In 1897, a group of Belgian businessmen founded the Crown Brewery in Alexandria, Egypt. A year later, the same Belgian businessmen founded Société Anonyme Brasserie de Pyramides (The Pyramid Brewery) in Cairo. Linked to a parent company in Brussels, both companies found customers among the heterogeneous expatriate communities in Egypt: Greeks, Italians, Britons, and others who had ventured to Egypt in search of new economic opportunities following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. It soon became clear that the two Belgian beer companies had tapped into another significant pool of customers: native Egyptians. The continuing success of the Egyptian beer industry throughout the 20th century testifies to the popular appeal of this beverage.
This study traces the economic history of the Egyptian beer industry from 1897 until its nationalization by the Egyptian government in 1963. It has three parts. The first section examines the arrival of the beer industry and the historical trends that shaped it. The second section looks at how the beer industry, capitalizing on changing ideas and institutions, established itself between 1897 and 1923. The final section looks at the years 1923–62, a pivotal thirty-nine-year period that saw the consolidation and Egyptianization of the beer industry as well as its further acceptance in the Egyptian cultural realm.
This analysis, based primarily on the records of the Department of Company Archives (Maslahat al-Sharikat) at the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya), seeks, by tracking the history of the Egyptian beer industry, to explain the continued presence of an alcohol industry in Muslim-majority Egypt. As I show, its success was due partly to the hybrid nature of the industry as both a Western and Egyptian venture. From the industry's very beginning it was a mix of “foreign” ambitions and “native” money-making, a combination of something new—the large-scale sale of lager beer—and something old—alcohol has been present in Egypt since Pharaonic times.Footnote 1 Those who worked in this industry existed in the interstices between East and West and those who consumed the industry's product did so to communicate both their Egyptianness and their foreignness.
The beer industry's hybridity provided it with the foreign capital and expertise to compete with the international brands, and the local business connections and familiarity with the local market to guard against the errors that face any foreign venture. For sixty years it allowed the industry to weather both the major economic trends in Egypt—consolidation, economic nationalism, and Egyptianization—and the invective of Egyptian national movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Young Egypt, which portrayed the industry as the importation of a Western vice into a temperate Egypt.Footnote 2
However, this powerful combination of foreign and local would not have worked were it not for the concomitant cultural changes that were taking place in Egypt. Because of beer's social value as both a modern and a secular product, many Egyptians found this beverage a powerful tool for communicating identity. Thus beer, and alcohol in general, became a real, albeit contested, part of Egyptian “modern” culture.
ARRIVAL
On 15 May 1897, a group of Belgian investors, led by Albert Heyndrickx, founded the Crown Brewery of Alexandria in Belgium with a capitalization of one million francs and built a factory in the Ibrahimiyya district of Alexandria. The Crown Brewery met instant success in Alexandria, and in 1898 the board decided to open another brewery, Société Anonyme Brasserie des Pyramides (Pyramid Brewery), with a factory on the outskirts of Cairo and an initial capitalization of 1.5 million francs, in order to exploit a bigger market.Footnote 3 The Cairo operation soon ran into financial trouble because of poor management and overexpansion.Footnote 4 The company would have dissolved were it not for the intervention of another set of Belgian investors, the Lambert-Rolin group, in 1904, which addressed the brewery's financial problems through the amortization of debts and the selling of assets and stocks.Footnote 5
Although Egyptians were familiar with fermented cereal beverages, both through the small amount of beer imported into Egypt before 1897 and, especially, through the local drink of būẓa, the founding of these two companies represented the institutionalization of the Egyptian beer industry.Footnote 6 These ventures were the product of specific trends occurring in the international brewing industry at the time.Footnote 7 With advances in the study of both yeast and refrigeration, brewers were now capable of producing a consistent and transportable product, usually a lighter lager, which enabled them to expand beyond their local markets.Footnote 8 The Belgians were especially keen to look beyond their borders because the local market was too small and fractured to support a large brewer on the scale of Guinness.Footnote 9
Accompanying these advances was an influx of Belgian investors and industrialists into Egypt; no fewer than thirty Belgian companies were founded in the period between 1897 and 1907.Footnote 10 This Belgian penetration was emblematic of the massive inflow of foreign capital into Egypt after the arrival of the British. Between 1897 and 1903, the amount of foreign money invested in Egyptian companies doubled, from twelve to twenty-four million English pounds.Footnote 11 The two beer companies were thus the byproduct of trends in both international brewing and the Egyptian economy in the late 19th century.
