Muhammad Ali Pasha & the Dream of an Ottoman Modernity
How Muhammad Ali built a modern state in Egypt, why he failed, and what we can learn from it.
Like many of the agricultural civilisations of the ancient world, from the empires of Mesoamerica to China, Egypt was a hydraulic civilisation. Its society clung desperately to the Nile, a ribbon of fertility amid the vast and undulating expanse of the Sahara. To control water was to control life, and this control was imposed by a centralised polity with the bureaucratic and engineering capacity to muster the manpower for labour-intensive hydraulic infrastructure, such as dams and irrigation. Thus, Egypt’s dependence on the Nile, its flat geography, and its large, largely homogeneous population compelled centralised governance. After all, the river that nourished also delivered tax collectors and soldiers with ease.
It is perhaps no accident, then, that the most determined effort to industrialise in the Middle East and North Africa began not in the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, but in its peripheral province of Egypt. The architect of this effort was neither philosopher nor theologian, but a hard-bitten Ottoman soldier of fortune: Muhammad Ali Pasha.
Where the Sublime Porte struggled to reform the empire through sartorial firmans, Muhammad Ali engaged in ruthless centralisation. He annihilated the Mamluk aristocracy and their feudal political economy; in its place, he built bureaucracies, arsenals, shipyards, and textile mills. He sought to render Egypt knowable and controllable through standardised tax collection, uniform laws, efficient communication, a professional standing army raised by conscription, and the adoption of large-scale industrial production. His statesmanship was defined by relentless action, geopolitical gambits, and a dream of ruling a revitalised Middle Eastern empire capable of holding its own against Europe.
Ultimately, his vision was undone by an unfortunate confluence: a man ahead of his time among his own people, yet too late in the global competition for power dominated by Europe. Britain, above all, could not tolerate an industrialising Egypt astride its imperial lifeline to India, and would play a key role in both Muhammad Ali’s failure and the Ottoman Empire’s eventual demise.
The story of modernisation often leaps from Europe and America to Meiji Japan, bypassing ambitious early attempts across India, the Middle East, and North Africa. Muhammad Ali’s rule stands as one of history’s great ‘what ifs’ – for had he succeeded, the trajectory of the Islamic world might have irrevocably altered global history.
Muhammad Ali was the quintessential reformer emerging in a civilisation’s twilight – a figure Ibn Khaldun would recognise. Yet his misfortune (and ours) was this: whenever such reformers arose within the cyclical rhythm of rise and decline, Britain invariably intervened, sabotaging revival. Islam’s challenge-and-response mechanism had been broken.
Contemporary views of this era often succumb to fatalism, drawing a straight line from Islamic civilisation’s 19th-century decline through the cataclysm of World War I to our fractured present. But this narrative obscures a crucial truth: even amid 19th-century colonisation and dysfunction, the capacity for indigenous renewal persisted. Our task today is to recover that thwarted vision of sovereign development, to understand why and how it failed, and to rediscover the mechanisms for civilisational revival.
An Ottoman Man in an Ottoman World
Born in the port town of Kavala (now in northern Greece) in 1769, Muhammad Ali’s origins betrayed little hint of imperial destiny. His father was an Albanian tobacco merchant and commander of the local Ottoman Albanian militia. Muhammad Ali would spend the first few decades of his life climbing the ranks of local power, acting as both a tax collector and a commander of Albanian mercenaries, ostensibly in service to the Porte, but more often acting as brigands engaging in local disputes.
There is some debate over the lineage of Muhammad Ali and his father – were they ethnically Albanian, or Turkish settlers who had moved from Anatolia to Thrace in centuries past? Debates over the true identity of Muhammad Ali reveal how culture and identity intersected in the pre-modern era in a manner almost entirely alien to us today. Egyptians, Albanians, and Turks often engage in heated debates about who Muhammad Ali was, how he perceived himself, and which modern nation-state can truly lay claim to him.
This debate would probably have made little sense to Muhammad Ali himself. Whether he was Albanian, Turkish, or some secret third thing was largely irrelevant in the wider context of the Ottoman imperial culture and identity. Muhammad Ali was an Ottoman man navigating an Ottoman world, seeking to reform it from within while ensuring the success of his ambitions and the longevity of his dynasty. The tension between race, faith, and power was resolved by order of priority, or through trade-offs made on a case-by-case basis.
