Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Egypt’s new khedive, Tawfiq Pasha (r. 1879–1892), was caught between the demands of Europe and powerful interest groups within his own society. He came to the vice-regal throne suddenly, when Britain and France prevailed upon the Ottoman sultan to depose his predecessor (and father), Khedive Ismail, for obstructing the work of their financial controllers in Egypt. Tawfiq Pasha thus knew better than to cross the European powers. Yet compliance with British and French demands had exposed him to growing criticism within Egypt. Large landholders and urban elites, chafing under the economic austerity measures imposed to repay Egypt’s foreign debts, grew increasingly outspoken against the khedive’s misrule. The Egyptian elites enjoyed a political platform in the Assembly of Delegates, the early Egyptian parliament established by Ismail Pasha in 1866. Their representatives in the Assembly began to demand a role in approving the Egyptian budget, increased ministerial responsibility to the Assembly, and a liberal constitution constraining the powers of the khedive. Tawfiq Pasha had neither the power nor the inclination to concede to such demands and, with the support of the European powers, suspended the Assembly in 1879. The landed elites responded by throwing their support behind a growing opposition movement in the Egyptian army. Egypt’s army had been hard hit by the austerity measures imposed after the country’s bankruptcy—particularly the Egyptians in the army. There was a deep divide in the army between the Turkish-speaking elite in the officer corps and the Arabic-speaking native-born Egyptians. The Turkish-speaking officers, known as Turco-Circassians, traced their origins to the Mamluks as a martial class. They had strong ties to the khedive’s household and to the Ottoman society of Istanbul. They held native-born Egyptians in low regard and spoke of them dismissively as peasant soldiers. When Egypt’s financial controllers decreed sharp cut-backs in the size of the Egyptian army, the Turco-Circassian commanders protected their own and imposed the cuts onto native-born Egyptian ranks. Egyptian officers rallied to their men?s cause and began to mobilize against unfair dismissal. They were led by one of the highest-ranking Egyptian officers, Colonel Ahmad Urabi. Ahmad Urabi (1841–1911) was one of the first native-born Egyptians to enter the officer corps. Born in a village of the eastern Nile Delta, Urabi left his studies at the mosque university of al-Azhar in 1854 to enter the new military academy opened by Said Pasha. Urabi believed himself no less qualified to be an officer than any Turco-Circassian of his generation. He claimed descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad on both his mother’s and his father’s side—in Islamic terms, a very illustrious lineage that no Mamluk could match, given their origins as Caucasian Christians converted to Islam as military slaves. A man of talent and ambition, Urabi achieved distinction, and his place in the history books, as a rebel, not as a soldier. Indeed, the revolt that bears his name was the event that precipitated the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In his memoirs Urabi idealized the army as a meritocracy, in which promotion was awarded through examination, “and those who excelled over their peers would be promoted to the appropriate rank.”¹² Urabi clearly performed well in examination. In just six years, between 1854 and 1860, he rose from a common soldier to become, at the age of nineteen, Egypt’s youngest colonel ever. Urabi was devoted to Said Pasha, the viceroy who had opened the oficer corps to native Egyptians. With the accession of Ismail Pasha in 1863, the new viceroy reverted to the traditional bias that privileged Turkish-speaking officers in the Egyptian army. Henceforth, patronage and ethnicity would displace merit as the basis of advancement in the military. The ambitious Urabi ran into a glass ceiling imposed by the Turco-Circassian elites. Through the whole of the sixteen-year reign of Ismail (r. 1863–1879), Urabi did not receive a single promotion. The experience embittered him against his superiors in the military and the viceroys of Egypt. Urabi’s conflict with the Turko-Circassian elites began almost immediately after Ismail ascended to power. Placed under the command of a Circassian general named Khusru Pasha, Urabi complained, “He showed a blind favouritism for men of his own race, and when he discovered me to be a pureblood [Egyptian] national, my presence in the regiment distressed him. He worked to have me discharged from the regiment, to free my post to be filled by one of the sons of the Mamluks.”