3 - Private and public life: women and the growth of the State

Summary

My lover and I are content, so why, judge, are you concerned?

Egyptian proverb (Taymūr, 556, p. 91)

What frees women is the distance of men.

Egyptian proverb (Taymūr, 728, p. 121)

The State in eighteenth century Egypt was centralized and fairly adept at collecting the agricultural surplus in the form of land taxes despite the bitter infighting of the beys and friction between Cairo and Istanbul. The ruling beys aspired to the relatively modest goals of protecting state revenues through the imposition of an order sufficiently strict to avoid a slide into anarchy; while parts of the countryside, particularly in Upper Egypt, did elude the control of the central government from time to time, Egypt overall exhibited a high degree of political unity in a period when regional trends had veered strongly toward decentralization and the emergence of many small power centers, such as in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. That the State managed to retain control over most of its hinterland was due rather more to fortuitous geography – the Nile Valley forming a natural and eminently accessible political unit – than to secrets of statecraft. The State's activities stopped far short of active intervention into the lives of its subjects: as long as the land was cultivated and the taxes were paid, the organization and quality of life in the country lay outside the concern of the government.

One of the dramatic changes of the nineteenth century was the gradual emergence of a more active and interventionist State under Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors.