Bankrupts and Brokers 63
suzerainty and guaranteed by an international treaty.
All that was required was an autocrat of enough ability to
preserve this international status and to prepare the first
stage in the transition from Eastern autocracy to
Western democracy. Ibrahim, who had as much
character as, though much less ability than, his father,
might have done this. His rule in Syria (1832-1841)
and his administration of his estates had both been highly
successful. But Ibrahim died during his regency
(November 10, 1848), and the succession of Abbas
(1849-1854) was a calamity.
Mehemet Ali had broken the Turko-Mameluke
tyranny over Egypt, but he had also broken the Moslem
supremacy that had kept the foreign colonies, the cos-
mopolitan concessionaires, and the Christian communities
from exploiting a Moslem society that was still in
medieval simplicity. The revolt of the reactionary Abbas
against his grandfather's modernism overweighted one
scale of this balance, but did represent a real Egyptian
resentment against exploitation by the foreigner in any
form, whether as Mameluke or money-lender. This re-
action would have come anyway, but Abbas was a born
reactionary. As a boy he refused to learn foreign
languages, and rejected all European education. As a
man he retired, a solitary sluggard, into the darkest depths
of Moslem obscurantism. Sir C. Napier (The War in
Syria, vol. ii., 1842) and Sir Ch. Murray (A short
memoir of Mehemet All) give us an unpleasant picture of
Abbas. He flogged and drowned his women, lived with
his horses and dogs, enriched his palaces, and im-
poverished his peasantry like any Mameluke. He allowed
his financiers, among them one Nubar, an Armenian,
to amass money for him by highly modern speculations,
but squandered it medievally on building a gloomy