Imperialism In Colonial Egypt

The Middle East, and specifically, Egypt, has had a long past of imperialism and colonialism affecting the region. From the 16th century to the early 20th, different colonial systems operated in Egypt under different empires and regimes. It can be argued that traces of these colonial systems have had a significant impact on current events.
The British Empire began to take control of Egypt following the two empires preceding it, the Ottoman, and the French. Both empires had an impact on Egypt, and paved the way for British colonial rule. In the novel, Colonising Egypt (1991), Timothy Mitchell covers the introduction of British colonialist disciplinary mechanisms to Egypt in the 19th century. He states that "the colonial process would try and re-order Egypt to appear as a world enframed… it was to be made picture-like and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation. Colonial power required the country to become readable, like a book” (Mitchell, 1991).
Dynamics of colonialism included not only the establishment of a European presence, but also the spread of hegemonic control that inscribed into society a new conception of ‘space’. In Egypt, colonial administrative methods created dependence and subordination through regulation of the population, surveillance, and reformation of …show more content…
The comparisons to the army was also present in social organisation; Mitchell (1991) tells us that, “as with the invention of a system of military rank, the new methods of spatial order also worked by producing and codifying a visible hierarchy.” For example, there were four different types of housing to distinguish between the social status of the families living inside them; establishing a social hierarchy that could be understood, measured, and read for the purpose of colonial control. As Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977) tells us, knowledge and power directly imply one