The directorate of both companies was split between Alexandria and Brussels, where their headquarters were located. Two of the five members of the Crown Brewery board and three of the seven on the Pyramid board lived in Brussels, while the others, who were a mix of Egyptian citizens and foreign protégés, maintained operations in Egypt. The transnational character of the board was typical of business ventures in Egypt at the time, which sought a precise mix of Western industrialists, foreign nationals living in Egypt, and Egyptian business elites to bridge any cultural, economic, or linguistic gaps. Also, like many Belgian international firms, much of the companies’ financing and direction came from the metropole.Footnote 12
The relatively small size of the Belgian community in Egypt necessitated that Belgian businessmen rely on the business group model, in which a number of companies from different sectors and in different countries were under the control of a small, unified directorate.Footnote 13 The Lambert-Rolin group, headed by Florent Lambert, a prominent Belgian businessman based in Brussels, was an example of this model. This group included not only the Pyramid Brewery but also the Anglo-Belgian Company Limited of Egypt, the British Tropical Africa Company (which worked in the Congo), a railway company, a tramway company, a cement company, and a company in charge of maintaining gardens in Cairo.Footnote 14
While much of the direction came from Brussels, both companies utilized the abilities of Belgians living in Egypt and of powerful Egyptian business elites. One board member of the Crown Brewery, Georges Nungovich, a Belgian national and major hotelier, was on the advisory board and board of directors of two other companies and owned the Georges Nungovich Egyptian Hotel Company.Footnote 15 Another local Belgian member, A. L. Gorra, was on the board of directors of three other companies. As for local Egyptians, the presidents of the companies were Egyptians from the pasha class: Khalil Khayyat Pasha (Crown Brewery) and J. G. Chakour (Shakur) Pasha (Pyramid Brewery). Both men had important positions in other joint-stock companies. Khalil Khayyat Pasha was a director of Société Égyptienne de Tabacs, the Egyptian Land investment company, and the North Egypt Land Company Limited, and the sole director of the limited liability company Tambeki Monopoly Co.Footnote 16 Shakur Pasha was the managing director of Société Anonyme des Ciments d’Égypte and the chairman of the Menzaleh Canal and Navigation Company.Footnote 17 These two businessmen were precursors of the native oligarchs who would come to dominate the Egyptian economy in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
ESTABLISHMENT
It was not long after their founding that these companies would face their first major hurdle, the stock market crash of 1907, which was a direct result of the influx of foreign capital into the Egyptian stock market between 1898 and 1906. The mass influx of funds set off a speculative fever in Egypt in 1905 and 1906: “Land companies sold land for very little deposits, banks lent liberally on shares . . . second or even third mortgages could be readily obtained.”Footnote 18 The inevitable “market correction” came when the American market dipped and wreaked havoc in the Egyptian economy. The most visible effect of the crash was that it wiped out many of the firms founded during the boom. The number of bankruptcy cases in the courts rose from 310 in 1907 to 520 in 1908 and to 546 in 1910.Footnote 19 Egypt did not truly recover until after World War I. Despite the general gloom of the economic scene in Egypt, both of the companies survived, as the beer business stayed profitable despite (or perhaps due to) the economic downturn. The fact that another set of Belgians founded the beer company Société Anonyme de Belge Brasserie d’Égypte (Belgian Brewing Company) in 1909 is indicative of this.Footnote 20
Crown and Pyramid breweries remained profitable during and after World War I, with production growing from around forty thousand hectoliters per year before the war to seventy-one thousand hectoliters per year from 1923 to 1929.Footnote 21 The companies did so well that the capitalization of Pyramid Brewery placed it in the top twelve best-funded companies in Egypt at the time.Footnote 22 Their success was built largely upon a business model that involved the import of most of the raw materials (malt, hops, and yeast) but the use of cheap and plentiful local resources (labor and water) to produce a product more affordable than its imported competition.Footnote 23
Their levels of production not only made the breweries economic powerhouses in Egypt but also placed them among the largest bottled beer producers in Africa. Despite the fact that Egypt was a Muslim country, its beer industry was more developed than that of most other colonies in Africa, where colonial regulations were often prohibitive. Starting with the Brussels Act of 1890, and strengthened with the League of Nations Treaty Series, the colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, etc.) prohibited “the importation, distribution, sale, and possession of trade spirits of every kind” within Sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote 24 The regulation stymied the creation of any large-scale native brewing ventures in Sub-Saharan Africa countries, and it was not until the 1920s (Kenya Brewers Limited) and later (Nigerian Brewing Limited, 1946) that ventures on a similar scale began to appear there.Footnote 25 These ordinances grew out of the infantilizing discourse that justified the colonial presence in Africa.Footnote 26 However, Egypt and the rest of North Africa were spared this paternalism.Footnote 27
The profitability of the Egyptian beer industry, unsurprisingly, continued to attract entrepreneurs and by 1927 there were thirty-six brewing companies.Footnote 28 Among these entrepreneurs was a pair of enterprising Swiss brothers, Walter and Curt Bomonti, who had founded the first brewery on the European side of Istanbul in 1890.Footnote 29 They had become familiar with the intricacies of the beer industry in Egypt through their work supplying beer to the Navy and Army Canteen Board of the British occupying forces.Footnote 30 They made their first foray into the Egyptian market with a brewery/rice mill built in Alexandria under the name “Bomonti Brothers.” This venture was so successful that in 1923 they were able to buy Pyramid Brewery and Belgian Brewing, consolidating them with their original beer company into a new entity, Société Anonyme Biéres Bomonti et Pyramides (henceforth Bomonti-Pyramid).Footnote 31 With the Bomonti takeover, Pyramid Brewery's executive took on a decidedly Swiss flavor. Besides the brothers who resided in Bern, another new member of the board, Jacques Ruch, lived in Zurich. Rudolph Jost, a Swiss citizen who lived in Alexandria, represented the Swiss industrialists at the meetings and was joined on the board by another Swiss national living in Alexandria. The rest of the executive drew from the useful base of foreign nationals living in Egypt, with two British protégés and a Greek protégé filling out the ranks.
