Colonial urban and military redesigns aimed above all at making subjects visible

Evidence

The disciplined and uniformed soldier would now be clearly distinguishable from civilians, making it possible to identify stragglers and overcome the last major barrier to the development of large armies—the problem of desertion. Model villages were intended to organise and make legible the life of ordinary Egyptians, introducing an architecture that would make even women and their families visible to the ‘observation of the police’. The new, open streets of modern Cairo and other Egyptian towns embodied a similar principle of visibility and observation, the principle of the exhibition. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 40

Categorization

• SEED: The uniform-as-desertion-barrier angle could anchor an essay on legibility technologies and their hidden functions.
• SHARE: The detail that uniforms solved the desertion problem by letting officers spot stragglers is a neat tidbit for someone into military history.