Officially in Egypt to give
advice, their agents steadily took over the running of the Egyptian financial system
as they strove to impose order upon the Khedive and his government. Meantime,
spurred on by Disraeli’s purchase of the Suez Canal shares in 1875, a transaction
that gave the British government a direct interest in the economic stability of Egypt,
the British slowly became the dominant force there and the French began to switch
their main interest to neighbouring Tunis.25
In the 1870s and early 1880s Egypt was going through a developmental crisis as the
new wine of westernisation began to burst the old bottle of traditional society. Indeed,
it has been argued that, in occupying Egypt in 1882 to forestall what they saw as
‘anarchy’, the British Liberal government aborted a genuine revolutionary movement
that could have given birth to a modernised Islamic state.26 Despite Said’s claim that
before 1914 even the sharpest radical critics of imperialism were unable to overcome
their belief in ‘the fundamental superiority of Western man’,27 there were a few in
Britain who trusted the Egyptians to manage the transition from autocracy to
liberal nationalism on their own, most famously Wilfred Blunt.28 The British
radical journalist H. N. Brailsford also had a strong feeling for what had been lost
by British occupation. Brailsford claimed that it ‘was not Oriental stagnation which
ruined Egypt but the ferment of Western ideas’.29 Ismail, he admitted, was ‘a spend-
thrift of genius’ but he also emphasised how much he had done, like his predecessors,
to develop the country and how Egypt’s progress had been blighted by the excessive
greed of its creditors. In 1882, according to Brailsford, Egypt was already ‘a nation’
emerging ‘from the lethargy and oppression of centuries’ when it was invaded by
Britain at the behest of the owners of its ‘usurious debt’.30
Unfortunately, Brailsford spoke for only a tiny minority in Britain and the British
administrators who were involved in the financial affairs of Egypt from the late
1870s onwards certainly took a very different view. Among the officials the most pro-
minent was Sir Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer from 1892, who after service in India was
prominent as a financial controller in Egypt before the occupation in 1882 and who
after it became British Agent-General and the effective ruler of Egypt behind the
scenes. Cromer’s Indian years had a great deal of influence on his attitudes to Egypt
and to Egyptians and ‘character talk’ was a fundamental part of the Indian experience
for British officials there.31 In his youth, Cromer could fairly be described as a Glad-
stonian liberal and, although he lost faith in what he saw as Gladstone’s weak and
vacillating policy in Egypt after 1882, he never ceased to be a believer in liberal econ-
omics, in balanced budgets and free trade.32 Others prominent in this story are: Alfred
Milner, later to find fame in South Africa, who helped to run the Egyptian financial
system under Cromer’s direction in the late 1880s and early 1890s;33 Auckland
Colvin, most of whose service was in India but who was a financial controller in
Egypt in the critical period 1881 – 82; Edward Malet, the British agent-general who
preceded Cromer;34 and Eldon Gorst who eventually succeeded Cromer in 1907.35
182 P. J. Cain
All of them wrote of their Egyptian experience and some of them, Milner and Cromer
especially, found a large audience in Britain for their productions. For them, Egyptians
were incapable of self-government or of managing their own finances because they
lacked the character needed to make it possible.36 It was on this basis, as we shall
see, that they explained Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the first place. They also
relied on it to justify the continued British presence in the country despite the hesi-
tancy of their political masters. The original expectation of the Liberal government
that took the decision to occupy was that Britain could withdraw after a very short
time; and subsequent governments, Conservative as well as Liberal, sometimes con-
sidered the possibility of evacuation.37 What Cromer, Colvin and Milner wrote was
deliberately designed either to rouse educated public opinion against withdrawal or
to counter what they saw as the scurrilous attempt by Wilfred Blunt to undermine
British authority in Egypt and to attack their motives.38 The fact that ‘character
talk’ played such a big part in their propagandising shows how deeply it was embedded
in the discourse of the political community they were attempting to influence.
That the financial crisis of 1875 – 82 in Egypt was, in the eyes of the British officials
there, fundamentally a moral one is evident from the way in which they described its
onset. The problem was thought to centre on Khedive Ismail who was seen, in true
Orientalist style, as a despot ruling without restraint and, therefore, someone whose
personal weaknesses could not be checked either at the private or the public level.
From the British perspective, Ismail’s biggest failure – and one deeply etched into
the nature of Oriental government as far as they were concerned – was that because
of the despotic nature of his rule, he did not distinguish between his private
income and that of the state. In former times, they admitted, the damage this could
do was limited, but when Ismail had open to him large lines of Western credit –
brought to him by those described by Milner as ‘foreign adventurers’ – 39 the possibi-
lities for harm were colossal. As Cromer put the matter, ‘in primitive and barbarous
states’ the damage that a despotic ruler could do to a simple agricultural economy
was limited and its powers of recovery were large. ‘But’, he went on, ‘the maximum
of harm is probably done when the Oriental ruler is for the first time brought into
contact with the European system of credit’, because that gave the opportunity to
damage future generations as well as his own.40
Milner admitted that Ismail was ‘full of the most magnificent schemes for the
material improvement of his country’. However, his ambition led him to invest in
sugar and ship-owning enterprises which were bound to fail because, given his mono-
polistic leanings and inevitable lack of sound business sense, they were set up ‘with
inadequate knowledge at inordinate cost’.41 Moreover, as Milner was keen to empha-
sise, Ismail was by nature ‘reckless, prodigal . . . luxurious, voluptuous, ambitious,
fond of display, devoid of principle’, and therefore, as Colvin claimed, a man incapable
of understanding that ‘his people could be a trust committed to him’.42 So, for the
British officials, the huge spiralling debt, the growing burden on the state revenues,
the large increases in taxation and the social unrest that became increasing obvious
from the mid-1870s onwards, when Ismail’s ability to pay off his old debts by borrow-
ing anew faltered and Egypt’s creditworthiness declined rapidly, were all inevitable
outcomes of Ismail’s depravity. It followed naturally from that attitude that the
Khedive had to be restrained. His own income was separated from that of the state
of Egypt through the creation of a civil list similar to that imposed on the Crown
in Britain. The ‘principle of ministerial authority had to be enforced’43 because,
Cromer believed, ‘countries with constitutional governments and limited royal prop-
erty were almost always more likely to repay what they had borrowed’.44 In other
words, open governments, because they were subject to checks and balances, engen-
dered trust and thus had much greater credit with their bankers and could borrow
at much lower rates of interest than could despotic regimes like Ismail’s.
However, to justify British intervention, Milner drove home the message that to
blame Ismail alone for the financial failings of Egypt was not enough. Ismail was an
amazing spendthrift but, Milner argued, he got away with it for so long not just
because of his own defects but because the whole system was rotten to the core. For
the crisis to become unmanageable:
It needed a nation of submissive slaves, not only bereft of any vestige of liberal insti-
tutions, but devoid of the slightest spark of the spirit of liberty. It needed a bureau-
cracy, which it would have been hard to equal for its combination of cowardice and
corruption. It needed the whole gang of swindlers – mostly European – by whom
Ismail was surrounded and to whom . . . he fell an easy prey.45
Milner went on to claim that this era of ‘frightful misgovernment’ was the result of ‘a
disregard not only of every economic but of every moral principle’. Egypt ‘teemed with
officials but few, very few of them, were men. Tyrannous to the weak, they quailed
before the slightest threat of lawlessness on the part of the strong’.46 In other words,
British officials were sure that financial ruin was a natural outcome of the defects of
character Egypt’s peoples, from Ismail downwards, displayed. In Milner’s view, the
‘one saving merit’ of such misgovernment was that it made foreign intervention
‘inevitable’.47 The logic of the British position was that European credit could only
be safely managed by European, that is to say British, officials because only they
had the qualities necessary to make the system work effectively.
Cromer exulted in Ismail’s fall, seeing his bankruptcy in Evangelical, almost apoc-
alyptic, terms as a great moral purgation that exposed the false and showy wealth on
which the latter’s regime had rested.
In Egypt, bankruptcy, of a truth, destroyed many false gods and pricked many
bubbles. Notably, it dashed down Ismail Pasha, the great high priest of Sham,
from that false eminence which he had attained, and allowed him to be pulverised
by the adventurers who were his former worshippers . . . These and many other
advantages did bankruptcy, in its ruthlessness, confer on a land whose government
had for years been one gigantic falsehood.48
Gladstone, who himself thought of bankruptcy and financial crises as signs of

