Sugar and Iron: Khedive Ismail’s sugar factories in Egypt and the role of French engineering companies (1867-1875)

In the 1860s and 1870s, Khedive Ismail undertook a large-scale agro-industrial project that laid the basis and technical infrastructure for a modern cane-sugar industry in Middle- and Upper Egypt. Global expertise and foreign companies played a crucial role; two French mechanical engineering companies, Cail and Fives-Lille, built and equipped fourteen sugar factories alone, additional ones were built by British firms. As most of these installations have long vanished, this article makes use of French company archives and other sources in an attempt to retrace the French contribution to Ismail's factory building project, to assess the numbers and locations of the factories, and to reconstruct their architectural and structural features. Based on the evidence, it argues that the decisive characteristic shared by the factories built by Cail and Fives-Lille was that they were erected as complete iron skeleton structures and as turnkey projects that combined the delivery and installation of both buildings and machinery by one single company. Seen in a global context, this system was novel and appears to have been devised and tested by French companies in Egypt before being applied by the same companies elsewhere in the world, making a contribution to industrial building more generally.