Modernization and the Growth of Nationalism 99
education was confined to the study of the theology and juris-
prudence of Islam; elementary education, to the learning of the
Qur'an by heart; and only the exceptional individual could read a
book or write more than his own name. The establishment of
Islam had inhibited the development of political ideas. Travel was
slow and beyond the means of the majority: Damascus was three
weeks' journey by caravan from either Baghdad or Cairo; such
rare travel-books as existed were accessible only to a few; and the
average man's experience and imagination were therefore con-
fined to his immediate environment. Consequently the idea of
nationality was unknown; all were subjects of the Padishah, but no
one thought of himself as belonging to a Syrian or an Iraqi, still less
an Arab nation. Instead men were distinguished by their millet, or
by the town of their origin: as Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, Jew,
Druze, Armenian, or Shi'i; as Baghdad!, Halabi (Aleppine),
Shami (Damascene), orMisri (Cairene).
The dominating purpose of Mohammed Ah was to secure his
personal position in Egypt, by making the country a formidable
military and naval power, and to this end he consistently devoted
one-half of the revenues of the state. The well-being of the people,
to whom he was foreign, did not interest him in the slightest; but
to provide the necessary finances for his military schemes, he had to
raise the agricultural productivity of Egypt from the miserable
state to which nearly five hundred years of misrule had reduced it,
and to create industries which did not yet exist. By 1814 he had
" bought out or expropriated almost all the landowners of the
Maniluk period, vesting the ownership in his own government,
i.e. in himself, but leaving the use and cultivation of the lands in the
hands of the existing tenants. From about 1820 he began the con-
struction of numerous canals in the Delta for the purpose of culti-
vating that district by perennial irrigation in place of the artificial
basins into which the annual Nile flood was admitted to fertilize
the ground for the main winter crop. By superseding the age-old
basin-irrigation by this new system, incomplete and imperfect
though it was in its beginnings, two or three crops could be grown
from a plot in one year, producing profitable yields of cotton,
indigo, flax, or rice as well as the basic winter grain-crop. Thus it
is estimated that between 1824 and 1840 the area under cultivation
was increased by about a quarter, in spite of the heavy demand on
man-power for military and industrial conscription. Agricultural