102 A Short History of the Middle East
Its isolation in the closed environment of the Nile Valley1 and its
debilitation by endemic disease; and he liad no instrument for the
execution of his plans comparable for energy, devotion, training,
powers of leadership, and ruthlessness towards opposition or
incompetence, with the Communist party in the U.S.S.R.2
Another instructive comparison Is with the Westernization of the
Japanese economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Here again the initial advantages were all with the Japanese since,
although their economic and social system was already being
undermined by degenerative processes, Japan even in her isolation
was a far more healthy organism than decayed and depopulated
Egypt. The Emperor was an institution with divine attributes that
could be used as a focus for the absolute loyalty and fanatical devo-
tion of a people who had learnt by tradition to regard these as the
supreme virtues of their race. The ruling-class, while enjoying
prestige and self-confidence, was not rigidly separated from the
rest of the population, but provided opportunities for men of
talent to rise into its ranks. In every class there was a capacity for
co-operation and organized effort which was in part the product of
a long experience of group action in the family, the clan, and the
guild.'3
In the light of these comparisons, so unfavourable to the ex-
hausted condition of Egypt at the accession of Mohammed Ali, the
cause for surprise is not that he failed to achieve his plans for
material re-organization, but that he was able to effect what must
have seemed impossible fifty years before, the lifting of Egypt out
of the morass in which centuries of misrule were smothering her.
He permanently increased the agricultural productivity of the
country by the introduction of perennial irrigation, though at the
cost of thereby lowering the natural fertility of the soil, formerly
enriched annually by the Nile mud but now requiring the addition
of fertilizers. It is some index of the improved agricultural pro-
ductivity that, after centuries in which the population of Egypt
had declined to perhaps only one-third or one-quarter of its ancient
maximum, it should, according to estimates, have Increased by
some 75 per cent, in one generation between 1821 and 1847, not-
1 This factor is well brought out by D. G. Hogarth, A Wandering Scholar in
the Levant (1896), 156ff.
2 This comparison has been independently developed by Dr. A. Bonne",
in Journal of the Middle East Society, I, No. 3-4 (Jerusalem, 1947), 40 ff,
3 G. C. Allen, A Short Economic History of Modern Japan, 156.