¹³ Khusru Pasha’s opportunity came when Urabi was posted to the examination board responsible for promotions—the one institution that ensured soldiers were advanced by their merit rather than their connections. Khusru Pasha ordered Urabi to falsify exam results to promote a Circassian, and when Urabi refused, the general reported him to the minister of war for disobeying orders. The case was referred up to Khedive Ismail himself and led to Urabi’s temporary dismissal from the army and transfer to the civil service. Pardoned by the khedive in 1867, Urabi only returned to full military service at his former rank of colonel in the spring of 1870. Yet he still harbored deep resentments against his Turco-Circassian superiors and the injustice they had made him suffer. The 1870s were years of frustration for the Egyptian army. Urabi took part in the disastrous Abyssinian Campaign, when Khedive Ismail attempted to extend Egypt’s imperial rule over the modern territories of Somalia and Ethiopia. King John of Abyssinia dealt the Egyptians a decisive defeat in March 1876, driving the invaders from his lands. The demoralized army returned home having suffered heavy casualties and military disgrace abroad to face demobilization following the 1876 bankruptcy. As one of the economic measures imposed by the European financial controllers, the Egyptian army was to be trimmed from 15,000 to a token force of 7,000 men, and 2,500 officers were to be put on half pay. In January 1879, Urabi was ordered to move his regiment from Rosetta to Cairo for demobilization. When Urabi reached Cairo he found the city awash in Egyptian soldiers and officers awaiting demobilization. Feelings ran high among men facing the sudden end of promising military careers and imminent unemployment. A group of Egyptian army cadets and officers staged a demonstration outside the Ministry of Finance on February 18, 1879, to protest their unfair dismissal. When Prime Minister Nubar Pasha and the British minister, Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, emerged from the Ministry, the angry officers rough-handled the politicians. Urabi, who did not take part in the protest, later recounted to a British sympathizer, “They found Nubar getting into his carriage, and they assaulted him, pulled his moustache, and boxed his ears.”¹⁴ The military riot served Khedive Ismail’s purposes so well that Urabi and his colleagues suspected the viceroy of having a hand in organizing the demonstration. Ismail wanted to be rid of the French and British ministers in his cabinet and wanted greater latitude over Egypt’s budget. He argued that the stringent austerity the European financial advisors imposed were destabilizing Egypt’s internal politics and put in jeopardy its ability to honor its debts to foreign bondholders. The day after the military demonstration, Ismail accepted the resignation of Nubar’s mixed cabinet. However, the British and French were not about to indulge the khedive’s bid to regain his powers, and in June 1879 Ismail was deposed. Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers were relieved to see Khedive Ismail depart. Yet the position of Egyptian officers only deteriorated under his successor, Khedive Tawfiq. The new minister of war, a Turco-Circassian named Uthman Rifqi Pasha, removed a number of native Egyptian officers from their posts and replaced them with men of his race. In January 1881, Urabi learned that he and a number of his colleagues were about to be dismissed in an operation he described in terms of a Mamluk restoration. “The Circassians were holding regular meetings of high and low ranking officers in the home of Khusru Pasha [Urabi’s former Circassian commander], in the presence of Uthman Rifqi Pasha, in which they celebrated the history of the Mamluk state.... They believed they were ready to recover Egypt and all its possessions as those Mamluks had done.?¹⁵ Urabi and his colleagues decided to take action. They drafted a petition to Khedive Tawfiq setting out their grievances and demands. This petition of January 1881 marked Urabi’s entry into national politics, setting a dangerous precedent of military men intervening in politics that would recur through Arab history across the twentieth century. Urabi and his fellow Egyptian officers had three main objectives: to increase the size of the Egyptian army, overturning the cuts in troop numbers imposed by the financial controllers; to revise the regulations and establish equality among all military men without distinction by ethnicity or religion; and to appoint a native-born Egyptian officer as minister of war. Urabi seemed unaware of the contradiction between these demands, for equality and the preference of a native Egyptian minister. Urabi’s demands were revolutionary for their time. When the officers’ petition was submitted to the prime minister, Riyad Pasha, he openly threatened the officers. “This petition is destructive,” he warned, “more dangerous than the petition submitted by one of your colleagues who was subsequently sent to the Sudan,” Egypt’s equivalent to Siberia.¹⁶ Yet the officers refused to withdraw their petition and asked that it be brought to the khedive’s attention. When the khedive received Urabi’s petition, he convened an emergency session in Abdin Palace with his top military commanders. They called for the arrest of Urabi and the two officers who had signed the petition on charges of sedition, and agreed to convene a special court-martial to try the men. Urabi and his fellow officers were summoned to the Ministry of War the following day, where they were told to surrender their swords. On their way to the prison, which was located inside the ministry, the Egyptians passed through two ranks of hostile Circassian officers, and they were taunted at their prison door by Urabi’s old nemesis, Khusru Pasha. “He stood outside the cell and taunted us as ‘peasants [suitable only for] working as fruit pickers,’” Urabi recalled with bitterness.