In 1801, Muhammad Ali was poised to test the full capacity of his flexible loyalties.
Conquering Egypt
Napoleon Bonaparte had launched an invasion of the Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Syria in 1798, racing against Britain for control of vital land and sea routes between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Yet in 1801, the French army withdrew, defeated by Ottoman resistance in Syria, crippling logistical challenges, and the need to confront the growing anti-Napoleonic coalition in Europe.
In the wake of this retreat, the Porte dispatched an expeditionary force under Khurshid Pasha to reassert Ottoman control over Egypt. Among them were Muhammad Ali and his Albanian mercenaries. Egypt groaned under the Mamluk elite, a caste of slave-soldiers turned parasitic landlords who controlled the land and the fate of its peasantry. Napoleon’s invasion had shattered their myth of invincibility, exposing Egypt and the wider Ottoman world to European military advances. Cavalry charges and swords could not stand against musket volleys and artillery. Yet the French had failed to shatter the Mamluks’ grip on power, regrouping as swiftly as the French had fled.
The competition to control Egypt commenced post-haste, with the Porte and the Mamluks striving for control over the province. Yet in that competition, both were blindsided by the rise of a third actor: Muhammad Ali and his Albanian braves. Lacking the blue blood of the Mamluks or the imperial patronage of Khurshid Pasha, Muhammad Ali instead relied on populism, possibly mastered during his time as a tax collector and mercenary captain back home in Kavala. He positioned himself as a champion for the merchants and ulema of Cairo, led by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. The ulema in particular, by extension of their moral and religious authority, wielded immense influence over Egyptian society. Muhammad Ali also allied with Umar Makram, a fiery populist whose proto-nationalist rhetoric against French occupation and Mamluk misrule had galvanised the streets.
As Muhammad Ali cultivated popular support, the Ottoman-Mamluk rivalry escalated, further ravaging Egypt. In 1805, a revolt erupted against Khurshid Pasha’s oppressive rule. Muhammad Ali deftly positioned himself at the head of this revolt. Faced with a restive Cairo and popular support for Muhammad Ali, Sultan Selim III had little choice but to appoint the Pasha as Wali – Governor of Egypt.
Having secured the support of the Egyptian street, eliminated his Ottoman rival, and received imperial patronage, Muhammad Ali now turned to the final obstacle to his rule: the Mamluks.
In 1807, Sultan Selim III was deposed (and assassinated in his harem a year later) after a Janissary revolt against his Nizam-i Jedid (“New Order”) military reforms, which aimed to create a European-style military out of the Ottoman army. The Janissaries, much like the Mamluks, had transformed from a fearsome slave-warrior caste into a social class with vested in-group interests. The Nizam-i Jedid was a direct disenfranchisement of their social position.
Muhammad Ali paid close attention to how these entrenched feudal classes reacted to reform. In 1811, under the pretext of honouring his son Tusun Pasha’s departure to lead an expedition against the Wahhabi rebels in Arabia, the Pasha invited the Mamluk chieftains and their retinues, numbering nearly 500 men, to a grand banquet within the walls of Cairo’s Saladin Citadel. As the procession of mounted Mamluks descended the narrow, winding ramp from the Citadel gate, Muhammad Ali’s Albanian troops sealed the exits and opened fire. Muskets and cannons loaded with grapeshot tore into the trapped procession, and few Mamluks escaped the slaughter. Survivors were hunted down across the country, all the way to Nubia, and their lands seized by Muhammad Ali. Egypt’s feudal order had been eliminated in one stroke.
Within a decade of his arrival, Muhammad Ali had become the undisputed ruler of Egypt. His ascent was a masterclass in Ottoman realpolitik, ruthlessly manoeuvring to aid rivals against each other and then turning on them once they were weakened. He leveraged popular unrest and support to overthrow the Ottoman governor, secured the Sultanic investiture to govern Egypt, and then used this newfound legitimacy to annihilate the Mamluks that had initially facilitated his rise. Even Umar Makram, realising too late Muhammad Ali’s intentions, was sent into exile.
Muhammad Ali had no intention of ruling either as a partner of the people or a satrap of the sultan. Instead, he quickly set about to consolidate his rule and set Egypt on the path to modernisation.
