alternatehistory.com

Having been the only European power to back Egypt in it's conflict with Ottomans and with a number of French advisers taking part in the conquests and modernization of Muhammad Ali. France was the premier European influence in the decades before the 1850s and with the recent victory in the Crimean war. The already strong French presence increased with more advisors and businessmen arriving daily to take part in the Egyptian economy and government. One particular Egyptian good of heavy interest in France and the rest of Europe starting from 1858, the crop that started the American Civil War, cotton.

Large scale commercial cotton farming in Egypt had begin in the early 1820s with the introduction of a new variant by a French Engineer but the start of the American civil war would kick this into overdrive. With cotton supplies from the Southern United States now cut off to European markets, the European powers turned to Egypt to fill the shortfall. Egyptian profits from the cotton sales would go into reforming the country along French lines and expanding the existing system of factories and education. The Army would see only a mild increase in size with a number of bribes to Constantinople enabling the country to loosen the terms of it's defeat in 1841, which limited the Egyptian military. The growth of French influence and increasing Egyptian revenue would culminate in the joint building of a canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea financed by French and Egyptian investors beginning in 1859.