¹⁷ The arrest of Urabi and his fellow officers provoked a mutiny in the Egyptian army. In February 1881 two units of the Khedivial Guard stormed the Ministry of War. The minister and the other Circassians fled the building. The soldiers released Urabi and his officers from their cell and led them back to Abdin Palace, where they held a noisy demonstration of loyalty to Khedive Tawfiq. The soldiers remained in Abdin Square until the unpopular Circassian minister of war, Uthman Rifqi, was dismissed and a man of their choice named his successor. The khedive also issued orders for changes in the military regulations to satisfy the soldiers’ requests on pay and terms of service. The demonstration then broke up, and the troops returned to their barracks. Calm had been restored, but the events had transformed Egyptian politics. Urabi emerged as a popular leader, and the military had forced the khedive and his government to accept their demands.

The large landholders and urban elites from the disbanded Egyptian Assembly of Delegates followed the army’s successes with great interest. They recognized that they stood a much better chance of imposing their liberal constitutional reforms upon the unwilling khedive in partnership with the armed forces. Between February and September 1881, a mixed coalition of Egyptian army officers, large landholders, delegates from the Assembly, journalists, and religious scholars took shape, calling themselves the “National Party.” As the Islamic reformer Shaykh Muhammad Abduh explained to a British observer, these “were months of great political activity, which pervaded all classes. [Urabi’s] action gained him much popularity, and put him into communication with the civilian members of the National party . . . and it was we who put forward the idea of renewing the demand for a Constitution.”¹⁸ The members of this coalition each had their own objectives and grievances. What held them together was a common belief that the Egyptians deserved a better deal in their own country. They took “Egypt for the Egyptians” as their slogan, and gave their support to each other’s cause the better to promote their own. For Urabi and his fellow officers, the constitution represented constraints on the Khedive and his government that would protect them from arbitrary reprisals. It also enhanced their role as defenders of the interests of the Egyptian people rather than just the narrow interests of the military men. To contemporary European observers the growing reform coalition appeared to be a nationalist movement, but this was not so. Urabi and his fellow reformers fully accepted Egypt’s status as an autonomous Ottoman province. Urabi regularly declared his loyalty to both the khedive and the Ottoman sultan—and was decorated by Abdulhamid II for his services. The reformists objected to the power of European ministers and consuls over Egypt’s politics and economy, and the dominance of the Turco-Circassians over the military and cabinet. When demonstrators took to the streets shouting, “Egypt for the Egyptians!” it was a call for freedom from European and Circassian interference, not for national independence. This distinction, however, was lost on the Europeans, who interpreted the actions of the Egyptian military as the beginnings of a nationalist movement that threatened both their strategic and their financial interests. Britain and France began to discuss the best ways to respond to the Urabi threat. The khedive followed the emergence of the opposition movement with growing concern. Already the European powers had whittled away his sovereignty, imposing European officials on his government and taking control of half of Egypt’s budget. Now his own subjects sought to clip his wings further by imposing a constitution and recalling the Assembly. Tawfiq was isolated. He could only count on the support of the Turco-Circassian elites. In July 1881, Tawfiq dismissed the reformist cabinet and installed as minister of war his brother-in-law, a Circassian named Dawud Pasha Yegen, whom Urabi described as ?an ignorant, fatuous, sinister man.? The officers responded by organizing another demonstration outside the khedive’s palace in Abdin Square. Urabi notified the khedive on the morning of September 9, 1881, that “We will bring all of the soldiers present in Cairo to Abdin Square to present our demands to His Highness the Khedive at four in the afternoon” that same day.¹⁹ Tawfiq Pasha was alarmed at the prospect of a new military mutiny and went with his prime minister and American chief of staff, Stone Pasha, to try to rouse loyal troops at the Abdin barracks and in the Citadel to intervene against Urabi—but to no effect. Urabi engendered more loyalty from the Egyptian military men than the khedive himself. Tawfiq was forced to receive Urabi before Abdin Palace with only his courtiers and the foreign consuls behind him. The officers presented the khedive with their demands: a new cabinet, headed by the constitutional reformer Sharif Pasha; the reconvening of the Assembly; and the expansion of troop numbers to 18,000 men. Tawfiq had no choice but to concur. The military and their civilian supporters were in control.

