Colonial governance required first describing its subjects as a separate object

Evidence

As with the registration, counting and inspection of bodies, the politics of the mind would have to begin with the process of description, in order to constitute its object as something separate. The first task of government was ‘to make an account of all the defects of the popular character’, wrote one of the inspector-generals of Egyptian schools, ‘to look for their origin, and to bring about their cure by means contrary to those which have caused them’. In 1872, therefore, he produced a book on schooling in Egypt whose first fifty pages were devoted to ‘the Egyptian character’. ‘To describe public instruction’, he explained on page one, ‘is to paint at the same moment a picture of the manners and the character of a people.’ This he did, in clear, political terms: the Egyptian is timid and yet defiant; he is susceptible to enthusiasm yet lacking in all initiative; his character is one of indifference and immobility, engendered by a lack of security about the future and an instability of property, which has killed the spirit of industry and the need to acquire. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 343

Categorization

• QUESTION: The 1872 inspector-general’s book on Egyptian schooling — worth chasing the title for primary-source citation if ever writing on colonial education.
• XREF: Echoes Edward Said’s Orientalism argument that describing ‘the native character’ is itself an exercise in colonial power, and connects to the earlier chapter’s registration/counting of bodies. — connects to: Colonial management required objectifying territories through maps and data-gathering surveys. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 311; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”