Colonial infrastructure projects conjured the abstractions they claimed merely to express.

Evidence

In the colonial order, in other words, the effect created of a framework would always appear as though it were a ‘conceptual structure’, as we say. It would appear, that is to say, as an order of meaning or truth existing somehow before and behind what would now be thought of as mere ‘things in themselves’. Political authority itself would now more and more reside in this effect of a prior, ordering truth. The reorganisation of towns and the laying out of new colonial quarters, every regulation of economic or social practice, the construction of the country’s new system of irrigation canals, the control of the Nile’s flow, the building of barracks, police stations and classrooms, the completion of a system of railways - this pervasive process of ‘order’ must be understood as more than mere improvement or ‘reform’. Such projects were all undertaken as an enframing, and hence had the effect of re-presenting a realm of the conceptual, conjuring up for the first time the prior abstractions of progress, reason, law, discipline, history, colonial authority and order. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 552

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that colonial ‘reform’ does not execute a prior plan but retroactively conjures the conceptual realm it pretends to obey is genuinely paradigm-shifting — the effect precedes its supposed cause.
• XREF: Reverses the Platonic assumption — echoes the book’s earlier ‘enframing’ discussions and connects to Mitchell’s argument that representation makes the world ‘re-presentable’ as things in themselves.