10 Qirsh - Abdulaziz

This small gold issue belongs to the brief overlap between Ottoman suzerainty and Egypt's accelerating financial independence under Khedive Ismail. The early 1870s were the years Ismail was borrowing catastrophically against Egypt's future — loans at punishing interest rates to fund the Suez Canal inauguration celebrations of 1869 and a modernization program the country could not afford. Within a decade, that debt spiral would cost Egypt its fiscal autonomy entirely, leading to Anglo-French financial control in 1876 and, ultimately, British occupation in 1882.