Revenues flowing towards the center were liable to leak at each juncture and could be increased only by further expansion outward, which weakened the network by adding further points of leakage. Typically, a powerful central household imposed levies on less powerful regional households, which in turn imposed obligations on those around them. But earlier forms of control were always porous and uncertain. Attempting to control from Cairo the agricultural revenue of the Nile valley was nothing new. In the 1820s and 1830s orders were issued from Cairo prohibiting the movement of villagers outside their native districts, prescribing the crops they were to grow and the means of cultivation, distribution, and payment, and stipulating the hierarchy of surveillance, inspection, and punishment by which these rules were to be enforced. Chapter 2 begins by describing a novel attempt in the early nineteenth century to regulate the daily life of rural Egyptians. Colonising Egypt analyses in the everyday details of the colonial project the metaphysics of its power.Ĭhapters 2, 3, and 4 of the book examine the development in Egypt of the power to colonise. Colonising refers not simply to the establishing of a European presence but also to the spread of a political order that inscribes in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.
While focussing on events in Egypt in the latter part of the nineteenth century, its argument is addressed to the place of colonialism in the critique of modernity. This book is not a history of the British colonisation of Egypt but a study of the power to colonise.
Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1988 1988.
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