Colonial irrigation works in Egypt relied on police-controlled migrant labour gangs from the south

Evidence

Capitalist production also required the creation and management of large bodies of migrant workers, to build and maintain the new structures being laid in place across the Egyptian countryside – roads, railways, canals, dams, bridges, telegraphs and ports. Larger projects such as the digging of the Suez Canal required the movement and supervision of tens of thousands of men. Smaller gangs of labourers were brought from southern Egypt for seasonal employment in constructing and maintaining the new network of perennial irrigation canals in the north, on which the cultivation of cotton depended. The British placed such gangs under continuous police control. They also introduced a system of ‘tickets’, which were handed out to the workers in their villages before they travelled north, but only to those men whom the local police deemed not to be troublemakers. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 322

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘ticket’ system as a pre-screening, permission-based worker-control device parallels the role of reputation/vetting regimes in the law-merchant and diamond-bourse material — documentation as a stand-in for directly known character.
• QUESTION: Did the ‘ticket’ idea diffuse specifically from policing practice into labour control, or was it borrowed from railway ticketing as the next paragraph suggests? Worth chasing the primary-source trail.