Colonial rulers supplied entertainments plus technical institutions to Egyptian elites

Evidence

Already in the 1830s, however, Emile-T. Lubbert, former director of the Paris Opéra and Opéra-Comique, had been appointed by the Egyptian government as director of fêtes et divertissements. Entertainments alone, of course, were not enough. ‘What Egypt like the rest of the Levant has never possessed is order’, explained Charles Lambert, a Saint-Simonist social scientist and engineer who set up and directed an Ecole Polytechnique in Cairo modelled on the great school in Paris, in a report to Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Governor of Egypt. ‘You have acquired great power’, wrote Jeremy Bentham approvingly in his own letter to the Pasha in 1828. ’… but it remains to determine the plan.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to James C. Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ theme of legibility and planning, and to how colonial powers deployed entertainment alongside governance.