Microhistory as Industrial History: Environment, Sugar Capitalism and Labour in Egypt, 1863–1879

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the microhistorical analysis of one specific industrial enterprise offers a useful perspective from which to study local participation in global industrialization and to unite business and environmental history. Using the example of the Daira Sanieh, a giant sugar holding in late Ottoman Egypt (the so-called ‘khedivate’), I map the economic logic of this non-sovereign polity and suggest that capturing capital was its rulers’ main priority. The article follows how Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, and his men looked for partners in trans-Mediterranean sugar capitalism, including even the establishment of a khedivial bank in Paris in 1870. It proceeds then to consider the problem of capturing human labour, necessitated by fire-engine sugar machines with increased processing capacity; and, drawing on the accountancy books of a single sugar factory, it discusses the Daira’s factories as the earliest pockets of high wage inequality in Africa. The conclusion poses the question whether this type of mechanization was a form of de-industrialization and suggests that global histories of capital can profit from industrial microhistory by considering how the interplay between non-sovereignty and industrialization hinders economic centralization.