The khedive succumbed to the reformers’ pressures and reconvened the Assembly. In January 1882 the delegates submitted a draft constitution for the khedive’s consideration. The constitution was promulgated in February, and a new reformist cabinet was appointed, with Ahmad Urabi named minister of war. Colonel Urabi, who had not seen a promotion since 1863, had finally overturned the Turco-Circassian hierarchy to secure control of the Egyptian military. There is little doubt that the Egyptian officers took the opportunity to settle old scores with the Mamluks. Former minister of war Uthman Rifqi Pasha was accused of a plot to assassinate Urabi, and fifty of his officers—all Turco-Circassians—were found guilty of the conspiracy. Many of those detained were tortured, with Urabi’s knowledge. He later confided: “I never went to the prison to see them tortured or ill-treated. I simply never went near them at all.”²⁰ Officials in Paris and London grew increasingly alarmed by Tawfiq’s growing isolation in Cairo. The khedive’s every concession to the reform movement reduced both his authority and the influence of the great powers over Egypt’s economy. The British and French were concerned lest the khedive’s concessions give rise to political disorder in Egypt. Urabi’s presence in the government did little to assuage European concerns. Urabi forced the new prime minister, Mahmud Sami al-Barudi, to dismiss European officials appointed to the Egyptian civil service. These changes were too much, too fast, for the conservative European powers to accept. The Urabi movement was beginning to look like a revolution, and the British and French went into action to prop up the faltering khedive?s regime. Ironically, their every action exacerbated Tawfiq?s isolation and enhanced Urabi?s standing. In January 1882, the British and French governments drafted a joint communiquй, known as the Gambetta Note, in a bid to restore the khedive’s authority. One might have expected better from two states that prided themselves on their mastery of diplomacy. The British and French hoped, by giving assurances of “their united efforts” against all internal or external threats to order in Egypt, that they might “avert the dangers to which the Government of the Khedive might be exposed, and which would certainly find England and France united to oppose them.” Nothing could have weakened Tawfiq Pasha’s position more than this poorly-veiled threat to protect the khedive from his own people. The clumsy Gambetta Note was followed by European demands that Urabi be dismissed from the cabinet. Urabi’s domestic standing was greatly reinforced when the unpopular European Powers sought to bring him down. Tawfiq, in comparison, became even more isolated. Urabi accused Tawfiq Pasha of acting on behalf of European interests and of betraying his own country. The prime minister resigned with most of his cabinet. Under the circumstances, no one was willing to form a new government. Urabi remained in office, which meant that the government was effectively under the control of its most popular and powerful minister. In seeking Urabi’s dismissal, the European powers had unwittingly left him in control of the Egyptian government. As the situation escalated, Britain and France resorted to gunboat diplomacy; in May 1882, the two powers dispatched a joint naval squadron to Egypt. This show of force left Khedive Tawfiq’s position untenable. On May 31 he left Cairo for Ras al-Tin Palace in Alexandria to be closer to the protection of the British and French ships. Egypt was essentially being ruled by two men: the legally recognized head of state, Khedive Tawfiq, confined to his palace in Alexandria; and the