Colonial disciplinary machinery operated on European bodies before colonized ones

Evidence

Epistemologically speaking, the various institutions of coercive surveillance, education, and health (the famous Foucauldian trio of prisons, schools, and hospitals) were not distinct from one another but were formed, thanks to a supporting and increasingly trenchant bureaucratic machinery, into a cohesive system of doing and ordering things, all of which culminated in the production of new identities and subjects, a new regime of truth. Extensive regulations, shaped by empirical, calculated, and calculating methods, were applied to these institutions for the purpose of disciplining the operations of the body, producing submission to regulating and systematic training techniques that engendered docility and obedience. The body, the site of both empirical analysis and intelligibility, had entered “a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.” It has become colonizable, capable of being manipulated into, and shaped according to, the will of the sovereign, who has now become constituted not by the will of a king or a pope, but by the very diffused and bureaucratized subject that was newly engineered. Colonization did not begin in the distant colonies, but right at home. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 200

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing move — that colonization began at home, training metropolitan subjects before distant colonies — reframes the genealogy of empire and the subject itself, demanding a full re-read rather than a one-line takeaway.
• SEED: An essay angle: the modern bureaucratic state (schools, police, hospitals) as an internal colonizing project preceding external empire — with the re-engineered citizen as the first colonial subject.
• XREF: Mirrors Shannon/Drake material on state apparatus and echoes Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; also resonates with the library history book’s account of institutional standardization.