individual moral failing, could not have put it better himself.49
184 P. J. Cain
II
Naturally enough, Ismail tried hard to resist the financial fetters that the European
creditor governments placed on him and, in 1879, under British, French and
German pressure, he was deposed by his overlord the Sultan of Turkey and replaced
by his much more pliable son, Taufiq. In encouraging Ismail to go, Lord Salisbury,
Conservative foreign secretary, told him, in his most patronising manner, that the
government was ‘bound, both by duty and interest, to do all that lies in their power
to arrest misgovernment, before it results in the material ruin and almost incurable
disorder to which it is evident by other Oriental examples that such misgovernment
will necessarily lead’.50 Britain’s energies were then directed in two ways. First, they
helped to negotiate a financial settlement in the Law of Liquidation of 1880 that
would ensure debt repayment through rigorous budgetary control of the Gladstonian
variety.51 Secondly, they tried to encourage the development of a constitutional

monarchy and liberal political institutions in Egypt that would provide, under
British guidance, disciplines necessary to long-term financial control and stability.
Malet and Colvin, now the chief European financial adviser to the Khedive, then
supported what they called the ‘liberal’ elements in Egypt while opposing those
they characterised as ‘military’. It was the increasing predominance of the latter
under Urabi’s influence, his own rise to power in 1881– 82 and the association
between the military and Islamic nationalism that eventually convinced Malet and
Colvin that intervention was necessary because European control was now under
serious threat. The nationalists under Urabi were alarmed by the restraints on the
budget, the heavy cuts in expenditure on the army and government services this
entailed, and the rise of European influence on government. However, in British
eyes, the nationalist movement proved that it was driven by what Colvin called
‘selfish ends’,52 because it demanded a restoration of army numbers and objected to
pay cuts at a time when the Egyptian government was finding it very difficult to
balance the books and to pay its foreign creditors. But what really upset Malet and
Colvin was that Urabi and his supporters wanted to put financial control back in
Egyptian hands and to use the newly revived Chamber of Notables as a vehicle for
voting the national budget. The British officials saw their control over the finances
endangered. Urabi was now described as an ‘illiterate fanatic’53 incapable of absorbing
Western discipline, despite the fact that he had promised to honour all Egypt’s foreign
obligations.54
From a British perspective, Urabi’s claim, if insisted upon, necessitated intervention.
As Colvin put the matter, ‘the European interests engaged in Egypt were far too
various and important to permit of the engagements contracted by the Khedive
being placed at the mercy of Egyptian soldiery or of an inexperienced native admin-
istration’.55 As financial controller in 1881– 82, it is clear that Colvin, like Malet, had
some sympathy with the Urabist cause and he recognised it as ‘an Egyptian national
movement’, one that represented ‘the growth of the popular spirit’. Yet he could not
bring himself to believe that it was capable of handling the finances safely without
European control. However good their intentions, Colvin was convinced that Urabi
and the nationalists did not have the moral strength to resist the clamour for state
expenditures and that would eventually threaten Egypt’s financial credibility.56 In ret-
rospect, Milner also showed some sympathy for Urabi’s position, recognising, like
Colvin and Malet, that his complaints against the corruption of the Egyptian govern-
ment and the ‘rapacity’ of many Europeans were soundly based. But his fatal mistake,
according to Milner, was his wish to eject the Europeans altogether. Like Malet, who
complained that Urabi was intent on getting rid of those who were ‘the works that
made the clocks go’,57 Milner was convinced that to clear the Europeans out of
Egypt ‘would have meant the exclusion of half the wealth, and of far more than half
the intelligence and enterprise, to say nothing of all the reforming energy and initiative
which the country possessed’.58 In other words, Milner, like Colvin, simply could not
bring himself to believe that Urabi and his supporters had the qualities of character
needed to exercise financial discipline. They had, he thought, aspired to act in the
national interest in 1881 – 82. They were right then to claim that the ‘native ruling
class was vicious and incapable’ but they did not have the moral strength to change
matters: ‘the only effective Arabists [sic] Egypt has ever known are some of the
British officials in the Egyptian service’.59 So finally, when tensions between locals
and Europeans exploded into conflict in mid-1882, when the Alexandria ‘massacres’
proved to the British that ‘anarchy’ had, as expected, taken over in Egypt,60 and
when all other possibilities of joint intervention failed to materialise, Cromer
claimed that Britain had to intervene because a ‘great nation cannot throw off the
responsibilities which its past history and its position have thrown upon it’.61 In
short, he thought that it was Britain’s duty to rescue Egypt from itself because, as
Cromer’s own previous Indian experience indicated to him, that ‘special aptitude
shown by Englishmen in the government of Oriental races pointed to England as
the most effective and beneficent instrument for the gradual introduction of European
civilisation into Egypt’.62
The British, as Said argued, felt they understood Egypt, ‘knew’ it even better than
the Egyptians themselves,63 and thus believed they had a right and a duty to
impress themselves and their ideas upon it. Malet expressed this view with brutal
frankness. He wrote forcefully to the Liberal foreign secretary, Lord Granville, in the
aftermath of the occupation, to say that ‘the really most important point in the recon-
struction before us is the establishment of justice to the natives; till that is done there
can be no security in Egypt of a durable and solid character. If they will not give it to
themselves it should be forced upon them.’64 Milner, while he recognised openly that
Britain had good practical reasons for remaining in Egypt, still insisted that they were
acting morally. British economic interests there were expanding and could be ‘wrecked
by misgovernment’. Egypt’s strategic significance also grew after 1882, so the latter had
to be organised administratively on British lines to ensure its stability. As he put it, ‘We
have nothing to gain by owning the country ourselves, but we should have a great deal
to fear from its falling into the hands of another power.’ For that reason Britain had to
bring the economic and political improvements to Egypt that made it stable, improve-
ments ‘that are not philanthropy, they are business’. But, he went on, ‘they are business
of a perfectly straightforward and honourable kind, and possessing the characteristics
186 P. J. Cain
of all good business – namely, that both parties concerned are benefited’.65 Milner, in
fact, was always very concerned to show that the British were not being ‘selfish’ in
administering Egypt, as the French claimed. He argued that, in dealing between
foreigners and their own nationals, ‘the British administrators err, if anything, on
the other side, so intense is their anxiety, that in the position of trust which they
occupy they should be above the least suspicion of partiality’. Milner pointed to
Cromer’s maintenance of a non-discriminatory, low tariff as just one example of Brit-
ain’s determination to ensure that foreigners benefited directly from British rule in
Egypt.66
Indeed, the small British official contingent was always sublimely assured that they
were in Egypt to further the common good rather than simply to minister to their own
narrow concerns. When dismissing the possibility of withdrawal in 1893 the then
foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery, argued that ‘it seems impossible lightly . . . to
retire from the task that was publicly undertaken in the general interest of Europe
and civilization, and to abandon the results of ten years of successful work in that
direction’.67 It was Britain’s ‘duty’ to provide the governing structures that would
make Egyptian finance truly productive rather than destructive. Britain was in
Egypt for its own purposes, but in being there Britain promoted the good of Egyptians,
of the other Europeans who lived and worked in Egypt, of those who drew income
from capital invested in Egypt and who traded with it. The overweening confidence,
masquerading as modesty, with which the British approached this task was made
clear in a letter from Milner to his mentor, the Liberal Unionist chancellor of the
exchequer J. G. Goschen, in 1891:
really with every desire to be modest, one cannot help seeing that one does a great
deal of good. I am the last person to claim to myself any considerable share of our
success here. But the success is so great and the numbers of people who can by any
possibility feel that they have contributed to it so small, that even the least of them
must come out with something substantial to his credit. I always say if you were to
load a Metropolitan Tramcar inside and out, it would amply suffice to carry off all
the people who stand between Egypt and another smash and I think you would find
that I must be one of the passengers, though perhaps the last to be asked to mount.68
One outcome of this uncritical self-assurance was a disabling contempt for those the
British officials were supposed to help. Britain, it was said, had to be in Egypt because
Egyptians, with a few rare exceptions,69 lacked ‘moral fibre’ or the ‘capacity and
character to keep things straight’.70 The supposed deficiencies of Egyptians were
catalogued: they would not take the initiative, hated responsibility, had no sense of
proportion, took no thought for the future and had no idea of the importance of accu-
racy.71 All this led Cromer to argue that although Europeans brought vital technical
skills to Egypt, it was more important that those who did so were men whose ‘force
of character’ could ‘remedy those defects in the Egyptian character which had been
developed by a long course of misgovernment’.72 What the small group of British
officials were imparting was, they claimed, something of universal value. Their influ-
ence, protested Milner, ‘is not exercised to impose an uncongenial foreign system
upon a reluctant people. It is a force making for the simplest ideas of honesty,
humanity and justice, to the value of which Egyptians are just as alive as anyone else.’73
Moreover, he claimed, ‘the object of the British officials is not to Anglicise the Egyptian
bureaucracy in political opinion but only to Anglicise it in spirit, to infuse into its
ranks the uprightness and devotion to duty which is the legitimate boast of the
Civil Service of Great Britain’.74 Nonetheless, the number of Europeans in Egyptian
government service rose in the 1880s and 1890s, basically because ‘character talk’
ensured that Egyptians could not be trusted.75
In radical circles in Britain it was widely believed that the British government had
intervened in Egypt purely in order to protect European investments and secure debt
repayment.76 For their part, the British officials in Cairo represented themselves as
fighting for the Egyptian government and its people rather than the bondholders or
any other sectional concern. The bondholders, whether British or European, were
assumed to be following their own narrow self-interest and it was taken for granted
by Cromer’s team that most European governments, especially the French, were
largely dominated by bondholder sentiment.77 The British, however, saw themselves
as ‘unprejudiced outsiders’,78 acting for the Egyptian nation and, through them, for
everyone else involved. Thus, in negotiations around the Law of Liquidation passed
in 1880, the British officials, including Cromer, Malet and Colvin, fought hard and
successfully to persuade other European governments to accept reduced interest rate
charges on debt, for fear that otherwise the financial stability of the government
would be badly undermined to the long-term detriment of all the interests involved.79
Malet put the matter at its simplest: ‘our policy is to make the interest of the creditors
subsidiary to the interests of Egypt’ because the Liquidation Commission ‘wants to get
hold of more money . . . than the government thinks it can spare’.80 In so doing, British
administrators in Egypt saw themselves as acting for the common good and opposing
the narrow and selfish interests of investors.
Financial stability was seen as the key to British success in Egypt and Cromer never
forgot that fact in his long reign. If the Egyptian government’s books were not
balanced then other European powers with financial stakes in Egypt would have an
excuse for intervention. From a British perspective this meant that Egypt would be
faced with ‘Internationalism’ or bondholder government and would be subject to
selfish demands and its prosperity imperilled.81 Balancing the budget and paying
the foreign coupon were guarantees of Britain’s right to be the sole adviser of the
Egyptian government and underwrote its invisible, but highly effective, imperial
control. In the eyes of the British officials financial rigour saved Egypt from the
clutches of other European governments whose policies they took for granted
would be much more self-serving than their own.
So the justification given for imperialism was not simply that Britain knew Egypt
better than the Egyptians knew it or that it had more experience in dealing with
‘Oriental races’. Just as important was the conviction that the motives of British offi-
cials in Egypt were altruistic, far more so than any other European power, and that
they were more altruistic because the officials were of ‘high character’ in Cromer’s
oft-used phrase,82 and were therefore best fitted to instil in the Egyptian government
and the wider society the same virtues as they possessed. It was precisely for this reason
188 P. J. Cain
that Cromer felt able to make the breathtaking claim that ‘his mission was to save
Egyptian society, and, moreover, that he was able to save it’,83 especially since, in his
eyes, the most obvious alternative European mentor, the French, clearly offered a
morally inferior product.84 Nonetheless, behind such high-minded rhetoric lay the
conviction that what was called altruism actually paid good dividends. Colvin
noted, for example, that a government dedicated to short-term bondholder interests
could undermine its own financial stability in the long run.85 For his part, Malet
was convinced that French influence in Cairo before 1882 was undermined in com-
parison with the British because the French official representatives were expected to
promote the private interests of their nationals, thus provoking much friction with
the locals.86 Cromer was also thinking along similar lines when, in retirement, he
argued that the European powers ‘tacitly acquiesced’ in the re-conquest of the
Sudan in 1898 because they knew Britain would maintain free trade there.87 Practical
benefits notwithstanding, the British preferred to think that these policies were
instances of the fact that virtue, expressed in strong character, brought its own reward.
III
In the 1880s, when bankruptcy seemed a real possibility, Cromer’s reforming instincts
were kept in check, though he did succeed in abolishing the corvee, the system of
unpaid forced labour traditionally used for clearing the irrigation canals of debris.88
As fear of bankruptcy receded and the budget began to move into steady surplus,
Cromer gave priority to increased spending on public works such as irrigation
which was identified as the key to growth, to increased foreign trade and greater
revenue from taxes and customs, and to cutting taxation. In Cromer’s eyes, Egypt
was a land of such ethnic and religious diversity as to preclude any solid sense of com-
munity. All that could bind its people together was material interest, a ‘poor material’