popular leader, Ahmad Urabi, at the head of the acting government in Cairo. With European warships cruising off the coast, tensions between Egyptians and Europeans exploded into violence in Alexandria on June 11, 1882. What began as a street fight between a British subject and an Egyptian coach driver turned into a riot against foreigners that claimed over fifty lives. Hundreds more were wounded, and thousands were left destitute by the destruction of homes and work places. The European press played up the Alexandria riots as a massacre of Christians and Europeans, putting pressure on the British and French governments to respond forcefully to the breakdown in order in Egypt. Urabi knew that anti-European riots were likely to provoke the British and French to intervene. He even suspected Khedive Tawfiq of instigating the riots to precipitate foreign intervention, though there is no evidence to support this allegation. Urabi dispatched 12,000 troops to Alexandria to restore order—and to reinforce the city against the expected European response. Urabi placed Egypt on a war footing, turning to his supporters among the large landholders to ask for peasant recruits to bolster his armed forces. Emergency taxes were levied to provide Urabi?s government with financial resources to withstand a European attack. Sure enough, the commander of the British fleet, Sir Beauchamp Seymour, issued a series of escalating ultimatums, threatening to bombard Alexandria unless the city’s sea defenses were dismantled. Undaunted, the Egyptian army set about reinforcing the defenses of Alexandria, extending the ramparts on the waterfront and building gun emplacements to face the threat of European ships. With neither the Europeans nor the Egyptians willing to back down, armed conflict was imminent. The threat of military action had one unforeseen consequence: the withdrawal of the French fleet after months of concerted Anglo-French efforts. The French government was bound by its constitution to obtain the consent of parliament before entering into hostilities with any country. France was still recovering from its terrible defeat to Germany in 1870, the cost of subduing Algeria in 1871, and the expenses associated with the occupation of Tunisia in 1881. The French treasury was overextended, and the Chamber was unwilling to enter into any new foreign entanglements. On July 5 the French government explained its position to the British and withdrew its ships from Alexandria. Now the British faced a momentous decision: either back down or go it alone. Britain did not want to occupy Egypt. A bankrupt state with a discredited ruler and an army in revolt is not an attractive proposition to any imperial power. Moreover, Britain’s presence in Egypt would upset the balance of power in Europe that Whitehall had worked so long to preserve. Even more problematic was the exit strategy: once British troops had entered Egypt, when would they be in a position to withdraw? Given Britain’s objectives of assuring the security of the Suez Canal and repayment of Egypt’s debts to British creditors, the risks of military action seemed to outweigh the benefits. Backing down, however, was never really an option. Victorian Britain would not have considered itself “Great” had it conceded to rebellious officers in less-developed countries. Admiral Seymour was given the government’s approval, and on July 11 he opened fire on the ramparts and city of Alexandria. By sunset the city was ablaze, and the Egyptian forces were in retreat. A detachment of British soldiers occupied Alexandria on July 14. It was the beginning not just of a war but of a British occupation that would last three-quarters of a century.

