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Mishaqa was now the prisoner of the crowd. He was separated from his family and taken through the back streets to an official’s house. Mishaqa was, after all, the consul of a foreign state. One of Mishaqa’s Muslim neighbors gave his battered Christian friend sanctuary and reunited him with his family, all of whom—including his young daughter struck down by the crowd—miraculously survived the massacre. Only those Christians who found such safe refuge escaped the carnage. Some were rescued by Muslim notables, headed by the exiled hero of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism, the amir Abd al-Qadir. He and others risked their own lives to rescue and give shelter to fleeing Christians. Other Christians took refuge in the limited space of the British and Prussian consulates, whose guards succeeded in holding back the mob. The majority of those who survived took precarious shelter in the citadel of Damascus, fearful that the soldiers might let the mob through at any moment. While the majority of the city’s Christians did find safe refuge, thousands did not and suffered terrible violence at the hands of the mob in three days of carnage. Mishaqa later detailed the human and material costs of the massacres in a report to the American consul in Beirut. He claimed that no less than 5,000 Christians had been killed in the violence, one-quarter of a community that originally numbered 20,000. Some 400 women were abducted and raped, and many were left pregnant, including one of Mishaqa’s own house servants. The material damages were very extensive. More than 1,500 houses lay in ruins, all Christian-owned shops had been looted, and some 200 shops in the Christian quarters were put to the torch. Churches, schools, and monasteries were plundered and destroyed.14 The Christian quarters had been gutted by theft, vandalism, and fire in an irruption of communal violence unprecedented in the city’s modern history.
The Ottoman government had established legal equality between its Muslim and non-Muslim citizens largely to prevent the European powers from intervening in its domestic affairs. The ensuing violence against Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus engendered the prospect of a massive European intervention. Upon learning of the massacre, the French government of Napoleon III immediately dispatched a military expedition headed by General Charles de Beaufort d’Hautpoul, a French aristocrat who had advised the Egyptian army during its occupation of Syria in the 1830s. De Beaufort was charged with the mission of preventing further bloodshed and bringing to justice the perpetrators of violence against the region’s Christians. The Ottomans had to act quickly. They dispatched one of their highest-ranking government officials, an architect of the Ottoman reforms named Fuad Pasha, to take all necessary measures to restore order before the French expedition reached the Syrian coast. Fuad fulfilled his mission with remarkable efficiency. He set in motion a military tribunal to mete out severe punishments to all responsible for the breakdown in order. The governor of Damascus was sentenced to death for his failure to prevent the massacre. Dozens of Muslims, from the nobility down to the poorest urban workers, were publicly hanged in the streets of Damascus. Scores of Ottoman soldiers faced the firing squad for having broken ranks and participated in the murder and looting. Hundreds of Damascenes were exiled or marched away in chains to serve long prison sentences with heavy labor. The government set up commissions to address Christian claims for compensation for damaged and stolen property. Muslim quarters were emptied to provide temporary housing for homeless Christians while state-funded masons rebuilt the devastated Christian quarters. Basically, the Ottoman officials anticipated every grievance the European powers might raise and acted upon it before the Europeans had a chance to intervene. By the time General de Beaufort reached the Lebanese coast, Fuad had the situation under control. He thanked the French profusely for their services and provided them with a campsite on the Lebanese coast, far from any population center, where the soldiers would be on hand in case they were needed. The need never arose, and within a year the French withdrew their forces. The Ottomans had weathered the crisis, their sovereignty intact.
The Ottomans learned some important lessons from the experience of 1860. Never again would they pursue a reform measure that openly contravened Islamic doctrine. Thus, in the decades that followed, when the abolitionist movement and the British government combined forces to pressure the Ottoman Empire to abolish slavery, the Porte demurred. Verses of the Qur?an encourage owners to treat slaves well, to allow them to marry, and to give them their manumission, but slavery is in no way forbidden. How could the sultan outlaw that which God?s book permits? In an effort to accommodate British pressure, the Porte agreed to work instead toward the abolition of the slave trade, on which the Qur’an is silent. In 1880 the Porte signed the Anglo-Ottoman Convention for the suppression of the black slave trade. It was a compromise intended to preserve peace within the empire rather than to curb the institution of slavery.15 The Ottomans also recognized the need to balance reforms with benefits to win public support for the Tanzimat. The population at large did not gain from an expanded bureaucracy designed to tax them better or conscript them more efficiently into Western-style military service. All of the legal changes designed to make the Ottoman Empire more compatible with European political thought and practice were alien to the average Ottoman. To encourage its subjects to accept such alien changes, the Ottoman government needed to invest more in the local economy and in promoting social welfare. Large-scale projects that gave the public pride and confidence in the sultan’s government—such as gas lighting, steam-powered ferry boats, and electric trams—could generate support for the reformist government. The Porte needed to make such tangible, visible contributions to Ottoman society and the economy if the reform process were not to produce more disturbances. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed massive state investment in building projects and public works throughout the Ottoman Empire. Two Ottoman vassal states—Egypt and Tunisia—enjoyed sufficient autonomy to pursue their own development programs. Having adopted Enlightenment ideas, the Ottoman world began to acquire advanced European industrial technology in a wild spending spree. Industrial goods and products reached Arab markets in ever-increasing diversity as the Ottoman world was drawn into the global economy of the late nineteenth century.