Ledgers, Looms, and Cannons
With his rivals vanquished, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to the development of Egypt. He had witnessed the military might of Napoleon’s France firsthand and understood, perhaps earlier than any non-European ruler, that industrial power and a modern state were the bedrock of geopolitical power. His reforms thus targeted three pillars: military modernisation, state-led industrialisation, and administrative centralisation.
Building a Modern Political Economy
He began with a nationalisation of all iltizam land (tax parcels), and an unprecedented wealth tax on awqaf (religious endowments), which by the 19th century had become vehicles for tax evasion by wealthy elites. Muhammad Ali seized the entire means of production in Egypt and created, for the first time, a truly national market. He mandated that producers sell their goods to the state, which would then resell them on international markets, earning sizeable revenues that would fund the Pasha’s state-building efforts. While this represented a catastrophic loss of freedom, workers' wages increased as a streamlined national market with access to global markets increased the value of production.
To manage this burgeoning state apparatus and extract its wealth more efficiently, Muhammad Ali set about creating a modern bureaucracy. He initiated one of the first modern censuses in the region. Tax collection was systematised by organising Egypt into 10 centrally-organised provinces, wresting control from local strongmen. Schools were established to train officials, engineers, doctors, and translators, separate from the traditional education provided by institutions like Al-Azhar. Vaccination programs were introduced, provided by the expanding national healthcare system. In 1832, Muhammad Ali even hired the French doctor, Antoine Clot (known in Egypt as ‘Clot Bey’), to build the first school of medicine for women.
Labour conscription was imposed to overhaul Egypt’s decrepit hydraulic infrastructure, dredging and expanding irrigation canals that had been neglected for centuries. The Mahmudiyah Canal, completed in 1820, reconnected Alexandria to the Nile, revitalising trade and increasing Egypt’s geopolitical importance.
A sovereign state required an industrial base. Muhammad Ali established ruthless state monopolies over Egypt’s key commodities: cotton, grain, sugarcane, and later, tobacco; the profits of which funded an astonishing industrial leap. Government factories sprang up across the Nile Delta: textile mills in Cairo, Mehalla el-Kubra, and Kafr el-Zayat, equipped with modern spinning jennies and power looms (by 1829, 30 cotton mills operated across Egypt, turning it into one of the world’s most important cotton exporters); arsenals at Cairo and Alexandria producing muskets, cannon, and ammunition; foundries casting metal; chemical works producing sulphuric acid and gunpowder; sugar refineries and glassworks. Shipyards at Alexandria built warships and merchant vessels.
Egypt was becoming legible, quantifiable, and centrally controlled – a recognisably modern state. This was not a straightforward task. The science of legibility was a foreign imposition in a culture where everything was anything but legible. Muhammad Ali lacked sufficient cadres of skilled bureaucrats capable of carrying out this task; there was immense resistance across Egypt to what was (rightly) seen as the impersonal interference of a state to which they had no allegiance. Nonetheless, the Pasha persisted.
Muhammad Ali also fostered an intellectual engagement with Europe that sought understanding, not subservience. The educational mission he sent to Paris in 1826 included Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, an Azhar-trained scholar and imam. During his five-year stay in Paris, Al-Tahtawi wrote Takhlis Al-Ibriz Fi Talkhis Bariz ("The Extraction of Gold in the Summarising of Paris"), a travelogue of what he observed in Europe. He marvelled at French engineering, public hygiene, and orderly administration, seeing them as manifestations of beneficial knowledge that Muslims could and should adopt. He noted the precision of French law, the efficiency of their postal service, and even their table manners as practical advancements. He also praised their educational institutions, libraries, and newspapers as vital tools for national strength. Al-Tahtawi expressed no sense of civilisational inferiority, instead treating France and Europe’s advances as a toolbox from which Muslims could adopt what was beneficial and leave the rest.
The Bulaq Press, founded by the Pasha in 1822 primarily to print military manuals and administrative decrees, evolved into the Arab world’s first modern publishing house. While initially favouring European technical works, it became the engine of Egypt’s later Nahda (cultural renaissance), an Arabic intellectual revival planting the seeds for the broader Arab nationalist movement. Al-Tahtawi later worked at the Press, producing over 2000 written works, mostly focused on translating European ideas and books on history, geography, and statecraft.
