"The Entente Cordiale As A Business Event - Privatizing the Daira Sanieh Company in Egypt, 1904"

Historical studies of the Entente Cordiale—the 1904 agreement between the British and French empires—usually emphasize the diplomacy that allowed the two colonial powers to divide Africa without clashing over territories. This presentation uncovers a business dimension of the agreement: the privatization of a large, government-owned (under French supervision) sugar enterprise, the Daira Sanieh, in 1900s British Egypt. Drawing on new research in Egyptian and French archives, I focus on what may be called French “business diplomacy.” I trace the links between the privatization of the Daira’s factories to French investors in the 1900s (and their brief but significant krach) and the broader context of the Entente Cordiale. By examining this vast and complex legal–financial operation, I show that French and British controllers and administrators obstructed any attempt by the Egyptian government to regain direct control over the Daira’s assets. Instead, they enforced capitalist privatization, believing that private enterprise represented a new form of overseas power. The paper’s argument is that, instead of pure material interest, inter-imperial diplomacy contributed, perhaps even co-created, a new phase of agro-capitalism in 1900s Egypt.