in itself but something on which ‘wise statesmanship could build a political edifice’.
Attention to the material interests of the bulk of the population would, he hoped,
‘bring into existence a conservative class’ who, although they might not love their con-
querors, would reject the false promises of nationalist leaders and religious fanatics
alike in favour of stability.89 Cutting taxes was thus the best method of convincing
the mass of the population of the benign intentions of government and was, in
Colvin’s words, ‘a boon universally valued’.90 Cromer also thought in terms of sup-
porting the small landowner against the great, and thus avoiding the landlord–
tenant strife that had recently bedevilled Ireland, and of implanting ideas of communal
welfare and public spirit in Egyptians that might one day make full self-government
possible.91
Reforms were often presented as noble acts undertaken in the face of widespread
Egyptian incompetence and selfishness. The British acknowledged that Mehemet
Ali, whom Milner called a ‘barbarian of genius’,92 had been the first to recognise the
need for improved irrigation in the Nile Delta and Milner admitted that the French
engineers he had hired were men of great skill. However, the French could only
advise and their advice was frequently ignored so the system worked badly. The
system, said Milner, was also beyond the capacity of the Egyptians to operate, proving
yet again that ‘European skill is useless without European authority’.93 The problems
presented by irrigation, according to Milner, were far more than technical ones.
Maintaining and improving the system required ‘good husbandry and equity’. It
was ‘a moral as well as a scientific problem’ and ‘science and morality had alike
been wanting’ among Egyptians.94 After 1882 the British engineers, largely recruited
from India, were in a position to enforce their recommendations and then the irriga-
tion system was steadily transformed by ‘the industry, ingenuity and, on the whole, the
remarkable economy with which the problem had been dealt with by the small body of
able and devoted men’.95 These men of ‘high character and marked capacity’ were
devoted to the public good and fearless in ensuring that the poor man got his share
of water as well as the rich. In doing so they ensured that the irrigation system
served not just the wealthy as in the past but ministered to ‘the greatest good of the
greatest number’.96
As opportunity arose, Cromer also reformed the tax system. Armed with modern
accounting methods brought in by his subordinates which gave a clearer picture of
revenues and expenditures and curbed fraud and corruption, Cromer ensured, as
far as possible, that Europeans became liable for the same taxes as Egyptians and abol-
ished a number of taxes and reduced others, such as the land tax, which provided
roughly 50 per cent of budgetary revenue.97 His policy was Gladstonian: the tough dis-
cipline applied to expenditure allowed a regime of lighter taxes which, he believed,
would not only encourage enterprise but also help to create a more prosperous and
co-operative community, while at the same time broadening the tax base and ensuring
buoyant revenues. Cromer was particularly concerned to reduce those taxes thought to
bear most heavily on the poor. He spoke in patronising terms of
those nine or ten million native Egyptians at the bottom of the social ladder, a poor,
ignorant, credulous, but withal not unkindly race, being such as sixty centuries of
misgovernment and oppression by various rulers, from Pharaohs to Pashas, have
made them. It is for the civilised Englishman to extend to them the hand of fellow-
ship and encouragement, and to raise them, morally and materially, from the abject
state in which he finds them.98
Again, the justification for this bias in policy was that, as in India, Britain had to act for
the common good.99 In support, Colvin invoked Sir Robert Peel’s idea that money
should be left to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’ and thus encourage what he
called the ‘growth of an economical spirit, of forethought, self-denial and thrift . . .
and for qualities such as these there is indeed enough and to spare in the modern
Egyptian’.100 Looked at more cynically, reducing tax was promoted as the best way
of pacifying the bulk of the population and making British rule more secure. It was
also the clearest sign the British could give that they were acting as trustees for the
Egyptian people and thus asserting, against the pretensions of other European
powers, their moral right to be in command in Cairo.101
The sound finance that improved Egypt’s creditworthiness and stimulated foreign
investment, made expenditure on key public works possible and simultaneously
190 P. J. Cain
allowed reduction of taxation, was advertised as the crucial prop upon which every-
thing else in Egypt rested. As Milner wrote: ‘Prosperity – nay, decent existence – is
impossible with a disordered Treasury.’102 Or, as Cromer expressed it even more
dramatically,
The subject [of finance] cannot surely be devoid of interest when it is remembered
that the difference between the magic words surplus and deficit meant whether the
Egyptian cultivator was, or was not, to be allowed to reap the fruits of his labour;
whether after supplying the wants of the State, he was to be left with barely
enough to keep body and soul together, or whether he was to enjoy some degree
of rustic ease; whether he was to be eternally condemned to live in a wretched
mud hut, or whether he might have an opportunity given to him of improving
his dwelling-house; . . . in fact, whether he, and the ten millions of Egyptians who
were like him, were or were not to have a chance afforded to them of taking a
few steps upwards on the ladder of moral and material improvement.103
The British cadre were always keen to show that sound finance reflected the strength of
character, the altruism and the public spirit, of the British rulers of Egypt. They rep-
resented the transition from deficit to surplus as the heroic achievement of a few dedi-
cated men who, with unflagging courage, audacity and sheer willpower, overcame all
the formidable obstacles to success. ‘This policy does not dazzle or attract. It requires
courage, self-restraint, and self-denial on the part of the ruler.’104 The difficulty of per-
suading naturally obstructive and sluggish ‘Oriental’ governments to move with the
times when British advisers had no legal authority to fall back on; the expense and
humiliation of the loss of the Sudan and the Gordon tragedy in 1883– 85; the persist-
ent hostility of the French and other Europeans which held up reforms in finance and
taxation; the obstruction placed in the way of financial and judicial reform by the legal
concessions made by past Khedives to Europeans in Egypt, known as the Capitula-
tions, and by the continuing power of debt collecting agencies created in the 1870s
that the British could not directly control such as the Caisse de la Dette; the attempts
by both Liberal and Conservative administrations to lay down their burdens in Egypt
by agreement with other powers, attempts that weakened the authority of British offi-
cials and gave scope to ‘agitators’ in Egypt and well meaning but dangerous liberals in
Britain who pressed for faster moves towards self-government in Egypt: all these bar-
riers to progress were overcome though, it was claimed, victory was often snatched
from the jaws of defeat only at the eleventh hour. That success, it was asserted, was
only achieved because the British fought unstintingly, bravely and resolutely for the
common good rather than their own. Looking back on his career, Cromer wrote
that ‘the task was ennobled by its difficulty. It was one worthy of the past history,
the might, the resources and the sterling national qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race.’105
Indeed, Colvin’s and Milner’s accounts especially are filled with what can only be
described as ‘ripping yarns’ of heroic exploit, whether it be tales of brave British