All the Pasha’s Men
The fate of Sultan Selim III’s own Nizam-i Jedid reforms served as a grim warning to Muhammad Ali. If the imperial core could not reform its armies, it had no chance of standing against the might of Europe.
Muhammad Ali started from scratch, transforming his motley crew of Albanian braves into the nucleus of his own Nizam-i Jedid. By 1824, he had established a vast training camp at Aswan under the command of Sulayman Pasha Al-Faransawi (born Joseph Anthelme Sève), a French officer who had converted to Islam and sought service under the Pasha. The recruits were a polyglot mix: remnants of his loyal Albanians, Mamluk slaves he still controlled, and tragically, thousands of enslaved Sudanese. The Sudanese, unprepared for the harsh conditions and European-style drilling, perished in droves; out of 20,000 brought to Aswan, only 3,000 survived the first year.
Desperate for manpower, and on the advice of the French consul, Bernardino Drovetti, Muhammad Ali turned to Egypt’s fellaheen – the peasant farmer class. In Napoleonic style, the Pasha imposed mass conscription on them. The idea of service to the state was an entirely revolutionary foreign notion. Many peasants fled their land into hiding, going as far as Nubia and Syria. Some even mutilated their own hands by cutting off thumbs and index fingers (necessary to fire muskets) to avoid military service.
Yet, Muhammad Ali persisted with relentless will. He recruited the services of dozens of European officers from Italy, France, and Spain, who drilled the raw recruits in European techniques. By the late 1820s, Egypt boasted a standing army of 130,000 men, trained in European tactics and armed with modern muskets and artillery, eclipsing the Ottoman army itself in discipline and firepower.
Muhammad Ali had observed how Britain was able to defeat Napoleonic France time and again, owing to the superiority of the Royal Navy. Without a modern navy, Egypt’s security and the Pasha’s ambitions would be curtailed in a likewise manner. He first attempted to purchase state-of-the-art warships from Britain but was rebuffed; they had no interest in helping a Middle Eastern and Muslim power acquire the power to compete with the Royal Navy. Even France was reluctant to help the Pasha. Undeterred, he turned to shipyards in Genoa, Venice, and Marseilles, privately commissioning frigates and brigs, and scavenging the Mediterranean for whatever vessels he could acquire. This nascent navy became central to his ambitions.
Dreams of Empire
Muhammad Ali’s first commission from the Porte after the successful capture of Egypt was to retake the Hejaz region of Arabia, centred on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the Wahhabi rebels. Led by his sons, Tusun and Ibrahim Pasha, the campaigns were gruelling, but demonstrated the army’s discipline and logistical capabilities. By 1818, victory secured the holy cities, bolstered Muhammad Ali’s legitimacy, and gave him control of the lucrative Red Sea trade routes. It also proved his forces could project power far beyond the Nile.
After the Hejaz campaigns, Muhammad Ali turned his attention to Sudan next, dispatching his modern army to conquer and incorporate the country into Egypt between 1820 and 1824. By the mid-1820s, the Pasha now governed over Egypt, the Hejaz, and Sudan. Yet, these successes did not satiate his ambitions.
An even greater opportunity arose after 1821, with the start of the Greek Revolt against Ottoman rule. By 1824, the Porte’s failure to crush the revolt prompted the Sultan, Mahmud II, to beseech Muhammad Ali for his support. Initially aloof, or perhaps desiring significant concessions, the Pasha intervened only when Sultan Mahmud II offered him the governorship of Crete and Morea if he succeeded in crushing the revolt.
Muhammad Ali dispatched his son, Ibrahim Pasha, at the head of the Egyptian army. In Crete, they crushed the rebels with startling efficiency, prompting increasing paranoia in the Porte. Egypt’s subsequent governance of the island revealed the Pasha’s reformist ethos: replacing arbitrary taxation and punishment with streamlined systems, rooting out corruption, and fostering relative stability. Muhammad Ali was not another satrap interested in tax farming.
