Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

102 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTmal products. They employ stones to make a few grains into flour. In somelarge villages, there are mills turned by cows.” 16 Bonaparte’s depiction of theEgyptian peasants underestimated them. He had forgotten how the villagewoman blinded one of his men with her scissors.Bonaparte now presided over a country full of peasants, and therefore hadto deal with landed property and agricultural taxes. The theory and practice ofland tenure in eighteenth-century Egypt is complicated, but it is better not tothink of land then as a commodity with one owner. It was a resource that was“owned” by various players, each of whom extracted some profit from farming.In other words, there were overlapping layers of ownership, rather than one exclusiveproperty holder. Theoretically, the Ottoman sultan owned all the land.The beys, his vassals, bid for tax farms, or the right to tax certain villages and tokeep part of the receipts for themselves, while passing on the bulk to the governmentin Cairo (and supposedly to the Ottoman viceroy, though that was increasinglyuncommon in the late eighteenth century). Village headmen claimedrights of tillage and profit over much village land. And the peasants claimed theplots of land they habitually farmed. Peasants bought and sold rights in fractionsof plots, showing that society recognized these local rights despite the theoreticalclaim of the sultan and the tax-collecting prerogatives of the local elite. 17Each province would have a Coptic Christian chief revenue officer whowould ensure the payment of taxes, such as the miri (assessed on peasants workingcrown lands) and the feddan (assessed on other farms in accordance withtheir square acreage), formerly rendered to the Ottoman-Egyptian elite, whichwould now be remitted instead to the Republic. He was to hire as many collectorsas necessary for this task and would have a French agent to whom he wouldreport on the administration of finances. Bonaparte had earlier promised theEgyptians liberation from the onerous imposts of the beys, but now he wasclaiming the same taxes for his own administration. 18 Coptic Christians were affordedrights in Islamic law of life and property and freedom to practice theirreligion, though they were subordinate in status to the Muslims. Approximatelysix percent of Egyptians were Coptic Christians. The Ottoman-Egyptian rulershad long resorted to the Christian Copts for help with keeping track of revenues.For the beys, the Copts’ lack of kinship and other ties to the Muslim majorityhelped forestall corruption. Ethnic groups or castes often specialized insuch occupations in the personalistic bureaucracies of the Middle East andIndia, unlike in China where the majority Han population competed for postsby examination. The rise of a centralizing, powerful military junta in the eighteenthcentury allowed some Coptic notables to become wealthy and powerful.