The reign of ʿAbbās I (1848–54) indicates how precarious was the advance of Westernization in Egypt. The effort had already been relaxed in the last decade of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s rule, and ʿAbbās showed himself to be a traditionalist. It was typical of his policy that he closed the school of languages and the translation bureau and sent their director, al-Ṭahṭāwī, to virtual exile in the Sudan. The French, who had played so large a part in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s reforms, fell into disfavour, and for diplomatic support ʿAbbās turned to their British rivals, whose help was needed against the Ottomans. Although initially ʿAbbās was ostentatiously loyal to the sultan, he resented an attempt made at that time to curtail his autonomy. The British, for their part, managed to enhance their communications with India by winning from ʿAbbās a concession to build a railway from Alexandria to Cairo; the line was completed between 1851 and 1856 and was extended to Suez two years later. Saʿīd (reigned 1854–63), who succeeded on ʿAbbās’s mysterious and violent death, inaugurated another reversal of policy. While he lacked Muḥammad ʿAlī’s energy and ability, he was not unsympathetic to the Westernizers. To his French friend Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had been a friend to Muḥammad ʿAlī as well) he granted in 1854 a concession for the cutting of a canal across the isthmus of Suez. This embroiled him both with the sultan, whose prerogative had been encroached upon, and the British, whose overland railway route was threatened by the project; a deadlock lasted throughout his reign.

Ismāʿīl, 1863–79

Ismāʿīl, the son of Ibrāhīm Pasha, who succeeded on the death of Saʿīd, displayed some of his grandfather’s dynamic energy and enthusiasm for modernization. He lacked caution, however, and his reign ended in catastrophe. From his predecessors he inherited a precarious economy and a burden of debt. The decline in North American cotton exports caused by the American Civil War (1861–65) greatly increased Britain’s demand for Egyptian long-staple cotton. This product had been introduced and developed in Muḥammad ʿAlī’s time, but its production had languished until the interruption of supplies of American cotton caused a fourfold increase in price during the war years. When peace returned, prices collapsed with disastrous consequences for the Egyptian economy. In the management of his finances, Ismāʿīl was both extravagant and unwise and laid himself open to unscrupulous exploitation. Ismāʿīl was committed to the Suez Canal project, but he modified the grant in two important respects: by withdrawing the cession of a strip of land from the Nile River to the Suez isthmus, along which a freshwater canal was to be constructed, and by refusing to provide unlimited (and largely unpaid) peasant labour for the project, a practice that had stirred great outcry in England and continental Europe. The matter was submitted to arbitration; a large indemnity was imposed on Ismāʿīl, who also agreed to pay for a large block of shares put by de Lesseps into Saʿīd’s account. French pressure on the sultan succeeded at last in overcoming resistance to the canal project at Constantinople, and a firman (decree from the sultan) authorizing its construction was granted in March 1866. Work had in fact already been going on for seven years, and in November 1869 the Suez Canal was opened to shipping by the empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III of France. The incident symbolized the political and cultural orientation of Egypt in the middle decades of the 19th century.

Ismāʿīl, in other ways, presented himself as the ruler of a new and important state. Although his relations with his suzerain, Sultan Abdülaziz (reigned 1861–76), were normally friendly, he was no less eager than his predecessors to secure the autonomy of his dynasty. In 1866 he obtained a firman establishing the succession by primogeniture in his own line—abandoning the contemporary Ottoman rule of succession by the eldest male. A year later a firman conferred upon Ismāʿīl the special title of khedive, which had in fact been used unofficially since Muḥammad ʿAlī’s time and which distinguished the viceroy of Egypt from other Ottoman governors. A period of strained relations developed between the khedive and the sultan arising from Ismāʿīl’s implied pretensions to sovereignty at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, but the two were later reconciled; a firman reconfirmed the khedive’s privileges in 1873. These concessions by the sultan, however, cost Ismāʿīl heavy expenditure—in bribes to Ottoman officials in Constantinople—and an increase in the annual Egyptian tribute and were another factor in the growth of Ismāʿīl’s indebtedness.

