Trees at the Dawn of the Anthropocene: Infrastructures of Empire – Amr Khairy
If you grew up in the Nile Delta or visited relatives there until the 1990s, you would have noticed the ṣafṣāfa trees, known universally as the weeping willows, and more commonly in Egypt as Umm al-shuʿūr (the loose-haired). They were large and imposing, compared to other trees and the expansive green fields in their surroundings. Their light green branches – the loose heavy green hair locks-like limbs – extended gracefully in arches that went up a little then stretched down, to be slowly moved by the light breeze. One would have encountered them mostly at the banks of the Nile and – more frequently – the irrigation canals.
In this article, I walk with this tree across literary works that depicted it under these nostalgic lights and used it to other ends, before I take a dip in time to when it was used – along with the sanṭ tree in Upper Egypt – for making charcoal to build Egypt’s economy and support Muhammad Ali Pasha’s endeavours towards regional expansion. These are two contradictory milieus for the tree that this article explores to tease out the promise of the interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene History for revisiting modern history.

Screen capture from Akhbar Al Youm online, 18 November 2021
Title reads: “Concrete glazing of canals: a new achievement that saves 5 billion cubic meters of water”
A ṣafṣāfa bent in prayer at the river bank
The ṣafṣāfa tree captured the attention of modernist Egyptian novelists and poets, becoming a fixture in poetry and literary works that harkened to, or used, pastoral nostalgia in different ways. Youssef Idris, arguably the most prominent short story writer in Egypt across the second half of the twentieth century, described a ṣafṣāfa on the banks of 1980s Cairo’s Nile as a mother to a street child.[1] In the story, a boy leaves his home and takes the folds between the exposed roots of the tree in the middle of Cairo’s urban buzz as his new home. It becomes the place from where he turns his back to the city and stays safe in hiding. Muḥamad Gibrīl, the prolific Alexandrian novelist, brings up the ṣafṣāfa in a scene where an Alexandrian and a villager compare notes on their different lives. The villager speaks of Umm al—shuʿūr along with the canal bridge and the local flour mill, fondly contrasted to the buzzing metropolitan city.[2]
In poetry, the ṣafṣāfa became a symbol for rural Egypt herself – given the sustained imagining of the tree as a kind mother – in at least two poems written to commemorate the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. In his elegy to Nasser, Fārūq Shūsha brings up the ṣafṣāfa, which “bent forward, from her place at the river, in prayer” as Nasser’s body returns to the land of Egypt after his funeral.[3] Maḥmūd Ḥasan Ismāʿīl describes the existential distress across Egypt at that moment, where the ṣafṣāfa consoles the bereaved. A longer quote is due given how it captures the place of rural landscapes in mainstream 1960s-70s modernist poetry:
| Millions still wait eagerly for his voice,
And cry when they see him silent, With the steps the hardworking masses take, In the faces of the honest folks, In the look in the eyes of the poor, In every stroke of the plough, In every ṣafṣāfa that Dried with its leafs the tears of the weary.[4]
|
سمع الملايين ما زال يصغى لصوته ويجهش بالدمع حين يراه بصمته على خطوة الكادحين وفى أوجه الشرفاء وفى نظرة الفقراء وفى كل فأس بكف السنين وفى كل صفصافة كفكفت بأوراقها أدمع المتعبين. |
Perhaps the famous line from Abdel Halim Hafez (the major singing star of the time) after the 1967 naksa, “baladnā ʿala t-tirʿa bitighsil shaʿrahā” (our country sits at the irrigation canal’s banks washing her hair), had in mind a weeping willow, the famous Umm al—shuʿūr. [5] In Ḥilmī Salīm’s Kafkaesque postmodern poetry that looked at Delta landscapes differently, the ṣafṣāfa has an uneasy presence, in a poem countering earlier nostalgic poetry that used rural tropes as metaphors for good old Egypt. “The irrigation pumps on the canal bridge/ are still in their place beside the ṣafṣāfa”, but an eerie presence settles on the scene, where “it is certain that the village mud/ had moved from the soles of our shoes/ to the diaphragms”.[6]
Ṣafṣāf and other trees in rural Egypt were eventually removed en masse since the early 2000s as irrigation and drainage canals gave way to covered systems across many rural areas that turned urban on the outskirts of cities. Many of the remaining waterscapes were included in the government’s recent programmes for glazing the bottoms and sides of these irrigation arteries and veins with concrete, seeking to cut down loss in water supplies. As such, this endeavour made the ṣafṣāfa redundant – since it was allegedly grown earlier to support the banks of canals – and they had to be removed to make way for the concrete water-saving solutions.