CREATION OF A LOCAL CONSUMER BASE
The origins of the sustained and durable growth of the beer industry in this period lay with the Muhammad ʿAli regime's quixotic quest to create a “modern” Egypt. Its policies manufactured a small group of “new men,” the effendiyya, set apart from other Egyptians by their education, their Western manners and dress, and their worldviews.Footnote 32 By the end of the century, the effendiyya came to represent a “new urban society, new social institutions, and new ways of life” and served as engineers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and political activists. The effendiyya also became a way station for sons of the provincial elite on their path to the honorific titles of pasha or bey and their full inclusion into the national hierarchy.Footnote 33
Members of this new secular elite, which subsumed much of the old elite through “effendification,” saw themselves, because of their “modernity” (read: self-identification as secular, Western, and elite), as separate from both the nonelite masses and the traditional al-Azhar trained hierarchy. As Keith Watenpaugh has shown, their modernity was a performative act that involved the use of new media, new social spaces, and new consumer goods to make “being modern observable and reproducible.”Footnote 34 Nancy Reynolds concurs, noting that consumer goods were an important way for Egyptians to craft their identity through participation in “commodity communities.”Footnote 35
Alcohol served as an ideal commodity for the effendi to perform modernity because its consumption achieved a double effect: while linking its Egyptian drinker to the “modern” European, who drank on social occasions, it separated him from both the nonelite and the religious Egyptian, who viewed alcohol as socially suspect at best or as religious anathema at worst. As Emmanuel Akyeampong has shown in his study of drink in Ghana, alcohol can serve as an especially powerful tool for the ordering of society and the signaling of power.Footnote 36 In the case of colonial Egypt, alcohol consumption represented the rejection of the traditionally trained al-Azhar shaykh in favor of the effendi.Footnote 37 As Will Hanley shows, alcohol continues to maintain this signification in the European-American academy, where its consumption is nearly synonymous with Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism.Footnote 38
The consumption of alcohol distanced the effendiyya from most but not all other Egyptians. There was another group of drinkers that was also the product of the policies of Muhammad ʿAli: urban subalterns. However, unlike the effendiyya, they were not the desired end product of a push for modernity but rather an unforeseen outgrowth of the Muhammad ʿAli regime's push for Egyptian urbanization. The populations of most of the major cities in Egypt saw significant growth between the years 1820 and 1882 due primarily to migration from the rural areas of Egypt.Footnote 39
While some of these migrants were wealthy landowners, the great majority were fellahin looking to escape a hard rural life. For these new migrants, who had some taste for fermented beverages from their experience with būẓa, the consumption of alcohol was a potent signifier of “modern,” elite life.Footnote 40 The best example of the aspirational power of alcohol comes from the movie al-Suq al-Sawdaʾ (The Black Market, 1945).Footnote 41 In this movie, one of Egyptian cinema's first “realistic films,” a group of urban roughs makes a fortune on war profiteering. In their desire to reflect their new wealth, the gang members are fitted with new Western dress and start visiting cabarets to drink all night.Footnote 42
The processes that formed these two groups of drinkers, “effendification” and urbanization, only accelerated after the arrival of the British in 1882, which brought an influx of foreign-born residents who had no religious qualms about drinking to the urban spaces of Egypt.Footnote 43 As Robert Ilbert and Janet Abu-Lughod have shown, between 1897 and 1917 the foreign population grew at a significant rate, with the largest increase coming from Greeks, Italians, North Africans, Maltese, and Ottoman subjects.Footnote 44 Many of these foreign-born residents brought not only a normalized view of the consumption of alcohol to the cities but also the alcohol business itself.
As a result there was a proliferation of spaces in which one could drink. While the exact number of places is unknown, by 1899 the British counsel estimated that there were over four thousand establishments in Egypt that sold alcohol.Footnote 45 From the alcohol licenses issued in Cairo from 1891 to 1896, we can get a sense of the dynamics of the business. The records show that foreign protégés, especially Greeks and Italians, played a significant role in this proliferation. For example, in the year 1893, Greeks and Italians comprised 75 percent of those receiving licenses.Footnote 46 As Alexander Kitroeff has shown, the predominance of Greeks and Italians was typical of the Egyptian economy in this era.Footnote 47 Likewise, Relli Shechter has shown that the tobacco industry was a major employer of Greeks.Footnote 48
With the preponderance of Greeks and Italians in the distribution of alcohol, it would be easy to dismiss the burgeoning alcohol industry as a foreign imperial imposition. However, on closer inspection the picture appears to be far more nuanced. When we move our gaze from the managers of these establishments, who tended to receive the licenses, to their owners, there appears to have been a significant Egyptian contingent among the latter. For example, the British consul reported that of the 4,015 alcohol distributors in 1904, 2,257 were foreign and 1,758 were local subjects.Footnote 49 One of the most prominent owners of bars was the elite Jewish businessman Yusuf Qattawi Bey. The Qattawi family, alongside the Mosseris, led the Jewish community in Egypt from the 1880s to the 1920s.Footnote 50 Yusuf Qattawi Bey played a significant role in the sugar industry, land reclamation, and Bank Misr.Footnote 51 In the late 1890s, he also owned eight separate establishments that sold spirits. These places, dispersed primarily in the Muski and Azbakiyya districts of Cairo, included bars (e.g., Crini Bar), cafés, restaurants, and even an ice cream shop.Footnote 52
Economic involvement in the alcohol industry was not strictly the domain of non-Muslims. The British consul also reported that, in 1904, 385 of the alcohol distributors in Egypt were Muslim-owned.Footnote 53 The records bear this out, with many of the Cairo licenses featuring Muslim names, some with honorifics like pasha and bey attached to them. One noteworthy example is Mahmud Pasha Falaki, who owned three bars in the ʿAbdin district in Cairo. Even more noteworthy are three princes: Prince Ibrahim Pasha, Prince Halim Pasha, and Prince Husayn Pasha. While they may not have been personally involved, there is no denying that the properties of each of these royals housed a café or bar. One particularly illustrative example is the bar Bodega Nouvelle Avenue. Established in 1894, it sat on the property of Prince Halim Pasha on Gamal Street in Azbakiyya and was run by an Italian, Riccardo Belloni.Footnote 54 As shown elsewhere, the royal family was not shy about profiting from the business of bars and taverns.Footnote 55
