Colonial power reproduced itself through local discourse and institutions, not just force

Evidence

The example of Zaydan’s work illustrates how extensive were the historical representations out of which colonial authority was built. The absolute opposition between the order of the modern West and the backwardness and disorder of the East was not only found in Europe, but began to repeat itself in Egyptian scholarship and popular literature, just as it was replicated in colonial cities. Through its textbooks, school teachers, universities, newspapers, novels and magazines, the colonial order was able to penetrate and colonise local discourse. This colonising process never fully succeeded, for there always remained regions of resistance and voices of rejection. The schools, universities and the press, moreover, like the military barracks, were always liable to become centres of some kind of revolt, turning the colonisers’ methods of instruction and discipline into the means of organised opposition. (Hence the rise after the First World War of disciplinary political movements opposed to European occupation, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whose leaders were almost invariably school teachers.) Nevertheless the power of colonialism was itself a power that sought to colonise: to penetrate locally, spreading and establishing settlements not only in the shape of cities and barracks, but in the form of classrooms, journals and works of scholarship. Colonialism – and modern politics generally – distinguished itself in this colonising power. It was able at the most local level to reproduce theatres of its order and truth. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 531

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s broader thesis in this book about the ‘world-as-exhibition’ and how colonial order reproduced itself through representation and discipline.
• QUESTION: The claim that colonial schools turned into centres of revolt — leaders of Muslim Brotherhood as school teachers — is a striking, falsifiable pattern worth tracing further.