Trees in a Warming Cairo
The question of trees at large, not ṣafṣāf in particular, came to prominence on Egyptian social media in the summers of 2023 and 2024. In the middle of the summer’s extremely long heat waves, where temperatures soar above 40° degrees without respite for weeks on end, several posts that went viral complained about the cutting of trees in Cairo’s urban landscapes – falling victims to the state’s overly ambitious reconfiguration and creation of new motorways across the city to reduce commute time to the New Administrative Capital – claiming that the lost trees were partially behind the extreme heat wave.
While one can contend that larger scale dynamics of global warming, not falling trees population, are actually the culprit – since we now live in the ever-deteriorating Anthropocene where all storms are more devastating and all heat waves are more extreme and lethal – trees in Egypt are still relevant to the longer trajectory of global warming. Strikingly, my research shows that growing more trees by the state in the late 1820s – not cutting them down – was a formative part in starting Egypt’s trajectory of joining the forces of global warming, namely industrial capitalism that burned fossil fuels to accumulate wealth.[7] This is a paradox that will be explained shortly.
Before explaining, there are two qualifications for this claim that need to be stated. First, to go back in time two centuries to comment on the current state of global warming is not going too far. On the contrary, climate science shows clearly that global warming is a historical phenomenon, if there is one single word to describe its relationship to time.[8] The carbon particles in the atmosphere, currently causing greenhouse effect – and are at least partially responsible for the extended heat waves – made it up to the skies since the early days of the industrial revolution, and since industrialisation and the mechanisation of agriculture in Egypt a few decades after by extension. Second, now that we know it is only relevant for historians to seek to better understand dynamics of global warming, there is ample historical evidence from Muhammad Ali’s decades in power that shows the need to follow the trees in connection to global warming within his predatory modernisation project.[9]
Infrastructures of Empire: Making Gunpowder and Steam Engines
The modernist literature and poetry of the 1960s-80s was produced as part of a broader cultural movement in Egypt that took for granted that Muhammad Ali was the builder of modern Egypt. It was a claim that started to be seen in the local press since the mid-1920s, where Muhammad Ali was described as “the founder of modern Egypt”.[10] Hardly anyone – including the cited poets and novelists – would disagree with the view that the Pasha established mechanised industry in Egypt, modernised the state bureaucracy, and introduced modern education.

Al- Muṣawar Magazine’s cover (issue 15, 30 January 1925). Caption reads: “Founder of Modern Egypt: Mohamed Ali”
However, the part about mechanised industrialisation is simply not true. Muhammad Ali sought to introduce steam-power to Egypt since the early 1820s, to power the spinning mills, gunpowder manufactories and the machine-making foundries. Britain, the country that possessed this new technology at the time, guarded it for some time, however.[11] Even for the few steam engines Muhammad Ali managed to procure in the 1820s, he could not find local coal supplies in Egypt to power them, and coal imported from England was prohibitively expensive to make the engines’ production economic.[12] The great number of factories that flourished until the early 1840s – one of thirty spinning mills in Egypt produced enough commodities to cover the needs of the local market – were mainly run by countless teams of oxen. Each eight oxen were hooked to a revolving central beam that formed part of the machinery (ṭanbūr), which were originally designed to be powered by steam engines. Even while the Pasha was casting spinning machinery in Boulaq and across other foundries in the Delta, based on French and British machine designs and with the help of European engineers he hired, everything was running on animal power, that is, until coal that powered steam engines was to be found in abundant quantities.[13]
By the late 1840s, Muhammad Ali had hired numerous geologists and coal prospectors from Europe to search for coal seams in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, and as far as present-day Iran. They found nothing, although coal mines were separately discovered in Mount Lebanon. His conquests – ultimately failed – in Greater Syria in the 1830s were partially motivated by his coal quest. Coal for powering the industrial revolution’s modern machinery was central to his thinking of what became known in hindsight as his failed project towards creating an empire in some of the – largely – Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In the mid-1840s, after almost two decades of failing to locate local coal endowments, the Pasha told a British diplomate, “coal! coal! coal! […] That is the one thing needful for me”.[14] Around the same time, he hired a Scottish geologist, summoned him to his palace in Shubra, and revealed the motives for his relentless search for the black diamonds. Addressing the engineer he said, “when you have found coal for me, […] I may make guns and steam-engines, and feel myself independent of England”.[15]
Muhammad Ali at the time – mid-1840s – was in the middle of a crisis. Britain defeated Ibrahim Pasha’s (his son) army in Greater Syria in 1840. The British fleet was equipped with the world’s first ever military steamships, leading to decisive victory.[16] A cattle plague devastated all animal power in Egypt in 1842-44,[17] and as such made the running of factories extremely challenging, and the so-called modern industrialisation of Muhammad Ali collapsed. Britain – as his words reveal – was the rival he wished to find coal to empower himself against. British steamships defeated Ibrahim in ʿAkka (Acre) in 1840. British coal was the subterranean foundation of its modern industries. It was, in a word, the infrastructural base of the British Empire, the first-ever fossil-fuelled hegemonic global power.