Who were the denizens of these establishments? In his stinging social critique of turn-of-the-century Egypt, Hadir al-Misriyyin aw Sirr al-Taʾakhkhurihim (The Present State of the Egyptians, An Explanation of Their Backwardness), Muhammad ʿUmar, the writer known only by this work and by his employment in the postal service, divides Egypt into three classes: the rich, the middle, and the poor, and then criticizes each for what he perceives as its failures.Footnote 56 Muhammad ʿUmar uses alcohol consumption as a key part of his critique. The houses of the rich, he asserted, are filled with “bottles of liquors,” and stacks of wine barrels are proof of their indolence, profligacy, and self-indulgence.Footnote 57 In the middle group, the youth spend all night drinking in the ever-increasing number of bars, cafés, and dance clubs in Egypt, which represent the insidious penetration of Western habits throughout the country.Footnote 58 As for the poor, despite their indigence, they drink even more than rich, especially at religious festivals like mawlids (saints’ birthday celebrations). Their consumption is a product of their ignorance and their prioritization of enjoyment and pleasure over all other things.Footnote 59
While Muhammad ʿUmar crafts a neat taxonomy of Egyptian drinkers, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi's turn-of-the-century novel and social critique, Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham, presents a far more nuanced picture.Footnote 60 The sections most pertinent to this study are those in which ʿIsa ibn Hisham visits drinking establishments. His first stop is the “club” (klūb), where the grandees of the Egyptian state drink, bet, and gamble in a palatial multiroom house.Footnote 61 From there he travels to four locations (a meeting hall, a restaurant, a tavern, and a dance hall) that fall within close vicinity of ʿAtaba Square, or as Ibn Hisham calls it, the “square of drunkeness” (saḥat al-sukr).Footnote 62 Here the protagonists shift from Ibn Hisham and the pasha to the khaliʿ (playboy) and the ʿumda (village chief), a deliberate indictment of those most susceptible to alcohol. The playboy is a depiction of the new class of tarbush wearers (mutaṭarbishūn), the effendiyya, whereas the ʿumda, who owns a thousand feddans, represents the uncultured rural elite that was slowly integrating into the urban hierarchy and absorbing its cultural mores.Footnote 63 In addition, the ʿumda stands in for rural migrants to the city, ignorant of urban custom and victims of urban depredations.
The first location, the meeting hall (mujtamaʿ), is rather upscale; it is widely renowned, located near the Opera House, and frequented by foreigners and tourists. The next stop is a restaurant located within a bar. It, too, is an upstanding location, which not only serves food and alcohol but also is notable for its “cleanliness, good service, and the prestige” of its customers.Footnote 64 After stopping at a tavern (ḥān), which is given little description, the final stop on the night of drinking and carousing is the dance hall (marqas). It is a dank subterranean haunt choked by a foul miasma of sewage and sweat, in which degraded women dance and prostitute themselves to besotted men from all walks of life (a policemen, an adjutant, a drunkard, a notable shaykh, and a provincial governor).
While the club is a bastion of the ruling elites and their scions, the other four locations, of varying cleanliness and respectability, are home to a broader spectrum of Egyptians. This variegated milieu conforms to Reynolds’ depiction of Cairo as a city characterized, especially around these bustling squares, by the contiguity and propinquity of the foreign (ifrangī) and native (baladī), an “ever-melting” city.Footnote 65 An ideal example of this is the prominent shaykh drinking in the filthy dance-club. His presence undermines both the foreign/native and the elite/subaltern dichotomy. He is at the same time foreign and native, elite and nonelite. Beer fit nicely into this milieu because of its generic similarity to būẓa, which made it also native and foreign, elite and nonelite.
However, this fluidity was strictly a male prerogative. While elite men could traverse societal boundaries and visit both the elite and subaltern drinking establishments, “respectable” women were limited to elite venues. In the only scene of Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham where women make a prolonged appearance, they are portrayed negatively. Ibn Hisham recounts how the most “beautiful” dancer in the club, as she dances, transforms “into the guise of a harpy appearing in a desert mirage, a ghoul grimacing and leaping around, or a bear quivering and crawling.”Footnote 66 Similar to the Egyptian social evaluation of female dancers and performers that Karin van Nieuwkerk details, Egyptian intellectuals perceived alcohol-consuming women first through their gender and then as alcohol consumers.Footnote 67 In Muwaylihi's harsh rebuke, we see a redefinition of femininity that helps to constitute a new effendi manhood.Footnote 68 Thus in Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham, only low-status female dancers and prostitutes frequent drinking clubs.
Despite this exclusion, many clubs listed a woman as their manager. For example, an Austrian protégé, Anne Fielder, was in charge of the Steinfeld Bar, founded in 1894 in Darb al-Mahabil in ʿAbdin. Women were not limited to a managerial role, but could also be owners. A good example is Caterina Bakesova, an Austro-Hungarian protégé who opened up the “Anglo-American Bar” in Harat al-Mudarrisin in Azbakiyya. While many of these owners were European protégés, with Austrian subjects featuring most prominently, Egyptian women, both Christian and Muslim, also served as owners. Names like Sayyida bint Muhammad al-Zakiyya, Jawhara bint Haslan, and Marie Bittar appear on the lists of owners.Footnote 69
CONSOLIDATION, (PARTIAL) EGYPTIANIZATION, AND CONSUMPTION, 1923–62
Consolidation
The Bomontis’ purchase of Pyramid Brewery in 1923 marked a distinct break in the history of the beer industry in Egypt. At the time, the industry was subject to two trends shaping the broader Egyptian economy between 1918 and 1965: consolidation and Egyptianization. The Bomontis were a driving force in the consolidation of the beer industry, first by combining three companies into Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery and then by taking over their main competitor, Crown Brewery. Although Crown Brewery was allowed to continue, as least nominally, as an independent company, all of its operations came under the control of Bomonti-Pyramid. Thus, by 1928, the Bomontis had secured a monopoly over the beer industry in Egypt.
