Colonial power requires a country to be made readable and picture-like.

Evidence

To colonise Egypt, to construct a modern kind of power, it would be necessary ‘to determine the plan’. A plan or framework would create the appearance of objectness that Melville found lacking, by seeming to separate an object-world from its observer. This sort of framework is not just a plan that colonialism would bring to Egypt, but an effect it would build in. As the following chapters will show, the colonial process would try and re-order Egypt to appear as a world enframed. Egypt was to be ordered up as something object-like. In other words it was to be made picture-like and legible, rendered available to political and economic calculation. Colonial power required the country to become readable, like a book, in our own sense of such a term. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels ‘Seeing Like a State’ on legibility, and the ‘enframing’ language echoes Heidegger’s concept of Gestell.
• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s central concept: colonial power operates by making a place appear as an enframed, object-like, legible picture-world.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a framework creates the appearance of objectness — that order is an effect built in, not imported — is a paradigm-shifting move from terrain to representation that runs through the whole book.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 127