“Successfully Compete with the British”: Contemporary Accounts of Muhammad Ali’s Industrial Experiment

Discussion of teaching Egypt as an example of state-sponsored industrialization

19 Mar 2025 — 3 min read

From page 105 of the AP World History Course and Exam Description

We often focus on Western Europe and the United States when teaching industrialization. However, other states also attempted to industrialize during the nineteenth century. The most well-known example is Egypt under Muhammad Ali. Although we often discuss why Egypt failed to industrialize (I’ve previously written about that tendency), that focus only makes sense when we already know the long-term history of nineteenth-century Egypt.