Between June and September 1882, Ahmad Urabi served both as head of an insurrectionary government and commander in chief of Egypt’s defenses against the British. Urabi enjoyed widespread support in both the cities and countryside for standing up to foreign invaders. While the khedive remained confined to his palace in Alexandria, many of the princes, attendants, and women of the royal household threw their support behind Urabi and contributed money, grain, and horses for the war effort.²¹ He continued to enjoy the full support of the landed elites and the urban merchants, as well as of the religious establishment. Urabi’s partisans did all they could to support the coming war, but the professional army was neither large nor confident enough to take on the British, and the peasant volunteers lacked the discipline and training to hold their ground under fire. Even as Urabi’s numbers swelled, his chances remained slim. The British were surprised by the stiff resistance they encountered from Urabi’s irregular army. Sir Garnet Wolseley reached Alexandria at the height of summer at the head of a 20,000-man campaign force. He marched his troops from Alexandria to seize Cairo, but his progress was checked by Urabi’s Egyptian defenders for five weeks, forcing the British to abandon the effort. Wolseley returned to Alexandria to ship his men to the Suez Canal zone, which the British were able to secure with extensive naval power in early September 1882. While in the canal zone, Wolseley received reinforcements from British India, after which he prepared to march westward toward Cairo. Urabi managed to surprise the British forces before they departed the zone and inflicted heavy casualties on the invaders before withdrawing in the face of superior numbers. The Egyptian forces fell back to a spot in the Eastern Desert halfway between the canal and the delta called Tall al-Kabir, to protect Cairo from invasion. Wolseley’s forces attacked before the Egyptians had the time to lay down proper defenses. The British marched to within 300 yards of Egyptian lines in the predawn hours and surprised the defenders with a bayonet charge at sunrise on September 13. The battle was over within one hour as the exhausted Egyptian troops finally succumbed to superior British forces. The road to Cairo now lay clear before the invading forces. The insurrectionary government of Ahmad Urabi collapsed with the Egyptian defenses at Tall al-Kabir. Urabi was captured in Cairo two days later. He and his colleagues were tried on charges of treason, found guilty, and had their death sentences commuted to a life in exile on the British colony of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). Khedive Tawfiq was restored to his throne, though he never recovered full sovereignty. With British troops occupying the country and British advisors posted to all levels of government, the real ruler of Egypt was the British Resident, Sir Evelyn Baring (later elevated to the peerage as Lord Cromer).

Urabi left behind a mixed legacy. Following the collapse of his movement, many criticized him for having provoked the British occupation of Egypt. Yet there is no denying the broad-based support he had enjoyed when standing up for the rights of native-born Egyptians. Some of his most outspoken supporters were women of the royal household. Urabi’s lawyer, A. M. Broadley, recorded a conversation with one princess who enthused that they all ?secretly sympathised from the first with Arabi [sic], because we knew he sought only the good of the Egyptians.... We saw in Arabi a deliverer, and our enthusiasm for him knew no bounds.?²² Princess Nazli, one of Muhammad ’Ali’s granddaughters, explained Urabi’s appeal in more universal terms:Arabi was the first Egyptian Minister who made the Europeans obey him. In his time at least the Mohammedans held up their heads, and the Greeks and Italians did not dare transgress the law. . . . Now there is nobody to keep order. The Egyptians alone are kept under by the police, and the Europeans do as they like.²³

Urabi spent eighteen years in exile before being allowed to return to his native land by Tawfiq’s successor, Khedive Abbas II (r. 1892–1914), in 1901. Granted a formal pardon by the Egyptian government, he pledged his loyalty to the khedive and forsook all political activity. A new generation of young nationalists hoped to gain his support for their fight against the British occupation, but Urabi kept his promise and stayed out of politics. An elderly man, Urabi wanted to see out his days in his beloved Egypt. His eyes were firmly fixed on the past, not the future. He spent the last decade of his life reading all of the books and newspaper accounts on the Urabi Revolt and dedicated his remaining years to clearing his name of all accusations of wrongdoing.²⁴ He wrote a number of autobiographical essays and circulated them widely to authors in Egypt and abroad. In spite of his efforts, two charges stained Urabi’s name for decades after his death in 1911: responsibility for provoking the British occupation of Egypt, and treason against the dynasty of Muhammad ‘Ali, the legitimate rulers of Egypt. It was only after a new generation of young Egyptian colonels overthrew the last of Muhammad’Ali’s line in the 1952 revolution that Urabi was rehabilitated and was admitted to the pantheon of Egyptian national heroes.