Success in Crete led to campaigns in the Morea, further showcasing his army’s prowess and expanding his influence. By 1826, the Egyptian army had succeeded in crushing much of the Greek Revolt. However, Muhammad Ali’s ambitions alarmed the European powers. Philhellenic sentiment was running high in Europe, but more crucially, Britain feared Russian expansion through Ottoman weakness and detested the prospect of a powerful, modernising Egypt controlling the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptian navy had enabled Muhammad Ali’s projection of power across the eastern Mediterranean and formed the supply lifeline to the Egyptian forces operating in Crete and the Morea.
Thus, a combined British, French, and Russian fleet, ostensibly enforcing a ceasefire, entered Navarino Bay in the Morea and deliberately provoked a battle that annihilated Muhammad Ali’s prized, modern navy – the fruit of years of investment and shipbuilding. It was his first defeat and a devastating blow to the Pasha, eliminating nearly two decades of hard work. Navarino seared into his consciousness the precariousness of his position.
The Vision Flounders
Stung by Navarino, fearing encirclement, and desiring restitution for the loss of his fleet, in no small part caused by the Porte’s incompetence, Muhammad Ali demanded Ottoman Syria from the Porte to add to his governorship. The province offered significant trading markets, a buffer zone against the Ottomans, and resources such as the timber of Lebanon needed to rebuild his fleet. The Porte was uninterested in increasing the power of their otherwise chastened viceroy.
In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha was dispatched to Syria at the head of the Egyptian army. Conquest was swift, but governing the region's fractious mosaic of sects and tribes proved far harder. Ibrahim, a brilliant soldier but less adept politician, struggled with understanding Syria’s cultural landscape. Reforms similar to Egypt and Crete were imposed, but Syria’s local elites proved more wily in their resistance to Egyptian taxation, and the imposition of conscription (levied only on Muslims) and perceived favouritism towards Christians sparked repeated rebellions. While Ibrahim Pasha succeeded in putting them down, lingering discontent made Egyptian governance over Syria an arduous affair.
Ibrahim Pasha continued his campaigning, and by 1832, the Egyptians were soundly defeating the Ottoman armies, marching as far as Konya in central Anatolia, where 15,000 Egyptian troops routed a significantly larger force of 60,000 Ottomans. The road to Istanbul lay wide open. Here, Muhammad Ali again overplayed his hand and provoked Europe against him.
Sultan Mahmud II, in panic, appealed to the Ottomans’ ancient enemy: Russia. The sight of Russian troops encamped on the shores of the Bosphorus forced a temporary settlement in the Convention of Kütahya in 1833, granting Muhammad Ali control of Syria, Adana, and Crete, but forcing him back from Istanbul and the Ottoman dynasty.
It was the zenith of his power. When the Ottomans sought revenge in 1839, Ibrahim delivered another crushing blow at Nezib in 1839, reinforcing their dominance of the Ottoman Middle East. The Ottoman fleet even defected to Alexandria days later. Constantinople seemed indefensible for the second time. Could Muhammad Ali overthrow the Ottoman dynasty?
Once again, European powers intervened, orchestrated by Britain’s Turkophobic Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston. Britain could not tolerate Russian influence over the Ottomans, nor could it accept a powerful, independent Egypt athwart the route to India. A European coalition (composed of Britain, Austria, and Russia) formed against Muhammad Ali. In 1840, the bombardment of Acre by the Royal Navy shattered Ibrahim Pasha’s Syrian stronghold, and a British fleet lay siege to the port of Alexandria. Facing overwhelming force and internal unrest, the ageing Pasha capitulated. The London Straits Convention of 1841 stripped Muhammad Ali of Syria, Crete, Arabia, and the Ottoman fleet, but crucially, it made his rule over Egypt hereditary. He had secured a dynasty but sacrificed an empire.
Meanwhile, Britain had moved deliberately to cripple the economic engine of Muhammad Ali’s state. In 1838, they imposed the Treaty of Balta Liman on the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt. The treaty abolished monopolies, the very mechanism Muhammad Ali used to fund industrialisation and control trade, and imposed "free trade." This would keep Egypt a mere supplier of raw cotton for Lancashire’s mills, and a market for British goods. Flooded with cheap, mass-produced British textiles, Egypt’s cotton mills and workshops were driven into ruin. The treaty had the same effect across the Ottoman Empire, and Balta Liman would result in the most extreme deindustrialisation of any 19th-century polity.
