I’ve just listened to @Alden_Young’s recent interview on the @OttomanHistory and it’s amazing how well it broaches with @aaronjakes’s fantastic book on the British occupation of Egypt. But then I realized that it actually went a lot further back.
THREAD

This story begins c1700 on the Arabic speaking shores of the Mediterranean. Growing demand for commodities from the booming European economies and populations creates incentives for a revival of the local agriculture after the difficult 17th century

In the Regency of Algiers the regions of Constantine and of the West multiply their grain production. Exports to France, Spain and Italy lead to a local economic boom, the benefits of which are captured by the local beys to the great discontent of the European merchants

Commercial jealousy as well as a sudden drop of production in the East lead to the widespread belief on the northern shores of the Mediterranean that the Maghreb is ill managed and that instead of feeding Europe it is not even capable to feed itself.

The motif of the lost splendor of the granaries of Rome becomes récurrent and a major selling point of the 1830 invasion to the French public. The idea that the Arabs cannot make the most out of the natural endowment is a trope that will preside over a gigantic agrarian theft

In the East the picture is somewhat more complex. Cotton here is the cash crop of choice and the likes of Zahir al Umar the great Palestinian Bedouin sheikh favored actively its development. But here again the bounty is regarded as mismanaged and the perceived ineptitude...

... of the local elites becomes one of the main arguments of the British intervention first in Egypt and then in the Sudan. Both Alden and Aaron describe how the Brits watch in horror that very argument being used against them later by the local nationalists.

A special twist of the argument was used by the zionists who described the Palestinians as incapable to develop the land unlike the new Israeli agricultural. What is different here is that while in Egypt the failure of the previous elites was a rather correct assessment,

in Palestine, the Zionists had to make that point in spite of the clear success of the Palestinian export-oriented agriculture.
In Algeria, Syria and Morocco the unfair distribution of the profits rather than the outright failure of the system tended to occupy the nationalist

Amazingly the cycle of legitimacy through blame did not end there. The often Soviet-inspired schemes of the 1950s-70s were criticized from the 80s onwards. The end of the kibbutz and the attempts to reform the Jazira agriculture reflect that trend.

In Morocco I witnessed first hand the campaign of the 2000 calling for the privatisation of the colons’ lands handed over to the tribes in 1956. Here the great new idea was foreign investment mostly from oil rich countries which some saw as a panacea and other as a land grab

It is both amazing and depressing to see the repetition of the same pipe dreams and of the same discourses time and again.