Egypt’s 1830 ordinance confined peasants to their native villages with passports

Evidence

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the people of Egypt were made inmates of their own villages. A government ordinance of January 1830 confined them to their native districts, and required them to seek a permit and papers of identification if they wished to travel outside. ‘It was scarcely possible’, we are told, ‘for a fellah to pass from one village to another without a written passport.’ The village was to be run like a barracks, its inhabitants placed under the surveillance of guards night and day, and under the supervision of inspectors as they cultivated the land – and surrendered to the government warehouse its produce. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power analysis and to the larger theme of the book (colonial order-making); also echoes the surveillance-logic in We (Zamyatin) — the village-as-barracks with permits and watchmen is a real-world run-up of that novel’s near-future biopolitics.
• SHARE: Send to anyone working on mobility control, passport history, or internal border regimes — the 1830 decree is an early, concrete internal-passport system predating most Western ones.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 129