The British occupation provoked upheaval well beyond the frontiers of Egypt. French dismay turned to hostility as they saw their British rivals establish an enduring imperial presence in Egypt, which since Napoleonic times had been an important French client state. The Egyptians had drawn upon French military advisors, sent their largest educational delegations to Paris, and imported French industrial technology; in addition, the Suez Canal was established as a French company. France refused to be reconciled to the loss of Egypt and sought by all means to settle scores with “perfidious Albion.” The French took their revenge by securing strategic territories in Africa, both to restore their imperial glory and to put pressure on British overseas interests. What ensued came to be known as the ?scramble for Africa,? as Britain and France, followed closely by Portugal, Germany, and Italy, painted the map of Africa in their imperial colors. Between 1882 and 1904, colonial rivalries led to a deep antagonism between Britain and France. The nadir of this competition came in 1898, when the two imperial powers very nearly went to war over rival claims to an isolated stretch of the Nile in Sudan. Neither side could allow the antagonism to fester and threaten open conflict. The only solution was to restore the imperial balance of power in the Mediterranean by conceding territory to France to compensate for Britain’s position in Egypt. Given France’s holdings in Tunisia and Algeria, the obvious solution lay in Morocco.²⁵ The problem was that France wasn’t the only European power with interests in Morocco. The Spanish held colonies on the Mediterranean coast, the British enjoyed significant trade interests, and the Germans were proving increasingly assertive in their own right. There was also the consideration that, after centuries of independent statehood, the Moroccans neither sought nor provoked invasion. The French foreign minister, Thйophile Delcassй, set out his strategy in 1902, saying that he was interested “in distinguishing the international question from the French-Moroccan question, and to settle the former separately and successively with each power in order ultimately to enjoy full freedom to settle [with Morocco].”²⁶ Over the next ten years, France haggled with each of the European powers in turn before imposing its rule on Morocco. The power with the least interest in Morocco was Italy, so Delcassй turned to Rome first, striking a deal in 1902 that recognized Italian interest in Libya in return for Italy’s support of French ambitions in Morocco. Britain was to prove more of a challenge. The British wished to preserve their commercial interests in Morocco and were unwilling to allow any maritime power to challenge the Royal Navy’s domination of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, Britain had a genuine interest in settling its colonial differences with France. In April 1904, Britain and France came to an agreement—the Entente Cordiale—that served as a fresh start for their diplomatic relations. According to the terms of the agreement, France recognized Britain’s position in Egypt and would not ask “that a limit of time be fixed for the British occupation.” Britain, for its part, recognized France’s strategic position “as a Power whose dominions are conterminous for a great distance with those of Morocco” and pledged not to obstruct French actions “to preserve order in that country, and to provide assistance for the purpose of all administrative, economic, financial, and military reforms which it may require.”²⁷ France moved swiftly to secure Spain’s agreement to a future French occupation of Morocco. The French satisfied both British and Spanish concerns by conceding Morocco’s Mediterranean coastline to Spain’s sphere of influence. This provided the basis for a Franco-Spanish agreement on Morocco, concluded in October 1904. The French had very nearly solved the ?international question,? paving the way to colonizing Morocco. All the European powers had now given their consent?except Germany. Delcass? had hoped to move on Morocco without involving Germany. After all, the German Empire had never extended to the Mediterranean. Moreover, Delcass? knew that Germany would demand French recognition of their annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, seized in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?1871, in return for German recognition of France?s ambitions in Morocco. This was more than France was willing to give for Germany?s consent. However, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II refused to be bypassed. Germany was emerging as an imperial power in its own right, with possessions in Africa and the South Pacific, and Morocco proved a point of competition between Germany and France. The Germans began to assert their interests in Morocco to force France to the negotiating table. In March 1905 the German foreign minister, Prince Bernhard von Bьlow, arranged for Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit the Moroccan sultan, Moulay Abd al-Aziz, in Tangier. Throughout his visit, the German emperor upheld respect for both Moroccan sovereignty and German interests in the sultan’s domains, thereby raising the first obstacle to French ambitions in Morocco. The German demarche forced the French into negotiations with Germany, and the “Moroccan question” was reopened with the convening of the Algeciras Conference in January 1906. The conference, in which eleven countries took part, was ostensibly aimed at helping the Moroccan sultan establish a reform program for his government. In reality, France hoped to use the meeting to bring broader European support to bear on Germany to overcome the kaiser’s resistance to French ambitions in Morocco. Despite Germany’s best efforts to turn the conference attendees against France, three of the states taking part—Italy, Britain, and Spain—had already given their consent to France’s claims to Morocco, and the kaiser’s government was forced to give ground. In 1909 Germany finally recognized France’s special role in Morocco’s security.