This aggressive expansion may have been bankrolled by the profits Bomonti-Pyramid were making, but the survival of the conglomerate was assured by an influx of funds from an outside force, the Heineken Brewing Company, one of the largest brewers in the world. When the chairman of Heineken visited Egypt after World War I, he was impressed by the rapid progress that the beer companies had made during the war.Footnote 70 Instead of a direct investment, Heineken went through an investment company named the Cobra Company, which bought a large amount of shares in Bomonti-Pyramid and Crown Brewery. Although they tried to minimize the appearance of their intrusion through the use of Cobra, Heineken was not a silent partner.
Three handpicked representatives of Heineken—M. Erick Carl Kettner, Jonkheer P. R. Feith, and Jonkheer O. Wittert van Hoogland—sat on the board of the Pyramid Brewery and insisted that they be consulted on all major decisions.Footnote 71 Heineken likewise placed a representative from Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery on the board of Crown Brewery. From the 1930s on, Heineken continued to increase its stake so that by 1963 it owned 43 percent of the merged companies.Footnote 72 The economic story of the beer industry from the Bomonti takeover until nationalization is one of sustained success. After 1923, other industries, like hard manufacturing, food production, and textiles, would overtake the beer industry, but it never lost its profitability. For example, the net profit of Crown Brewery and Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery in 1959 was around 280,000 pounds.Footnote 73
The foreign-backed consolidation of the beer industry in Egypt between 1923 and 1963 was typical of the Egyptian joint stock companies of the time. As Relli Shechter has shown, the Egyptian tobacco industry underwent a similar process of centralization driven by the multinational British–American Tobacco Company (BAT). In the period that Bomonti-Pyramid was consolidating the beer market, BAT rapidly expanded in Egypt. By 1927, it owned six tobacco factories in Egypt and had become the country's second biggest tobacco company. The same year, it merged with the largest company, Matossian, and renamed the conglomeration Eastern. At that point Eastern owned 90 percent of the tobacco market.Footnote 74 Similarly, as Robert Tignor notes, a few “heavily capitalized, vertically integrated, and politically powerful firms” took control of the textile industry in Egypt during the 1920s.Footnote 75 The push for consolidation in all of these industries was spurred by the tariff reforms of 1930. Local leading business magnates saw these reforms, which were meant to limit imports, as an opportunity to dominate their respective sectors. They thus established “large and powerful firms in the late 1920s” to make it difficult for new firms to enter.Footnote 76
(Partial) Egyptianization
Although multinational interests pushed consolidation forward, Egyptians had an increasing role in joint-stock companies in this period. Within the beer industry, it is indisputable that the main leadership became more Egyptian. The chief executive officer and the primary stockholder of each of the breweries from 1937 to 1957 was a native Egyptian citizen: Muhammad Ahmad Farghali Pasha for Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery and Muhammad ʿAziz Abaza for Crown Brewery. Both of these men were typical examples of the business oligarchs who came to dominate the Egyptian private sector in the 1940s and the 1950s.
As Robert Vitalis has shown, a distinctive element of that sector from the 1930s to the 1950s was the business group fronted by a well-connected business oligarch. Although business groups—individuals and families organized as coherent coalitions—had been a feature of the Egyptian economy since the late 19th century, the Egyptian-led business group became predominant in these decades. Vitalis identifies three distinct characteristics of these groups: (1) they encompassed “a diversity of firms across different economic sectors; (2) [they had an] ownership-management coalition, though a single individual [was] often identified as the group's leader; (3) the group's core leadership [was] bound by personal, family, ethnic or other communal ties that provide[d] the basis for coordinating its operations.”Footnote 77
Farghali Pasha and ʿAziz Abaza were very much in this model, as products of Egyptian landowning elites’ familiarization with capitalist enterprise through their direct dealings with foreign capitalistic institutions such as banks.Footnote 78 Farghali's father was a successful Alexandrian cotton merchant who established Farghali Cotton and Investment Company with the help of foreign investors. Using his father's connections and his own business acumen, Farghali Pasha sat on many executive boards; in 1946 he was on the boards of twenty-nine different companies.Footnote 79 ʿAziz Abaza, who was from one of Egypt's largest landholding families, also sat on numerous boards in addition to his role as head of Crown Brewery. These included the Land Bank of Egypt, the Société Anonyme de Misr pour le Théâtre et le Cinéma (The corporation for Egyptian theater and cinema), and SEP (a petrol company).Footnote 80 As for Farghali, ten members of his family, including his wife and daughters, owned a significant amount of stock in the company. In addition, Farghali Cotton Company was one of the top three shareholders in the company.Footnote 81
Egyptian-led business groups became a primary feature of the Egyptian economy in this period because the economic nationalism that began in the 1920s bore significant fruit in the 1930s and 1940s. The belief that Egyptians should run the Egyptian economy emerged between 1916 and 1922, with the foundation of the Sidqi Commission on Commerce and Industry, Bank Misr, and the Egyptian Federation of Industries. Bank Misr, which was founded and led by Egyptians, seemed to be the example par excellence of Egypt's new economic nationalism. However, as Vitalis shows, these institutions were still tied intimately to non-Egyptian capital. In the 1920s, economic nationalism was a convenient way to support new ventures and garner public support for the multinational business groups that were forming around certain enterprising Egyptian individuals.Footnote 82 However, beginning in the 1930s and culminating with the Joint Stock Company Law of 1947, the ideals of Egyptian economic nationalism became more of a reality. The law required Egyptian companies (those with major bases in Egypt) “to offer 51 percent of their stock to Egyptians and to place Egyptian nationals on 40 percent of the board seats.”Footnote 83 These moves pushed many multinational companies, including those in the beer industry, to employ more Egyptian citizens.