The Pasha searched for coal to forge a powerful fossil-fuelled state that would have been able to challenge Empire of the day. Had he been successful, global warming would have won that early another hotspot for accumulating carbon particles in the atmosphere, to add to the already – by that time – accumulating count rising from England. But while coal was avidly searched for – including by means of forcing Druze populations in Mount Lebanon to mine it[18] – he also sought to complement animal power with renewable motive power. He experimented with windmills and watermills, but these projects did not bear fruit.[19] In the late 1820s – just at the moment when peasants in Egypt where fleeing their villages in unprecedented numbers[20] to escape the increasingly taxing labour and produce demands – the Pasha invested heavily in growing trees to produce charcoal, which he wanted to use for making gunpowder and to forge and power steam engines.
The sanṭ tree (Acacia Nilotica) was cut down and processed into charcoal that was famous for being exceptionally good as fuel for steam engines in the absence of coal. The ṣafṣāf tree’s charcoal was burned and fine-grounded as an essential component in manufacturing gunpowder. The two makers of empire, guns and steam engines.
The ṣafṣaf and sanṭ were native of Egypt (Delta and Middle-Upper Egypt, respectively) before the nineteenth century. There is enough evidence to believe both had presence – with cultural and material uses – in ancient Egypt,[21] or were at least growing in the Delta and Nile valley before Muhammad Ali came to power in 1805.[22]
In 1828-30, Muhammad Ali grew in the Delta 4.3 new million trees. 1.1 million of them were sanṭ, and 300,000 were ṣafṣāf.[23] Archival evidence does not show whether Muhammad Ali imported new more productive species of these two trees or capitalised on the local species,[24] but it shows that these millions of trees were grown by meticulous money-and labour-consuming artificial irrigation, over productive agricultural land that was otherwise invested in growing cotton and other lucrative commodities for the global market. In the early 1830s, the Pasha instructed his agents, in an order about turning 700 acres in Ṭanṭā, Gharbiyya into a forest of sanṭ and labkh trees (the latter in much smaller quantities), to choose the land carefully, and to provide enough irrigation infrastructure and the labour of, “men, cattle, and gardeners”.[25] These 700 acres were the latest batch of land dedicated to sanṭ forests in Gharbiyya. In May 1831, he reported in one of his orders, matter-of-factly, that “because of the necessity of sanṭ wood for making coal”, at least 6,000 acres were already under sanṭ trees in Gharbiyya. He then ordered the cultivation of 1,000-2,000 acres in Upper Egypt in a similar fashion.[26] If the thousands of acres across Gharbiyya and Upper Egypt used for growing sanṭ trees followed the same intensive production pattern of the 700 acres in Ṭanṭā above, it must have been a major attempt to produce alternative fuel – charcoal – economically.[27]
Meanwhile, other orders from the period bring up artisan processes of charcoal-making.[28] In the summer of 1835, the Pasha asked the governors of the Delta provinces if they knew of artisans skilled in making charcoal. If such skilled persons were absent, he said, they were to be recruited from Upper Egypt. Finally adding, “Make coal [sic] and do not deprive the people of this bless.[29] Right after, he ordered one of the two governors of Upper Egypt, to send several individuals [experts in this art] to the district of Munūfiyya [in the Delta] to teach its people. Give these individuals the salary of several months instantly. After they teach the people of Munūfiyya this craft, they are to return to their district, and some of them will later be dispatched as teachers to the Delta districts.[30]
Ṣafṣāf trees, Umm al-shuʿūr, were planned to be increased a few years after the 300,000 trees grown in Tanta starting 1828. Instead of dedicating Viceroyal lands to grow forests of this tree, the Pasha ordered an outputting arrangement of sorts. In March 1833, all district administrators were instructed to tell the peasants that any person who grows a ṣafṣāfa shall get “some money”. From this incentives programme, all trees and wood harvested “shall be sent quickly to the gunpowder factories”.[31]
