Colonising Egypt

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Until the Muslim conquest, great continuity had typified Egyptian rural life. Despite the incongruent ethnicity of successive ruling groups and the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt’s larger urban centres, the language and culture of the rural, agrarian masses—whose lives were largely measured by the annual rise and fall of the Nile River, with its annual inundation—had changed only marginally throughout the centuries. Following the conquests, both urban and rural culture began to adopt elements of Arab culture, and an Arabic vernacular eventually replaced the Egyptian language as the common means of spoken discourse. Moreover, since that time, Egypt’s history has been part of the broader Islamic world, and though Egyptians continued to be ruled by foreign elite—whether Arab, Kurdish, Circassian, or Turkish—the country’s cultural milieu remained predominantly Arab. The extent of the processes of representation begins to reveal the elusiveness of their apparently simple structural effect. The structure of meaning in a system of representation arises, it is suggested, from the distinction maintained between the realm of representation and the external reality to which it refers. Yet this real world, outside the exhibition, seems actually to have consisted only of further representations of the real. Just as the imitations in the exhibition were marked with traces of the real (were the natives on display not real people?), so the reality outside was never quite unmediated. Colonising Egypt is not concerned so much with this necessary elusiveness, but with the question of how it comes to be overlooked. How does the colonising process extend the world-as-exhibition, supplanting with its powerful metaphysic other less effective theologies?

Green, Dominic (2007). Three empires on the Nile: the Victorian jihad, 1869-1899. Simon and Schuster. What was the relationship between international financial control (IFC) and European imperialism in Egypt?Empire does not always imply direct rule. Imperial powers have extensive spheres of influence, in which their overwhelming power enables them to coerce or persuade countries to align their policies with the hegemon’s interests. The British occupied Egypt in 1882, but they did not annex it: a nominally independent Egyptian government continued to operate. But the country had already been colonized by the European powers whose influence had grown considerably since the mid-nineteenth century. In Egypt, one of the key vectors for this kind of informal colonialism was debt: the Egyptian government was heavily indebted to European banks and declared bankruptcy in 1875. This was a common pattern both in the nineteenth century and in more recent decades. In Egypt and in most other cases, the rhetoric justifying the situation has the dominant power “assisting” to develop the indebted country’s fiscal practices and its industry. In 1906 the Denshawai Incident provoked questioning of British rule in Egypt. This was exploited in turn by the German Empire which began re-organising, funding, and expanding anti-British revolutionary nationalist movements. For the first quarter of the 20th century, Britain's main goal in Egypt was penetrating these groups, neutralising them, and attempting to form more pro-British nationalist groups with which to hand further control. However, after the end of World War I, British colonial authorities attempted to legitimise their less radical opponents with entrance into the League of Nations including the peace treaty of Versailles. Thus, the Wafd Party was invited and promised full independence in the years ahead. British occupation ended nominally with the UK's 1922 declaration of Egyptian independence, but British military domination of Egypt lasted until 1936. [1] Mitchell's effort at a theoretical construct is brilliant and his details are fascinating (especially the specific examples brought to light from the remoteness of a century ago, such as his descriptions of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the Lancaster method of teaching). But his effort is deeply wrong-headed, even perverse. Take the matter of Egyptians refusing to adopt the printing press until the nineteenth century. Mitchell dismisses the usual explanation, obscurantism and preservation of power. Instead, he recalls the high Muslim practice of text recitation and explication, then argues that this tradition made the prospect of uncontrolled publishing anathema to the scholars. Mitchell's is a brave attempt, but he fails on two counts. First, he has done no more than specify the reasons for obscurantism; second, not every piece of writing is a "text" requiring explanation and not all opposition came from scholars; the opposition to printing had far deeper and wider roots than Mitchell allows. Throughout the 19th century, the ruling dynasty of Egypt had borrowed and spent vast sums of money on its own luxury and on the infrastructural development of Egypt. The dynasty's economic development was almost wholly oriented toward military dual-use goals. Consequently, despite vast sums of European capital, actual economic production and resulting revenues were insufficient to repay the loans. Eventually, the country teetered toward economic dissolution and implosion. In turn, a European commission led by Britain and France took control of the treasury of Egypt, forgave debt in return for taking control of the Suez Canal, and reoriented economic development toward capital gain.

Equally accurate representations were made of the city where the exhibition was held. At the centre of the 1878 Paris exhibition visitors had found the Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, which included exhibits and models of 'everything connected with the city's functions: schools, sewers, pumping stations, urban rebuilding' as well as plans of the city in three-dimensional relief. [22] This was surpassed at the next Paris exhibition, in 1889, where one of the most impressive exhibits was a panorama of the city. As described by the same Arab writer, this consisted of a viewing platform on which one stood, encircled by images of the city. The images were mounted and illuminated in such a way that the observer felt himself standing at the centre of the city itself, which seemed to materialise around him as a single, solid object 'not differing from reality in any way'. [23]

The question of meaning or representation is an essential aspect of this structural effect, and is the central theme of the book. The methods of organisation and arrangement that produce the new effects of structure, it is argued, also generate the modern experience of meaning as a process of representation. In the metaphysics of capitalist modernity, the world is experienced in terms of an ontological distinction between physical reality and its representation—in language, culture, or other forms of meaning. Reality is material, inert, and without inherent meaning, and representation is the non-material, non-physical dimension of intelligibility. Colonising Egypt explores the power and limits of this ontology by showing the forms of colonising practice that generate it. As a motif exemplifying the nature of representation, the book takes the great nineteenth-century world exhibitions that formed part of Europe's colonising project. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, it refers to this modernist metaphysics as the world-as-exhibition. obsolete by the metaphysics of representation. Textual intention was analogous in nature and method to the intention or authority of political power, and in fact had always formed an important part of such power. The new effect of meaning—as an abstract frame constituted in opposition to the real—offered at the same time a new effect of political authority. Like meaning in the world-as-exhibition, authority was now to appear as a generalised abstraction, with names like law or the state. Like meaning, it would now appear as a framework standing outside the real world. The colonial transformations that introduced the effects of representation tended at the same time to create this new effect of authority.

Of the span of Egypt’s history since the arrival of Islam, no comparably brief period has received more scholarly and popular attention than the years 1798–1801, when the country was conquered and occupied by a French military expedition commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte. Publication – for political, propagandistic, and scholarly motives – of materials pertaining to the expedition began early. Before the end of 1798 London publishers were selling collections of French despatches and correspondence intercepted in transit from Egypt to France. At least one account of the military aspects of the expedition was in print before the French evacuated Egypt in 1801. The first major intellectual product of the civilian intellectuals who accompanied the French army – Denon’s Voyage dans la basse et haute Egypte – was in print in 1802, with English editions appearing the following year in London and New York. The first edition of the vast Description de l’Egypte began to appear in 1810.

Colonialism in the Arab World

are told in a didactic guide entitled L'Egypte, la Tunisie, le Maroc et l'exposition de 1878 . 'This is easily explained, for t They were taken to the theatre, a place where Europeans portrayed to themselves their history, as several Egyptian writers explained. They spent afternoons in the public gardens, carefully organised 'to bring together the trees and plants of every part of the world', as another Arab writer put it. And inevitably they took trips to the zoo, a product of nineteenth-century colonial penetration of the Orient, as the critic Theodor Adorno wrote, 'which paid symbolic tribute in the form of animals'. [18] Lccn 87018761 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.12 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18603 Openlibrary_edition Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge University Press, 1983), chapter 8: “Egyptian Nationalism.”