Ismāʿīl had inherited an African empire in the northern area of the Sudan. Since the middle of the century, in consequence of the abolition of the monopolies, merchants had penetrated south and southwest, up the White Nile and the Al-Ghazāl rivers, in search of ivory. An ancillary slave trade that had developed distressed Europeans, who forgot that their depredations against Africans had continued virtually unabated until the early 19th century, and they prevailed on the khedive to abolish this commerce. Thus, acting on humanitarian and expansionist motives, Ismāʿīl sought to extend Egyptian rule into these remoter regions. He made considerable use of expatriates, notably the Englishmen Sir Samuel White Baker and Sir Charles George (“Chinese”) Gordon, who extended the khedive’s nominal authority to the African Great Lakes. Another series of events led to the conquest in 1874 of the sultanate of Darfur in the west. The khedive also wished to make Egypt the dominant power in the Red Sea region. The sultan granted him the old Ottoman ports of Sawākin and Mitsiwa in 1865. Egyptian control was established on the Somali coast, and in 1875 the city of Hārer was captured. Attempts to invade Abyssinia in 1875 and 1876 were, however, unsuccessful and marked the limits of Ismāʿīl’s imperial expansion.

Like other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt was bound by the capitulations—a system of privileges derived from earlier Western treaties with former sultans. Under the capitulations, European and American residents in Egypt were exempt from local taxation and were subject only to their own consular courts. By patient negotiations over several years, Nūbār Pasha, Ismāʿīl’s Armenian minister, succeeded in establishing the Mixed Courts in 1875. These had jurisdiction in civil cases involving Egyptians and foreigners, or foreigners of different nationalities, and had both foreign and Egyptian judges, who administered codes based on French law.

By that time the social consequences of the agrarian and political changes inaugurated by Muḥammad ʿAlī were clearly appearing. The khedive and his family were Egypt’s principal landholders, possessing extensive personal estates quite apart from the state lands. Around the khedivial family was a parvenu aristocracy that held the principal civil and military offices. Many of its members were also great landowners; most of them were Turkish or Circassian by origin. Although the peasantry’s condition had been harmed by military conscription, by corvées for public works (including large-scale demands for labour on the railways and the Suez Canal), and by ill-considered economic and industrial experiments, the rights of cultivators on their land gradually increased. The richer peasants, from whom the village headmen were recruited, in particular increased in importance. When, in November 1866, Ismāʿīl set up the consultative council known as the Assembly of Delegates, the members of which were chosen by indirect election, the great majority of those elected were village headmen. While Ismāʿīl did not intend to give any of his powers to the Assembly, its establishment and composition pointed to the political growth that would occur among native Egyptians in the next 60 years. Conscription had affected the makeup of the army. The power of the entrenched Turco-Circassians was challenged by native Egyptian officers, who resented the privileges of their foreign colleagues. The defeat of the Circassian commander in chief, Rātib Pasha, by the Abyssinians in 1876 was a blow from which the prestige of the old officer group never recovered.

From the Assembly, the army, and the Westernized intelligentsia emerged politically conscious individuals and groups who drew their ideas from both Western and Islamic sources. Their organization was for the most part small-scale and ephemeral, and their outlook was subversive, being hostile to the autocracy of the khedive, the dominance of the Turco-Circassians, and the pervasive power of the Europeans.

Political tension increased in the last years of Ismāʿīl’s reign. Various expedients to postpone bankruptcy (e.g., the khedive’s sale in 1875 of his Suez Canal shares to Britain) had failed, and in 1876 the Caisse de la Dette Publique (Commission of the Public Debt) was established for the service of the Egyptian debt. Its members were nominated by France, Britain, Austria, and Italy. In the same year, Egyptian revenue and expenditure were placed under the supervision of a British and a French controller (the Dual Control). After an international enquiry in 1878, Ismāʿīl accepted the principle of ministerial responsibility for government and authorized the formation of an international ministry under Nūbār that included the British and French controllers in his cabinet. Ismāʿīl, however, was not willing to give up his autocracy. In 1879 he exploited an army demonstration against the European ministers to dismiss Nūbār, and he worked in alliance with the Assembly of Delegates to destroy international control over Egypt. By this time, however, his standing outside Egypt had been lost; and in June 1879, Sultan Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876–1909), instigated by France and Britain, deposed him in favour of his son, Muḥammad Tawfīq.