By the late nineteenth century, decades after Muhammad Ali’s organic coal-alternatives were forgotten, sanṭ and ṣafṣāf dominated the rural landscape encountered by the tourists. In Baedeker’s travel guide from 1885, we get the sense that sanṭ dominated the landscape in Upper Egypt, while ṣafṣāf was everywhere in the Delta.[32] In a handbook on gardening in Lower Egypt, the ṣafṣāfa is described as common in Cairo as well, and “is largely grown for binding the banks of canals”.[33]
Meanwhile, the decades after Muhammad Ali witnessed Egypt’s integration into global capitalism by means of the deployment of systems of indebtedness, the extensive mono-cropping of cotton and sugarcane, and the deployment of fossil-fuelled technology in agriculture for the overwhelming purpose of gearing up the production of these two cash crops. Egypt was eventually integrated in industrial capitalism as a dependent rural economy after coal’s absence in the early nineteenth century denied it the pursuing of the British heavily fossil-fuelled position in the Anthropocene.
The Trees of the Anthropocene
The trees that were grown intensively then turned into charcoal to make gunpowder and to fuel steam engines, left their milieu in the infrastructures of state-building and failed empire aspirations from the mid-nineteenth century, and moved on to the role of support props for irrigation canal banks, then eventually became nostalgic fixtures in literature and poetry about rural Egypt, before they were cut down as the state’s infrastructural plans moved on to building massive satellite cities in the desert.
Thinking with the ṣafṣāf and sanṭ trees brings forward two notes, on the re-writing of Egypt’s modern history through the eyes of the Anthropocene History, and on the nature of the Anthropocene itself. I will present the two in their entanglements.
The Anthropocene is a notion that uses geological terminology to capture the enormity of human activity’s impacts over the last two centuries on Earth. It is the age of humans, when the capturing and burning of fossil fuels led to the crossing of tipping points in biogeophysical planetary systems. Although the point in time at which this new geological age – metaphorical or actual – started is still being debated, it is reasonable to assume that the Anthropocene became what it is – a force of human metabolism in nature through capitalism – at the time when the industrial revolution was picking up pace, roughly the early to mid-nineteenth century.
That is to say, the forceful rise of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century offers openings for analytical interventions from a diverse set of disciplinary and interdisciplinary viewpoints, and Egypt is part of this space. Fossil capitalism belongs to economic history as much as it belongs to ecocriticism. In Christopher Bonneuil’s and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s, The Shock of the Anthropocene, we are exposed to different milieus in which one can encounter the age of global warming. Two of them are relevant to the story of Muhammad Ali’s trees: the Capitalocene (Anthropocene as the age of fossil-fuelled capitalism) and Thanatocene (as the age of devastating wars that propelled and was motivated dialectically by industrial capitalism).[34] If we put these two notions together, they show how expanded production through industrialisation and wars to defend trade territory in the nineteenth century was a major force in pushing the Anthropocene forward. In Britain, capitalism led to the adoption of steam technology in the textile production, and the wealth accumulated from the industry – and the technological fossil-fuelled base – created a military force to protect their markets. In Egypt, Muhammad Ali changed the nature of the Delta’s waterscapes by means of introducing perennial irrigation through the summer irrigation canals, to grow cotton. Right after, he turned his attention at the turn of the 1820s decade to manufacturing the cotton into thread and cloth. Now the coal that would have fuelled this industry needed to be brought from elsewhere, so he sent his armies east to mine it from Mount Lebanon. They were the same armies he arguably created to defend and further his new-found commercial empire. The moment of 1840, when the British navy – equipped with unmatched steamships – devastated the Pasha’s armies, was a moment of declaring the supremacy of fossil fuels, foretelling their Capitalocene and Thanatocene trajectories.