doctors fighting off the cholera outbreak that followed the occupation,106 or the
story of the British irrigation expert ‘who brought his bed to the Canal bank, and
did not leave the scene of operations, night or day, till the work was finished’.107
Typical of these representations is the story of Edgar Vincent, later Lord
D’Abernon, who was Cromer’s financial adviser between 1883 and 1889 when still in
his late twenties and early thirties. Vincent’s ‘energy’ and ‘vigorous attention’ to detail,
his ‘zeal’ and his ‘courage’, were crucial to balancing budgets in these trying times and
he was ‘eminently resourceful’ and always ready with some ingenious device to stave of
the evil day of bankruptcy’.108 In this, Colvin insisted, he was selfless: others reaped
where Vincent had sown.
Of all who have successively held since 1883 the office of Financial Advisor,
Mr Vincent was the most tried and tested. His successors prospered by his
labours, and garnered at ease what he had sown under the burden of the hot
Egyptian day . . . The pleasure of increasing salaries, of adding to the strength of
establishments, of furnishing funds for reforms, or remitting taxation, was reserved
for Mr Palmer and Mr Gorst [his successors]; to Mr Vincent was assigned the
thankless task of refusing supplies alike to the deserving and the undeserving.
Fertile in expedients, and pitiless in economy, he was sustained by the abiding
conviction that all would come right in the end. In the darkest hour he never lost
hope; and the dawn of a brighter day broke upon him before he made over office
to his successor.109
Colvin’s book, like Milner’s and Cromer’s, is full of such stories of ‘enthusiasm lit
and sustained by the flame of duty’.110 Taking care to hide their sometimes bitter dis-
putes about policy from public view,111 and constantly professing modesty about their
own achievements, they were all embarrassingly lavish in their praise of each other.112
IV
There is no doubt that the British obsession with character made it almost impossible
for them to envisage an autonomous Egyptian state and it undercut the original claim of
the Liberal government that they were bringing liberty as well as peace and orderly
administration. Sent in 1883 to investigate how Britain could establish ‘stability and
progress’ in Egypt and then withdraw quickly, Lord Dufferin, then ambassador at Con-
stantinople, recommended creating representative political institutions to please his
Liberal masters: but he also warned them that ‘in the East, even the germs of consti-
tutional freedom are non-existent. Despotism not only destroys the seeds of liberty
but renders the soil . . . incapable of growing the plant.’ He made plain his view that
if Britain left Egypt too soon the latter would descend again into financial chaos and
fall victim to European bondholder control.113 So before the British could support with-
drawal they had to convince themselves that the Egyptians had the character to sustain
independence and this they could not do. When he first became agent-general in 1883,
Cromer believed, like Gladstone, that a speedy withdrawal was possible. By the late
1880s he had changed his mind.114 In retirement, he recognised that the British ‘were
always striving to attain two ideals’, of good government and self-government, ‘that
are apt to be mutually destructive’ and now he had no doubt that in Egypt the
pursuit of the first objective meant deferring the second for a very long time.115
In British eyes, if character was the foundation of liberty then forming character in
the first place was a matter of cultivating good ‘habits of mind’.116 In urging Malet to
192 P. J. Cain
stay in post as the Liberal government came into power in 1880, Salisbury, for
example, spoke of the need to continue financial control until ‘the lapse of time
and the influence of habit has given [the new financial arrangements] a chance of
durability’.117 However, if character was a matter of painfully building up good
habits and sloughing off bad ones then Cromer and his supporters thought that the
Egyptians had far to go. As Colvin put the matter, the ‘effect of centuries of unremit-
ting misrule is graven deep in the character of the Egyptian’.118 How much did a few
years of good government weigh in the scale when set against aeons of despotism?
Such assumptions about the painfully slow nature of ‘character building’ meant that
Cromer, Colvin and Milner easily convinced themselves that Egyptians were incapable
of acting responsibly and independently at the national level and that they were, in
Colvin’s words, ‘without a sense of corporate needs, without a common sense of col-
lective purpose, without civic virtues, without social energy’.119 So, because they
believed ‘ordered liberty’ would be a long time in the making, British officials could
dismiss calls from Egyptian nationalists for greater political autonomy as premature.
Such beliefs gave Cromer an excuse for keeping expenditure on education miserably
low since he could argue that, without some prior ‘transformation of the national
character’, education served mainly to encourage self-serving nationalists;120 and his
considered view in retirement was that the ‘transformation, if it ever takes place at
all, will probably be the work, not of generations, but of centuries’.121
Milner was convinced that the Egyptian bureaucracy lacked ‘backbone’ and would
soon ‘slide into old habits’ if European influence was removed.122 In his view, it was far
more important to carry on with the slow work of stiffening the Egyptian character
than it was to worry about giving Egypt its own Parliament.
As a true-born Briton, I, of course, take off my hat to everything that calls itself
Franchise, Parliament, Representation of the People, the Voice of the Majority, and
all the rest of it. But as an observer of the actual condition of Egyptian Society, I
cannot shut my eyes to the fact that Popular Government, as we understand it, is,
for a longer time than anyone can foresee at the present, out of the question. The
people neither comprehend it nor desire it. They would come to singular grief if
they had it; and nobody except a few silly theorists thinks of giving it to them.123
Gorst, too, thought that, like other parts of the East, Egypt had ‘no great desire for self-
government so long as it is decently governed’. Orientals had been given a long time to
work out their own ‘salvation’ but they had failed and thus they needed ‘the successful
races’ to guide them.124 And Milner, like the rest of his colleagues, was complacently
assured that, whatever Egyptian nationalists might say, the British understood the
interests of the mass of the population much better than they did.125
Cromer’s move away from his youthful liberalism had much to do with his rather
low opinion of Islam, a prejudice he shared with the officers who worked with him. It
was Cromer’s belief that, although Islam was a ‘noble monotheism’, it had failed as a
social system because it put a seventh-century straightjacket on everyday law and
society that prevented social progress.126 Christianity was superior precisely because
it had avoided that.
If a religious belief cannot adapt itself to the requirements which are constantly
cropping up as the world grows older, one of two things will probably happen.
Either society advances and the religious belief is stranded and eventually forgotten,
or the creed holds society in its grip and bars the way to advancement. It is the proud
boast of the Christian religion, and more especially of the Protestant version of that
religion, that it is not obliged to choose between either of these alternatives. It
possesses sufficient elasticity to adapt itself to modern requirements.127
Cromer initially saw his task as helping to bring Christian morality to Egypt –
especially the more ‘elastic’ Protestant version that was the foundation stone of char-
acter and progress in Britain – to act as the spiritual cement within a new society. That
‘deep-rooted’ morality mattered more than the faith itself because it held sway over
even non-believers in Britain and, he thought, would continue to do so if belief

