Parting the Desert by Zachary Karabell

Author:Zachary Karabell [Karabell, Zachary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56607-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2003-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE CORVÉE

THE FRENCH EXPRESSION “Quelle corvée!” translates as “What a drag!” The actual corvée in nineteenth-century Egypt was that and more. Hardly unique to Egypt, the corvée has been used in countless countries for as long as human history has been recorded. Most of the wonders of the ancient world were built through forced labor. Even the temples of the Greeks were constructed by laborers who were not given the option of refusing to haul the tons of stone and thousands of bricks needed to construct a Parthenon. The Great Pyramids at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia—all were the products of hundreds of thousands of peasants who were corralled by armies of the state, taken to the sites, and put to work. Whether they survived was not a primary concern.

One of the byproducts of the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, and the emergence of liberal ideas in the nineteenth century was that slavery and forced labor came under attack. Human bondage was difficult to reconcile with the principles of liberty and freedom. The British officially outlawed the slave trade in 1807. In France, the Society for the Abolition of Slavery agitated for decades before it was finally victorious, during the brief Second Republic interregnum, in 1848. Neither of these laws actually ended slavery in the colonies held by Britain and France, and it would take continuous effort by antislavery advocates to eradicate the human trade in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America. But by midcentury it was difficult to find anyone in a position of influence in the West defending slavery, at least outside of the Southern part of the United States.

The Egyptian corvée existed in a gray zone. The peasants pressed into service were not considered property of the state or of private individuals. But the system did impose a form of temporary servitude. The workers could not come and go as they pleased. They were recruited under the threat of violence and forced to work under the threat of violence. Typically, the corvée was used for irrigation projects on the Nile. These took several months to construct, but it was simple to assemble large numbers of peasants from nearby villages. The Nile Delta, to the north of Cairo, was the most densely populated region of the country outside of the cities, and most of the dikes, dams, embankments, and sluices that needed maintenance and dredging were within a few days’ journey from even the most remote delta village. The system was further softened by an unspoken understanding that irrigation did not just serve the interests of the few: agriculture was vital for ruler and peasant alike.

Another mitigating factor was the culture itself. Slavery and the rights of man were the subject of fierce debates in Western Europe at the time, but the same was not true in Egypt or anywhere else in the Near East and Africa. The slave

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