Trees of the Delta and Upper Egypt, ṣafṣāf and sanṭ, as this article seeks to show, become proper objects of historical analysis in the interdisciplinary space of Anthropocene History. This history is: global by definition; seeks to understand the forces and contingencies behind global warming; and – for modern Egypt’s historians – it can uncover chronic blind spots that show how to rewrite the history of the modern world, with Egypt included, rather like a micro or local-global history. This includes finding “infrastructures” of state-building, empire-building and power in very unlikely objects and spaces.
Amr Khairy
CEDEJ-Ifao Postdoctoral Fellow
amr.khairy@cedej-eg.org
[1] Idrīs, Yūsuf. al-ʿAtab ʿal-nazar [Excuse Me]. Cairo: Hindāwī, 2017 [1987], 19-24.
[2] Gibrīl, Muḥammad. Mashārif al-yaqīn. Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 2021.
[3] “Ahzān Al-Fuqarā’ [Sorrows of the Poor], a poem by Farūq Shūsha, In: Shaʿbān, Aḥmad Bahāʾ al-Dīn. Ughniya li-ʿAbd al-Nāṣir (A Song to Abdel-Nasser). Cairo: Dar Nashr Anbāʾ Rūsiyya, 174.
[4] “Min laḥẓat al-ḥuzn al-ʿaẓīm [From the Moment of Great Sorrow]”, a poem by Maḥmūd Ḥasan Ismāʿīl, in: Ibid, 239.
[5] The song “ʿaddā n-nahār”, a poem by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Abnūdī, written and sung/produced in the state’s studios on 28 June 1967. See: Tawfīq, Muḥammad. al-Kaʿk wa-l-bārūd [Cake and Gunpowder]. Cairo: Risha Publishers, 2024.
[6] Salīm, Ḥilmī . Madāʾiḥ galṭat al-mukhkh [Eulogies to Brain Stroke], in: al-Aʿmāl al-kāmila li-Ḥilmī Sālim – al-guzʾ al-rābiʿ [Complete Works of Helmy Salim – Part Four]. Cairo: GEBO, 2006, 443.
[7] Khairy-Ahmed, Amr. “Egypt Ignited: How Steam Power Arrived on the Nile and Integrated Egypt into Industrial Capitalism (1820s-76)” PhD Thesis, Lund University, 2023, Chapter 3.
[8] Malm, Andreas. “Who Lit the Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy”, Critical Historical Studies, 3 (2), 2016.
[9] It remains debated in the literature on Muhammad Ali whether his reign possessed a thoroughly planned project or was a product of a series of unplanned developments. See for example: Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Muhammad Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: AUC Press, 2002. Chapter 1.
[10] This title showed up in Al-Muṣawar, 30 January 1925.
[11] Muhammad Ali bought some steam engines in the early 1820s from a French workshop that hired English mechanics, because steam engines’ exports were prohibited in Britain at least until 1824. See: Khairy-Ahmed, “Egypt Ignited”, 73-4; “Third Report,” The British Press [a newspaper], 9 April 1824.
[12] Khairy-Ahmed, “Egypt Ignited”.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Patton, Andrew A. A History of the Egyptian Revolution: From Arab and European Memoirs, Oral tradition, and Local Researches, Vol. II. London: Trubner & Co, 1863, 239.
[15] Petherick, John. Egypt, the Soudan and Central Africa: Explorations from Khartoum on the White Nile to the Regions of the Equator. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and sons, 1861, 2-3.
[16] Malm, Andreas, “The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth”, Verso Blog [https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth], 8 April 2024.
[17] Gamgee, John. The Cattle Plague; With Official Reports of the International Veterinary Congresses Held in Hamburg, 1863, and in Vienna, 1865. London: Robert Hardwick, 1866, 314.
[18] The quality of the coal seams found in Mount Lebanon turned out to be disappointing. That coal, rich in Sulphur, tended to burn quickly in steam engine furnaces in Egypt, and was soon abandoned. See: Ahmed, “Egypt Ignited”, chapter 2.
