Colonial descriptions of disorder doubled as portraits of Egyptian society needing reform

Evidence

Just as the model schools offered the model of a modern system of power, this image of the old style of teaching was also the image of existing Egyptian society. Movement is haphazard and undisciplined, space is cramped, communication is uncertain, the presence of authority is intermittent, individuals are all unalike and uncoordinated, disorder threatens to break in at any point, and order can be reestablished only by the swift and physical demonstration of power. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 283

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how colonizers’ descriptions of ‘chaos’ in subject societies function as self-justifying diagnoses — the same rhetorical move from classrooms to whole societies.
• XREF: Connects to Orientalism’s critique of how the West framed the East as disordered and thus needing intervention (Said, and also the broader ‘civilizing mission’ literature).