This trend was reflected in the board make-up of the two companies after 1947. Farghali and Abaza were on the boards of Bomonti-Pyramid and Crown, respectively, with several other Egyptian citizens. Including Farghali, four of the seven Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery board members were Egyptian citizens.Footnote 84 When Abaza is factored in, the Crown Brewery had a similar proportion of Egyptian to non-Egyptian citizens on its board.Footnote 85 Some of these other board members were also exemplary of the consolidation of economic power in the hands of Egyptian business groups; Rene Ismalun of the Pyramid Brewery, an Egyptian citizen, sat on the boards of seven other companies.Footnote 86 The Egyptianization that occurred from 1937 to 1957 extended not only to the directorate but also to the employees. For example, by 1957, of the fifty-three office workers for Pyramid Brewery, forty-one carried Egyptian citizenship.Footnote 87 By 1963, 144 of Pyramid's 150 factory workers were Egyptian citizens.Footnote 88 The Bomonti-Pyramid Brewery even changed its name in the 1950s to the al-Ahram Brewery in an attempt to reflect its Egyptianness.Footnote 89
Although legislation led to some Egyptianization, the foreign ties of multinational companies were not severed (only the nationalization of the 1950s and 1960s would accomplish this). There were more Egyptian citizens on the boards than in the 1920s, but foreign nationals maintained their presence. In the case of the beer industry, Heineken representatives would hold on to their seats until 1963. The stockholders of the beer companies up until nationalization came from all over Europe (Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Austria, France, etc.) and the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, etc.).Footnote 90
Likewise, the workforce was not as Egyptian as the records would have scholars believe. Although the intent of the Company Law was to push foreign nationals from jobs so they could be replaced by Egyptian citizens, a much more common occurrence was that a “foreign” worker or member of the board would become an Egyptian citizen. This was the result of two factors: the transnational status of many foreigners in Egypt and changes in the citizenship process from the 1930s to the 1950s. Until the late 1930s, the prospects of legal and fiscal exemption through the Capitulations and the Mixed Courts had made it much more attractive for local minorities to apply for foreign rather than Egyptian nationality.Footnote 91 As a result, there were numerous life-long residents of Egypt who were not citizens. This trend was particularly pronounced among the religious minority communities; the majority of Jews living in Egypt in the 20th century did not have Egyptian citizenship.Footnote 92 An example is the prominent Jewish Suares family, whose members were Italian citizens.Footnote 93 Given the linguistic, cultural, and economic heterogeneity of many Egyptian residents at this time, attempts to place them into a “foreign” versus “Egyptian” dichotomy are reductive. However, that is exactly what the Egyptian state, with legislation such as the Company Law of 1947, attempted to do.
As a result of such legislation, the mutamaṣṣirūn (Egyptianized foreigners), as Joel Beinin refers to them, and the companies that employed them, were faced with a dilemma: one of their greatest strengths (their cultural dynamism and multicultural skills) had become a major threat to their employment.Footnote 94 As Simon Shamir shows, the path to Egyptian citizenship for these local minorities before 1947 was torturous.Footnote 95 In particular, despite the 1929 Nationality Law's Western liberal basis, the burden of proof required as well as institutional bias prevented many minorities from gaining Egyptian citizenship, even if they wanted it.Footnote 96 As a result, when the Company Law came into being it induced a mad scramble for citizenship. Some, like Hanna Yusuf Hanna, whose declaration of state-recognized Egyptianness was preserved in the Pyramid breweries records, did succeed.Footnote 97 However, many were not as lucky. The large companies had two options in dealing with these cases. They could either replace (i.e., fire) them or they could “move” them through a manipulation of the records they produced for the Department of Companies (Maslahat al-Sharikat), the government body in charge of assuring compliance with the Company Law.
In the case of the beer industry, we are privileged with a view of the companies’ “creative” accounting because they were caught in flagrante delicto. As a 1962 report shows, the two beer companies attempted to circumvent the watchful eye of the Ministry of Trade, which housed the Department of Companies, by setting up a distribution office that they shared but that was not, formally, part of either company. Through this distribution office, they paid employees like Michel Elias, who would otherwise have raised the percentage of foreigners’ pay to an unacceptable level. These dealings led the Ministry of Trade to look further into their books and find numerous inconsistencies, which included the gifting of villas to foreign employees as well as unreported bonuses. All of this malfeasance was evidence of the beer companies’ flaunting of the Company Law of 1947. As punishment they were forced to let go of some of their foreign workers.Footnote 98
Although it appeared that the companies became more Egyptian and local due to the pressures of economic nationalism, much of the change involved not the replacement of foreign workers with Egyptians, but rather the transformation of transnational workers from “foreign” to Egyptian. In addition, although there were fewer non-Egyptian employees, generally speaking, these few still tended to receive greater compensation (salary and bonuses) than the Egyptians. For example, at al-Ahram Brewery in 1957, the highest paid non-Egyptian employee made over fifty thousand Egyptian pounds more than the highest paid Egyptian employee. The forty-one Egyptians combined earned in salaries, bonuses, and incentives 2,120,000 Egyptian pounds, while the eight non-Egyptian employees earned 1,042,000 Egyptian pounds.Footnote 99 Shechter shows that there was a similar wage discrepancy in BAT between foreign and Egyptian workers. For example, “in 1947, 18 of the 25 best paid employee positions went to Britons and seven were occupied by other foreign nationals.”Footnote 100 As he points out, this discrepancy was not solely a reflection of preferential treatment for foreign nationals but also the result of the foreign nationals sometimes being more skilled and accustomed to higher wages.Footnote 101
The national identity of the beer industry in Egypt would remain ambiguous until Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir's government sequestered the beer companies in 1957, then fully conglomerated and nationalized them in 1963. The government incorporated them into its newly formed General Corporation for Food Industries (al-Muʾassasa al-Misriyya al-ʿAmma li-l-Sinaʿat al-Ghidhaʾiyya, GCFI), headed by Dr. Hasan Muhammad Ashmawi.Footnote 102 This policy reflected the fact that, between the years 1957 and 1961, al-Nasir and his regime launched a campaign against the “compradorial” elements within Egypt, which involved the sequestration of the assets of most businesses in the country.Footnote 103 With this nationalization, all foreign shareholders were bought out at a price favorable to the Egyptian government.