declined in the future as he expected that it would. Yet such a task was necessarily a
slow one. One reason that Cromer thought the Europeanised Egyptian could not be
trusted was that, agnostic though he might be about Islam, he had as yet failed to
connect with Christian morality despite his adoption of many other aspects of
advanced civilisation. However, since directly attacking Islam would antagonise the
population and threaten British hegemony, Cromer turned to economic and social
reform in the hope that it would stir society in ways that would present challenges
to accepted beliefs and practices. In the very long run, he thought it possible that
Islam would transform itself into a vaguer deism ‘which would establish a moral
code sufficient to hold society together by bonds other than unalloyed self-interest’
and allow it to progress socially, as Protestantism had done in Europe and America.
Egyptians might learn good habits but, from Cromer’s perspective, they could only
do so over many generations.128
Cromer always strove to do his ‘duty’ and once wrote to his wife that he aspired to
‘total effacement of personal views and ambitions’ in serving Egypt.129 There is no
doubt that he was sincere and that many of the other leading figures were equally
sincere in their professed determination to bring peace and prosperity to all of
Egypt’s people. Some of the changes they introduced, such as the abolition of the
corvee and the overhaul and repair of the Nile irrigation, were of lasting benefit and
those reforms were made possible by installing the most disciplined and efficient econ-
omic and financial administrative apparatus Egypt had ever seen. However, many of
the social and economic reforms they adopted, including the lowering of taxation,
were by no means as benign in effect as Cromer and his supporters had fondly
hoped and the poor did not see many benefits from economic growth.130 More fun-
damentally, British efforts in Egypt were marred by the assumption of moral superior-
ity that lurked behind ‘character talk’. The persistent claim that the British were
uniquely unselfish and the tendency to describe as altruistic policies that were
clearly designed to support Britain’s own strategic and economic interests in Egypt
are illustrations of a persistent and unexamined arrogance. Despite their easy assur-
ance that they understood Egyptians, that arrogance also made it very difficult for
British officials to have a sympathetic insight into the lives of those they ruled and
194 P. J. Cain
made it impossible for them to see that Egyptians deserved liberty just as much as they
deserved ‘good government’.131
Acknowledgement
I should like to thank Roger Lloyd-Jones, Barbara Bush, Gerald Studdert-Kennedy and
Mark Bearn for their comments on earlier drafts and also the audience at the Inter-
national Economic History seminar at the London School of Economics who
helped me to clarify some difficult issues.
Notes
[1] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 298.

