Colonial rule required restructuring the household into a disciplinary site

Evidence

If modern political authority was to work through the forming and disciplining of ‘character’, the individual household, it followed, had to be transformed into a site of this discipline. To this end it was necessary to break down existing patterns of association and segregation, mystified and romanticised under such labels as ‘the harem’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 361

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece: moral panics over dress/segregation as instruments of class and identity discipline — here the harem is the target of colonial moral reform.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 361