Caisse de la Dette Publique

During the late 19th century, Egypt undertook several modernization projects for which they required loans from other states. The main sources of the major debt accumulation of Egypt, for which the debt commission was instigated, were the construction of railways, telegraph lines, irrigation systems and the construction of the Suez Canal. Under Isma'il Pasha's rule several railways were constructed: The Cairo-Aswan railway, Cairo-Alexandria line and the Cairo-Suez line. For the construction of these railways Egypt took out a loan worth £3.000.000, in 1866 from the Anglo-Egyptian bank. To purchase estates and develop sugar refineries, a loan of £3,387,000 was taken out 190. Half of this loan went towards the purchasing of estates and the other half went to the development of sugar refineries. Suez Canal In 1875 Isma'il Pasha decided to sell Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal to make up for its foreign debt. The shares were bought by Rothschild & Co on the instruction of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. == The system of the commission ==

"This system was mainly under the control of two countries, France and Britain. This system of 'dual control' represented Europeans' direct intervention in Egypt's financial affairs." It was initially led by a secretary and three commissioners representing the governments of Austria-Hungary, France and Italy; from 1877 the United Kingdom and from 1885 Russia and Germany. One of the commissioners would serve as the president, or chairman, of the commission. George Goschen, a Director of the Bank of England and later on a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Edmond Joubert, a French banker from Paris, were chosen to coordinate the initial task of creating a plan for the Egyptian financial situation. == The Caisse de la Dette Publique and the Ottoman Public Debt Administrations ==

During the 1870s, Egypt was still nominally under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. The Caisse de la Dette Publique in Egypt was comparable to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), which was also administered by European powers and was established around the same time as the Public Debt Commission. The OPDA managed to reduce Ottoman debt by 58 percent, whilst Egypt's total debt burden was only brought back by 2 percent. == Abolition ==

The Public Debt Commission was abolished by a bilateral agreement between the British and the Egyptian governments, signed on 17 July 1940, due to Allied interest in improving relations with Cairo during the Second World War. ==See also==