[19] See: al-Giritlī, ʿAlī. Tārīkh al-ṣināḏa fī l-niṣf al-awwal min al-qarn al-tāsiʿ ʿashar [History of Industrialisation in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century]. Cairo: Dār al-maʿārif, 1952. Chapter 4; Khairy-Ahmed, “Egypt Ignited”, chapter 1.
[20] Cuno, Kenneth. The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt (1740-1858). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 117.
[21] Barakat, Hala and Abdel Aziz, Ibrahim. Guide to Plants of Ancient Egypt. Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 2010, 12; Ṭāhā, Aḥmad. Shagarat al-ṣafṣaf. Bab Masr, 6 April 2020: https://www.babmsr.com/%D8%B4%D8%AC%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%81-%D9%82%D8%B5%D8%A9-%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%84-%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A9-%D9%85%D8%B5%D9%86%D8%B9%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%B1/ citing Selim Hassan’s Ancient Egypt Encyclopaedia. Presence of the tree in the longer history of Palestine and Iraq too: Smith, William. Dictionary of the Bible. Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 1863, 1771-2.
[22] al-Ḥitta, Aḥmad. Tārīkh al-zirāʿa al-miṣrī fī ʿahd Muḥammad ʿAlī [History of Egyptian Agriculture in the Reign of Mohamed Ali]. Cairo: GEBO, 2012 [1950], 305-7.
[23] Sāmī, Amīn. Taqwīm al-Nīl II. [Survey of the Nile Part II]. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub, 1936, 379, probably citing al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya of Ramaḍān 1246 H, since the pieces of information before and after this table are cited from it. The same numbers (300,000 ṣafṣāf and 1.1 million sanṭ trees) occur in: al-Ḥitta,Tārīkh al-zirāʿa, 306-7.
[24] He might have brought Iraqi or Palestinian varieties of the ṣafṣāf. Walter’s gardening handbook for Lower Egypt from 1895 speaks of a Salix Babylonica in Cairo (probably from Iraq and/or Palestine), beside the local Salix Ægyptiaca. Draper, Walter. Gardening in Egypt: A Handbook of Gardening for Lower Egypt. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1895, 28.
[25] Order to the Maʾmūr of Ṭanta, dated 15 Ramadan 1246 H [27 February 1831], in: ʿAbbās, Raʾūf (ed.). al-Awāmir wa-l-Mukātabāt al-ṣādira min ʿAzīz Miṣr Muḥammad ʿAlī [Orders and Correspondences Issued by the Wali of Egypt Mohamed Ali] Vol. 1, Cairo: Dār al-Kutub, 2010. 321, item 1536.
[26] Order to Upper Egypt’s director, dated 18 Dhū l-Ḥigga 1246 H [30 May 1831], in: Ibid, 326, item 1567.
[27] Ahmed, “Egypt Ignited”.
[28] At least since the mid-eighteenth century, Dandara in Upper Egypt was growing trees and manufacturing charcoal that covered most demand in Egypt. Lawson, Fred H. “Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820-1824.” International Journal for Middle East Studies 13, no. 2 (1981): 131-53, 137.
[29] Order to the governors of the Delta, except Giza and Behira, dated 16 Rabi’ Thāni 1251 H [10 August 1835], in: ʿAbbās (ed.), al-Awāmir Vol. II, 9-10, item 2239.
[30] Order to the governor of half of Upper Egypt, 27 Rabīʿ thāni 1251 H [21 August 1835], in: Ibid, 12, item 2249.
[31] Order to Council Director dated 3 Dhū l-qiʿda 1248 H [23 March 1833], in: ʿAbbās (ed.), al-Awāmir Vol. I, 362, item 1763.
[32] Baedeker, Karl. Egypt: Handbook for Travellers, Part First. London: Dulau and Co, 1885, 78.
[33] Walter. Gardening, 28.
[34] Bonneuil, Christopher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Verso, 2016.Chapters 6 and 10.
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CEDEJ (8 mai 2025). Trees at the Dawn of the Anthropocene: Infrastructures of Empire – Amr Khairy. Les Carnets du CEDEJ. Consulté le 16 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13w3k