After Balta Liman and the London Convention, Muhammad Ali’s worsening health, state of defeat, and some solace that he had at least preserved Egypt for his dynasty, led to the faltering of the Pasha’s grand project. Egypt’s debt ballooned as its industries came to a standstill.
Ultimately, he could not defeat the confluence of unfortunate events that stood in the way of his vision. European powers, especially Britain, viewed his industrial and military rise with alarm, seeing a potential barrier to their own imperial designs, particularly the route to India. They actively worked to undermine him, propping up the enfeebled Ottomans as a more pliable entity.
The Porte itself, riddled with envy and fear of its over-mighty viceroy, proved a constant, debilitating opponent, more interested in clipping his wings than harnessing his energy for the empire’s benefit.
A Future Lost
Muhammad Ali’s drive had been the dynamo of the Egyptian state. His successors lacked his vision, energy, and ruthless competence. His most capable son and intended heir, Ibrahim Pasha, worn out by constant campaigning, died of consumption just months after formally succeeding his ailing father in 1848. Muhammad Ali’s advisors neglected to inform him of his son’s death out of fear for his health. The Pasha would pass nearly a year later in the summer of 1849.
Ibrahim’s nephew and successor, Abbas Hilmi I, was reactionary and paranoid. He despised his grandfather’s reforms and became the caricature of the indolent Oriental satrap, presiding over the dismantling of his industries, the closure of schools, the dismissal of European advisors, and the mortgaging of Egypt’s future to European creditors to fund palace escapades.
Though later successors like Said Pasha and Ismail Pasha revived aspects of their progenitor’s development programme, they did so on a foundation of massive European debt. Ismail’s extravagant borrowing, coupled with collapsing cotton prices, led directly to the imposition of Anglo-French financial control and ultimately, the British Occupation of 1882. The dynasty became increasingly hollow, its nominal independence preserved only as a facade for British control, limping on until the military coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed King Farouk in 1952, ending the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt.
Modernisation is a brutal affair: cultural homogenisation, military conscription, and the rigours of industrial production on labour were just some of the trials that every developed state today has had to endure. Yet what fruits they enjoy, be that material prosperity or political and military sovereignty, is a direct result of these trials.
Muhammad Ali was no angel or saviour. He was driven by personal ambition and the desire to create an imperial dynasty. His policies caused a great deal of suffering, particularly through the toll exacted on the fellaheen of Egypt, who bore the brunt of his measures. Nor was he a philosopher or intellectual, wrestling with abstract notions of modernity and tradition. He understood that sovereignty depended on military organisation, industrial productivity, and state capacity, and the only response to European advancement was to identify what worked and adopt it. Innovation was judged by its utility, not its origin.
The Pasha’s failure was not preordained. Japan, facing similar Western pressure just decades later, would demonstrate that non-Western societies could rapidly industrialise while retaining cultural coherence under determined leadership. Egypt possessed the resources, the strategic location, and, under Muhammad Ali, the will. What it lacked was time free from British and European interference, and a hostile cultural and political milieu at home. No one could tell what the future of the 19th and 20th centuries would bring, and if they had, the impetus to modernise would have received a different urgency. Yet, if he had succeeded, we may well be telling a different tale, and the cost of modernisation a mere stepping stone to a better future.
Perhaps this is why Muhammad Ali’s figure looms so large in the history and imagination of both modern Egypt, where he is considered the ‘father of the state’ (although not without significant pushback owing to the toll he exacted on Egyptians), and the wider Middle East. No statesman since his time has come so close to creating the conditions for an industrialised and modern state of consequence in the Arab world.
In his time, few shared the Pasha’s dreams of an industrialised Middle Eastern empire at the heart of Islamic civilisation. Muhammad Ali’s failure remains one of history’s most haunting 'What Ifs?’
Author: Ahmed Askary is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Kasurian, a magazine focused on history, culture, and civilisation.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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Further Reading
Books
Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali
Henry Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt
Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt 1740-1858
Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt
Khaled Fahmy, Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt
Journals
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 49, Muhammad Ali Pasha
Laura Panza & Jeffrey G. Williamson, Did Muhammad Ali Foster Industrialization in Early Nineteenth Century Egypt?