Egypt led the way in modernization initiatives in the nineteenth century. Muhammad’Ali had invested heavily in industry and technology, though his projects were always undertaken with the military in mind. It fell to his successors to invest in Egypt’s civilian infrastructure. Abbas Pasha (r. 1848–1854) made a modest start when he granted a concession to a British firm to build a railroad between Alexandria and Cairo. Concessions were the standard contract by which a government encouraged private companies to undertake major investments in its domains. The terms of a concession would set out the rights and benefits accruing to both the investors and the government for a fixed period of time. The more generous the terms of a concession, the easier it was to attract entrepreneurs to one?s country. However, governments had to be careful not to concede too much to foreigners if they hoped for the enterprise to generate some profit for their own treasury. With governments in South America, Africa, and Asia vying for new technology, industrialists drove hard bargains. Abbas Pasha was a conservative man who preferred not to make many commitments to foreign investors. The next ruler of Egypt, Said Pasha (r. 1854–1863), committed the country to far more ambitious plans. He laid a second railway line between Cairo and Alexandria and awarded a concession for a new line from Cairo to Suez, completing the overland link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea route to the Indian Ocean. He fostered Euro-Egyptian partnerships to bring steam shipping to the Nile and the Red Sea. Yet nothing could compare with the 1856 concession Said gave his former French tutor, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to construct a waterway linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: the Suez Canal. It was to prove Egypt’s greatest development project, and the biggest drain on Egypt’s treasury, of the nineteenth century. The granting of concessions was not in itself an expense to the treasury. If all of the ventures established by Egyptian concession-holders had succeeded, investors and governments alike would have profited. Unfortunately, many of these ventures were very risky and failed. This would have been bad enough for the host government, which had hoped to build stronger domestic economies through investment in European technology. Its losses were compounded by the demands of European consuls for indemnities when their citizens’ investments failed. As a matter of national pride, each consul took note of the indemnities received by the consuls of other states and sought to outdo them. Thus, when the Nile Navigation Company went bankrupt, the Egyptian treasury had to compensate European shareholders to the sum of Ј340,000.16 The Austrians set a new benchmark for individual claims when their consul managed to squeeze 700,000 francs from the government of Egypt to compensate an Austrian investor on the spurious grounds that twenty-eight cases of silk cocoons had been spoiled by the late departure of the Suez-to-Cairo train. Said was reported to have interrupted a meeting with a European businessman to ask a servant to close the window. “If this gentleman catches cold,” he quipped, “it will cost me Ј10,000.”17 The Suez Canal project generated the greatest indemnity bill of all. The British had objected to French plans to create a canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Given its empire in India, Britain would inevitably be more reliant on the canal than any other maritime power. The idea of placing such a strategic waterway under the control of a French company was completely unacceptable to the British. They had no right to prevent the government of Egypt from offering concessions to its sovereign soil, but they could object to the terms of the concession. Specifically, the British objected to Egypt?s promise to provide free labor to dig the canal as tantamount to slavery, and they demanded that Egypt rescind those articles conferring rights on the Suez Canal Company to develop both banks of the canal in a colonization scheme. The Egyptian government was too reliant on Britain?s goodwill to refuse its objections, and it therefore notified the Suez Canal Company that it wished to renegotiate key terms of the original 1856 concession. The company turned the dispute over to the French government to defend its rights as a concession holder against British pressure. Said’s successor Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879) inherited the dispute and had to suffer the arbitration of the French emperor Napoleon III—hardly a disinterested party. In his settlement of 1864, Napoleon III demanded that the Egyptian government pay 38 million francs to the Suez Canal Company to compensate it for the loss of free labor, and 30 million francs for the land along the banks of the canal that was to be returned to Egypt. Additionally, he found reason to charge the Egyptian government an additional 16 million francs, making for a total indemnity of some 84 million francs (Ј3,360,000, about $33.5 million in 1864)—an unprecedented sum.18 In spite of its heavy losses to development projects, the government of Egypt remained optimistic about its economic future. Egypt’s most important export crop was long-staple cotton, prized by European weavers. In 1861 the supply of American cotton was cut by the outbreak of the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, cotton prices quadrupled. Egypt’s a