The case of the beer companies’ largest shareholder, Heineken, illustrates the uneasy relationship between the government and the companies. According to Law 82 of 1961, when foreign companies were nationalized, the foreign stockholders would be paid for the stock they lost. The dispute between Heineken and the Egyptian government was over how the stock price would be calculated. The government claimed that it was the price of the stock in the Egyptian exchange on the day of the company's nationalization. While this may seem to be a reasonable way to determine the value of a share, Heineken argued otherwise. They claimed that the Egyptian government's sequestration of the beer companies’ assets in 1961 before nationalization had driven down the price of the stock and thus that the price on the exchange was not an accurate reflection of Heineken's investment in the company.Footnote 104 The sides reached an impasse and it was only several years later that the dispute was settled by Dr. Ismaʿil ʿUmar Foda, who was appointed the director of the newly nationalized beer company and given a spot on the GCFI's board.
Dr. Foda was the grandson of a large landowner from Sinballawayn in the Daqahliyya province in the Delta and his father was a member of the Chamber of Deputies. The Nasirist government chose Foda for the position because his advanced degree in microbiology from the University of California–Berkeley and his work with Dr. Ashmawi arguably gave him a level of technical expertise that was unmatched among Egyptians. Foda would serve in this position for the next twenty-one years.Footnote 105 The remaining board positions were likewise filled with Egyptians, either technocrats or those with a close relationship with the Nasirist regime.
Celluloid Consumption
The success of the beer industry, despite the significant changes in the economy and reduced foreign immigration in the period from 1923 to 1963, implies the growing cultural import of the product. An example of this trend is the appearance of a beer-centered ritual in Egyptian nightclubs. As Karin van Nieuwkerk describes it, in the 1920s and 1930s female entertainers in clubs were tasked with the fatḥ (opening), whereby the entertainer would approach customers and ask if they would like to drink with her. The fatḥ would often turn into a competition between men to exhibit their wealth and masculinity, with the beer bottle serving as the ideal symbol. For example, a male customer might order a dozen bottles of beer and have them brought by a train of attendants as a means to show off.Footnote 106
This ritual provides a vivid example of beer's penetration into the Egyptian social milieu, where it came to play a role in defining middle-class masculinity. Film, which had seen rapid development in the 1930s, also can provide useful hints about Egyptian beer consumption in this period. The filmic portrayal of beer drinkers suggests that they were coming from the old groupings of the effendiyya and the urban subaltern. Their boundaries however, as Lucie Ryzova notes, had shifted. The effendiyya in the period following Egypt's semi-independence in 1922 came to represent, at least for the liberal nationalists, the perceived middle of Egyptian society, the bearers of the national mission, and an entity distinct from the awlād al-balad (native sons, “the good guys”), the fellahin, and the awlād al-dhawāt (elite).Footnote 107 In practice, the effendi was in a liminal state between the lower and the upper class; his secular, modern, and liberal education drove him to strive for a lifestyle to correspond to it, but his background and financial status kept him separate from the higher elite.Footnote 108 As Ryzova notes “the crucial feature of effendi identity was not a desire to create a conceptual middle, but the desire to be upwardly mobile.”Footnote 109
With this shift, the effendiyya, at least in the minds of intellectuals, became distinct from the classes above and below. Whereas previously the effendiyya included both the elite and the Western educated nonelite, in this period it came to be more and more synonymous with only the latter group while the Westernized elite took the name of awlād al-dhawāt. Since a modern, secular, and liberal education could transform an urban subaltern to an effendi, what it meant to be a non-effendi resident of a town or city also needed to be defined through the concepts awlād al-balad and al-futuwwāt. The awlād al-balad represented both “behavioral characteristics and norms” and a “specific group of Egyptians” delimited by their “conditions of existence”: economic status, geographical placement, occupation, and confessional affiliation.Footnote 110 Intellectuals bestowed the awlād al-balad with an unquestioned Egyptian authenticity, an “Egyptian heroism,” and a retrograde and “unmodern” view of the world.Footnote 111 Thus it was not embarrassing to come from this background but essential for a “modern” Egyptian to move past it. Whereas the awlād al-balad was imagined as the stratum from which the effendi evolved, the futuwwāt “was a site of sovereignty that was the Other of effendi masculinity and bourgeois nationalism.”Footnote 112 The futuwwa was the failed urban subaltern, the one who did not seek a “modern,” civilized life but opted for the life of al-balṭagī (thug, tough, etc.), dominated by physical force and base pleasures.Footnote 113
It was these imagined groups (awlād al-dhawāt, awlād al-balad, futuwwāt, and the effendiyya) that shaped depictions of beer consumption in Egypt in the postindependence period.Footnote 114 For the elite, their consumption of alcohol was unquestioned and assumed. Many films produced in the years 1930–50 show upper-class men and women dressed in fine Western clothes, listening to music, and dancing while enjoying an alcoholic beverage. While generally the type of alcohol remains obscure, in a few notable exceptions beer takes center stage. For example, in al-ʿAzima (Determination, 1939), as ʿAdli Bey (Anwar Wajdi) talks to Muhammad Hanafi (Husayn Sidqi) on a phone located in a bar about their joint business venture, a Stella advertisement sits prominently in the background.Footnote 115 In an even more illustrative example, the rich Svengali, Kawthar (Zuzu Madi), in the movie ʿUsta Hasan (Boss Hasan, 1952), has a refrigerator stocked with beer bottles bearing the unmistakable star of Stella beer.Footnote 116 This scene is important in showing not only the elite's consumption of beer but also the acceptability of upper-class women's consumption of it, which the film portrays as normative.