[2] Said, Orientalism. The most accessible commentary is by Macfie, Orientalism.
[3] Cannadine, Ornamentalism.
[4] Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of British Africa, 181.
[5] Bush and Maltby, ‘Taxation in West Africa’.
[6] Kent, Brains and Numbers, 6.
[7] The key work on character is by Collini, Public Moralists, Part I, esp. ch.3. See also Bellamy,
Liberalism and Modern Society, ch.1; and Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in
Britain and France. For the imperial dimension, see Field, Towards a Programme of Imperial
Life.
[8] Burrow, A Liberal Descent.
[9] Seeley, The Expansion of England.
[10] Schumpeter coined the phrase ‘ethical imperialism’ to describe America’s post-1945
international stance but it could well be used to describe British attitudes in this period.
Schumpeter, ‘An Economic Interpretation of Our Times’, 394.
[11] Collini, Public Moralists, ch.5.
[12] However, by 1914 there was also growing support for the New Liberal contention that state
help was necessary to provide the poor with the minimum necessary to allow them to
develop character and become active citizens. Vincent and Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citi-
zenship, ch.5.
[13] Collini, Public Moralists, 97– 98.
[14] Collini, Burrow and Winch, That Noble Science of Politics.
[15] Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School.
[16] The quotation is from Macaulay’s essay on Clive in Critical and Historical Essays, 541; see also
Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 109.
[17] Studdert-Kennedy, ‘The Broad Church Idea of the British State’.
[18] For the shaping of Gladstone’s thought, see Matthew, Gladstone, 103– 48, 330 –50; and Hilton,
The Age of Atonement.
[19] Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 132.
[20] Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, 75.
[21] Durrans, ‘A Two-edged Sword’, Cain, ‘Radicalism, Gladstone and the Liberal Critique of
Disraelian “Imperialism”’.
[22] Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 237 –39.
[23] Ibid., 18; Lowe, ‘Imperialism’. Disraeli’s failure to adhere to Gladstonian principles was prob-
ably the biggest single reason for his defeat at the election of 1880. Biagini, ‘Popular Liberal-
ism, Gladstonian Finance and the Debate on Taxation’, 141, 162. For Gladstone’s moral
dominance as financier, see ‘Mr Gladstone as Financier’, The Spectator, 6 Dec. 1879, 1529 – 30.
[24] On Egyptian debt, see Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 122– 28; and Ferguson,
The World’s Banker, 817– 35. For an interesting contemporary account, see Dicey, England
and Egypt.
[25] Good accounts of the build up to the crisis of 1882 can be found in Atkins, ‘The Conservatives
and Egypt, 1875 – 80’, 190; Ramm, ‘Great Britain and France in Egypt’.
[26] Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East. See also Scholch, Egypt for the Egyptians!
[27] Said, Culture and Imperialism, 290– 91.
[28] Blunt, ‘The Egyptian Revolution’.
[29] Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 96.
[30] Ibid., 101.
[31] See Owen, ‘The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience’. For an ‘Indian’ example of the
importance of character in the imperial context, see Lord Curzon, ‘The True Imperialism’,
142– 56.
[32] Owen, Lord Cromer, is a fine modern biography.
[33] On Milner, see Halperin, Lord Milner and the Empire; Wrench, Alfred Lord Milner; and Colin
Newbury’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 38, 302 –09.
[34] For Colvin, see the essay by B. R. Tomlinson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
12, 831– 33. For Malet, see Lynn Williams essay in ibid., 36, 309– 11.
[35] See Mellini, Sir Eldon Gorst. Gorst was known under the name John Lowndes Gorst until
1902.
[36] Of course, the British officials in Egypt only echoed a much wider view of ‘Oriental’ economic
incompetence and unreliability. See, for example, ‘Reports relating to Uganda by Sir Gerald
Portal’, in Parliamentary Papers C7303 (1894), esp. 32 – 38.
[37] Mowat, ‘From Liberalism to Imperialism’, 116– 24.
[38] Blunt, Secret History of the Occupation of Egypt.
[39] Milner, England in Egypt, 179.
[40] Cromer, Modern Egypt, I, 58.
[41] Milner, England in Egypt, 176; Cromer, Modern Egypt, I, 56.
[42] Milner, England in Egypt, 176; Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 21.
[44] Owen, Lord Cromer, 109.
[46] Ibid., 19. In this context it is worth noting that Cromer and Gorst believed that the
Muslim acceptance of female seclusion and polygamy, together with the generally low
status of women in Egypt, meant that masculinity was ill-developed there. Egyptian
men would never have ‘self-respect’ until monogamy and proper family life became well
established. See Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 155– 59, 542; Gorst, ‘The Oriental Character’, 127.
[47] Milner, England in Egypt, 176, 179. The latter page is headed ‘Thriftless Expenditure’.
[48] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 443– 44. For Cromer’s obsessive concern with Ismail’s moral
deficiencies, see Owen, Lord Cromer, 114– 15.
[49] It is interesting in this context that when, in retirement, Cromer wrote an essay on Disraeli he
saw him, as had Gladstone, as typically ‘Oriental’: and because Disraeli’s ambition was per-
sonal rather than altruistic and because he had a ‘total absence of any moral principle’
Cromer even compared him to Ismail. See Cromer, ‘Disraeli’, 178– 79, 183.
[51] Owen, Lord Cromer, 126– 34.
[52] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 23, 27.
[53] Malet, Egypt, 112.
[54] It is noteworthy that one radical financial journalist in Britain argued that the debts
were Ismail’s alone and the Egyptian people had a right to repudiate them if
necessary rather than pay the European ‘cormorants’ who had lured the hapless ex-Khedive
196 P. J. Cain
into disaster. See Wilson, ‘The Eleventh Plague of Egypt’. See also Scholch, ‘The “Man on the
Spot”’.
[55] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 25. Blunt, Secret History, 221– 22, was convinced that
fears about maintaining financial control lay behind British intervention in 1882.
[56] Colvin’s memorandum to the Foreign Office, reprinted in Cromer, Modern Egypt, I, 218– 21.
Given the overarching theme of this article it is rather ironic that in 1882 Blunt argued that
‘through the strength of his character Sir Auckland has carried Sir Edward everywhere with
him, and together they have brought an English army and unutterable misery into Egypt’.
Blunt, ‘The Egyptian Revolution’, 341.
[58] Milner, England in Egypt, 16; cf. Cromer, Modern Egypt, I, 212; and Dicey, England in Egypt,
251.
[59] Milner, England in Egypt, 18 –19.
[60] The ‘massacres’ were greatly exaggerated. See Chamberlain, ‘The Alexandria Massacres of 11
June 1882’.
[61] Cromer, Modern Egypt, I, 330. For modern interpretations of the reasons for occupation, see
Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, ch.4; Chamberlain, ‘Sir Charles Dilke and
the British Intervention in Egypt in 1882’; and Hopkins, ‘The Victorians and Africa’.
[63] Said, Orientalism, 32. On this theme, see also the debate on Egypt in Parliamentary Debates
5th ser., 17 (3 June 1910), cols.1124, 1125, 1132, 1134, 1141.
[66] Ibid., 215.
[67] Quoted in Cromer, Abbas II, 40; and in Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 239. For similar
sentiments, see Sir Edward Grey’s speech in Parliamentary Debates 5th ser., 17 (13 June 1910),
cols.1152 – 53.
[68] He did add that this ‘may be simply a piece of self-delusion’, but the whole tone of the letter
shows that he did not believe that. Wrench, Alfred Lord Milner, 121.
[69] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 61– 62, for an example. Gorst recognised a few members
of the Egyptian elite who ‘compare with Europeans on equal terms as regards, education,
character and habits of thought.’ Gorst, ‘The Oriental Character’, 124.
[70] Gorst, ‘The Oriental Character’, 138; Milner, England in Egypt, 33.
[71] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 144– 65, 298; Gorst, ‘The Oriental Character’, 132.
[72] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 282, 296.
[74] Ibid., 290.
[76] The radical critics are discussed in Chamberlain, ‘British Public Opinion and the Invasion of
Egypt’.
[78] Owen, Lord Cromer, 246.
[79] Milner, England in Egypt, 111; Colvin, Making of Modern Egypt, 111; Cromer, Modern Egypt, I,
159– 60.
[80] Malet, Egypt, 63; see also Dicey, England in Egypt, 239– 48.
[81] Cromer, Modern Egypt, 443– 44; Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 115, 128.
[82] Cromer, Modern Egypt, 281.
[83] Ibid., 124.
[84] Apart from dark hints about French sexual mores, Cromer was concerned mainly with differ-
ences in approaches to governance. He argued that the French, like other Europeans, preferred
a bureaucratic system with rigid rules handed down from the centre, while British methods
were more individualist and left much more discretion to subordinates. In his view, the
Egyptians were tempted by the French approach because it absolved them from taking per-
sonal responsibility: but the more pragmatic British system was better for them because it
helped to build character. Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 236– 42. See also Earl of Cromer, ‘The
Government of Subject Races’, in Political and Literary Essays, 28– 31; and Said, Orientalism,
211– 12. Note also the contrast between French ‘logic’ and English ‘common sense’ in Cromer,
Modern Egypt, II, 125.
[85] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 111– 12.
[87] Earl of Cromer, ‘The International Aspects of Free Trade’, in Political and Literary Essays,
138– 40. It is noteworthy that Milner became a passionate protectionist in the 1890s.
[89] Earl of Cromer, ‘The French in Algeria’, in Political and Literary Essays, 252– 56; and ‘The
Capitulations in Egypt’, in ibid., 159.

