Having been deprived of its "colonies," and losing the army which constituted a large market for its products, the Egyptian factories found it difficult to produce commodities that could compete with foreign, mostly British, goods. In Egypt itself, local industries were closed down after losing their protective tariff barriers. At the same time foreign merchants flooded the Egyptian market with their cheap goods after the collapse of the Pasha's monopoly system. Soon afterwards they established financial houses and started extending numerous loans to members of the ruling family as well as to the rural population that triggered a debt spiral that forced Egypt to become more and more economically dependent on the West. Nearly thirty years after the death of Mehmed Ali a severe financial crisis offered a pretext for foreign intervention which eventually led to an invasion by British troops, thus effectively reducing Egypt to the position of a British protectorate and ushering in a period of military occupation that lasted for seventy years.

XREF: Connects to the earlier claims about Britain dismantling Muhammad Ali's development program and Palmerston's hostility as a commercial rival; this highlight shows the economic mechanism by which that rivalry produced dependency. Pays off: "Egyptian context explains the gap between plan and execution."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 78