Egyptian films also portrayed the beer-drinking urban subaltern. Two prominent examples are Hamida (Shukri Sarhan) in Ibn al-Nil (Nile Boy, 1951) and Hasan (Farid Shawqi) in ʿUsta Hasan.Footnote 117 In Ibn al-Nil, whose very title evokes the idea of the awlād al-balad, Hamida, a fellah, travels to Cairo to escape his life in the village. Fresh off the train, Hamida searches for a place to spend the night and ends up in a club. Unsurprisingly, he is enticed by the vices of the dance club, specifically, a dancer and beer, and loses all of his money, which sets off a terrible chain of events. In this instance, beer, depicted in an overflowing stein, is closely associated with the dancer (Samiha Tawfiq) through the interspersing of images of the frothy mug with those of her gyrating. As for Hasan, Kawthar entices him to abandon his humble lifestyle and become her paramour with gifts and plentiful food and drink. In one of the film's most pivotal scenes, when the protagonist begins to realize the pleasures possible in this new life, Hasan gorges himself on a whole turkey and drinks three bottles of beer. This plenty is in stark contrast to the penurious lifestyle he lives in his humble home.
The consumption of beer is blatant, and not without consequences for the two characters. A common refrain in these and other pre-1960s Egyptian films is that the ibn al-balad who drinks ultimately suffers. Hamida's first night of drinking is transformative, changing him from the naive yet authentic ibn al-balad into a cynical and violent futuwwa. Eventually, his new lifestyle leads to jail (although he is later freed and returns home). For Hasan, beer also marks a transformation. He leaves his life as a hard-working mechanic to become a morally corrupt bon vivant. His transformation brings him two unhappy relationships (with his wife and Kawthar), physical harm to his son, and the murder of Kawthar. It is only the surprise confession of Kawthar's invalid husband to the murder that frees Hasan, having learned from his mistakes, to resume his original life. The transformative power of beer in these representations suggests the dangers of modernity to the uneducated but authentic awlād al-balad. In each case, the protagonist has chosen, due to alcohol, the incorrect path. He has not moved from authentic native son to hard-working and respectable middle-class member. This narrative of the downfall of the drinking ibn al-balad is echoed in other media. For example, in Bayram al-Tunsi's zajal poem Il Baladi, ʿAbd al-Salam, the writer, is brought down by his ever-increasing consumption of beer and whiskey.Footnote 118
The idea that the consumption of beer and other alcohol is a danger is supported by depictions of the effendiyya, who generally remain abstemious. For example, the main protagonist (and arch-hero) of al-ʿAzima, Muhammad Hanafi, avoids drinking even when he visits his good friend, the elite playboy ʿAdli, in a bar. This abstemiousness is seen in other effendi protagonists, including Hamid (ʿImad Hamdi) in al-Suq al-Sawdaʾ and Taha Effendi (Yusuf Wahbi) in Ibn al-Haddad.Footnote 119 However, middle-class protagonists are not always abstemious; Munir (Farid al-ʿAtrash) in Ahebbek Inta (I Love You Only, 1949) is a telegraph operator and part-time singer, who in the course of his work consumes alcohol. In this role and many others Farid al-ʿAtrash's characters are notable for their entirely normative relationship with alcohol.Footnote 120
Different treatments of alcohol can be attributed to differences in aesthetics. As Walter Armbrust and Joel Gordon have argued, while the break between the “commercial/melodramatic” film and the “art/realistic” film in Egyptian cinema was not as sharp as some critics would imply, it was not immaterial.Footnote 121 In realistic films like The Black Market, Boss Hasan, and Determination, directors attempted to portray, with varying degrees of success, Egypt as it existed. While the melodramatic films starring Muhammad ʿAbd al-Wahab, Farid ʿAtrash, and ʿAbd al-Halim Hafiz certainly reflected some aspects of Egyptian reality, they were aimed more to entertain than to faithfully reproduce the social conditions of contemporary Egypt. With regard to the depiction of alcohol consumption, this meant that it was included as a part of the aspirational lifestyles glorified in commercial films. This depiction was in contrast to the realistic films, where alcohol consumption was used along with gambling and sex as symptoms of corruption wrought by mimicking the West. The different depictions of alcohol consumption vis-à-vis the imagined middle class/effendiyya was a result of Egyptian intellectuals’ uncertainty over what the ideal mix of the modern and traditional should be for that group, whose members they envisioned as the true bearers of Egypt's future.Footnote 122
CONCLUSION
This article has shown that the continued presence of the beer industry in Muslim-majority Egypt was due in large part to its hybrid nature. While its origins were tied heavily to foreign capital and expertise, its success lay in its ability to use local manpower in executive offices as well as the factory. What is most notable about the history of the beer companies in this period is how much it mirrored that of other industries, notwithstanding the claims of national movements like the Muslim Brothers and Young Egypt that these companies were aberrant, alien entities. When we examine the beer industry in the context of the Egyptian private sector as a whole, we see that it was as “Egyptian” as any other. Its trajectory from start-ups supported heavily by foreign funds, to transnational ventures, to a fully nationalized and Egyptianized industry is one that the majority of the “Egyptian” industries of the Nasirist era followed. There are numerous examples, with British–American Tobacco (Eastern) and Misr Spinning and Weaving being two of the most notable.Footnote 123
This similarity was due in large part to changing norms in Egypt as it made its push for a self-conscious form of modernity. As I have shown through an analysis of films and literature, beer and other types of alcohol became powerful means to communicate identity in this period. Beer consumption performed a double purpose of aligning its drinkers with the “modern” while simultaneously rejecting the overtly religious, as 20th-century Egyptian films and literary works amply attest. Beer consumption was not an oddity peripheral to “true” Egyptian culture but was rather a real if contested part of Egypt.
