British colonial surveillance began with birth registration to control conscription

Evidence

I will begin, like the French officer, with the control of the body. The system of surveillance was to start not in the school or the army, but from birth. Following the British military occupation of Egypt in 1882, a central office was set up to organise the official registration of births in every Egyptian village. This required what Lord Cromer, the local agent of the British government, liked to call ‘systematic English inspection’, the everyday method of power that colonialism sought to consolidate. ‘In connection with registration and the value of systematic English inspection’, he reported to the Foreign Office in London, ‘there cannot be a better example than a recent case in the Province of Benisouef. The English Inspecting Officer had reason to believe that there must be a large number of adults and children who had not been registered on a certain “esbeh” [estate] belonging to a wealthy Egyptian. The Sheikh who was responsible had certified that there was no one in the village on the [estate] liable to conscription or non-registered … The Inspecting Officer, with a force of police and watchmen, surrounded the village at night; in the morning over 400 were found unregistered, and the Sheikh will be tried by court-martial.’ The immediate purpose of registering the country’s births was to organise recruitment into the army, whose own methods of surveillance and control I have discussed earlier. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 320

Categorization

• SHARE: The night-time village surround that found 400 unregistered adults, with the Sheikh court-martialed, is a vivid anecdote for someone into colonial administration history.
• CANDY: The idea of surrounding a village at night to catch unregistered births as a conscription scheme is a striking and tellable anecdote.