[91] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 451– 52.
[93] Ibid., 233.
[94] Ibid., 234. He also claimed, 242, that ‘the idea of repairing anything is alien to the Arab mind’.
[95] Ibid., 252.
[97] Milner, England in Egypt, 200 –20; Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 447– 48.
[99] Ibid., 447.
[100] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 376.
[101] Cromer, ‘The Government of Subject Races’, 44 – 51.
[108] Ibid., 206, Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 286.
[109] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 135. In this context it is of some interest to note that
when Vincent was freed from Cromer’s grip and became, in 1889, Director-General of the
Imperial Ottoman Bank, his arrogance and impetuousness led him into speculative ventures
of a thoroughly unGladstonian nature and raised serious questions about his probity. See
Auchterlonie, ‘A Turk of the West’, 61– 64; Davenport-Hines and Van Helten, ‘Edgar
Vincent, Viscount D’Abernon, and the Eastern Investment Company’.
[111] The financial exigencies of the 1880s and disputes over how to deal with them caused con-
siderable tension between Cromer and Vincent and some other British officials. See Owen,
Lord Cromer, 229– 30.
[112] In this context, see the penetrating study of the psychology of the imperial elite by Tidrick,
Empire and the English Character.
[114] Owen, Lord Cromer, 186, 204, 243– 49.
[115] Cromer, Ancient and Modern Imperialisms, 118– 19.
198 P. J. Cain
[119] Ibid., 382.
[120] Earl of Cromer, Abbas II, xxiii. As Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 116, pointed out,
expenditure on education should have been a priority if self-government was the chief aim
of government.
[121] Cromer, ‘The Government of Subject Races’, 26.
[122] Milner, England in Egypt, 328, 84, 313.
[123] Ibid., 308.
[124] Gorst, ‘The Oriental Character’, 134, 138.
[126] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 132, 135– 36.
[127] Ibid., 202.
[128] Ibid., 141 –44, 232– 33, 234. For a fascinating study of how the Egyptian elites in the public
service tried to internalise Cromer’s lessons on character, see Mitchell, Colonising Egypt,
esp. ch.4.
[129] Owen, Lord Cromer, 213– 14. The financial morality of some other British officials did give
cause for concern but even Blunt admitted that Cromer was untouched by any scandal.
Ibid., 306– 07.
[130] For critical modern accounts of Cromer’s stewardship of the economy and its effects, see
Tignor, Modernisation and British Colonial Rule in Egypt; and al-Sayyid-Marsot, ‘The
British Occupation of Egypt from 1882’, 657– 64.
[131] The commentary in Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 119 –20, is interesting in this regard.
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The Journal of Imperial and

Character and imperialism: The british

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Character and Imperialism: The

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the wealthiest portion of the population, supporters of Toryism, which he saw as

Gladstone, who himself thought of bankruptcy and financial crises as signs of

variety.51 Secondly, they tried to encourage the development of a constitutional

few steps upwards on the ladder of moral and material improvement.103

even non-believers in Britain and, he thought, would continue to do so if belief

[1] Cromer, Modern Egypt, II, 298.

[90] Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 202– 04.

XIX (1976): 773– 86.

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