Egypt’s infrastructure projects conjured the abstractions of progress and order

Evidence

The reorganization of towns [he says] and the laying out of new colonial quarters, every regulation of economic or social practice, the construction of the country’s new system of irrigation canals, the control of the Nile’s flow, the building of barracks, police stations and classrooms, the completion of a system of railways – this pervasive process of “order” must be understood as more than mere improvement or “reform.” Such projects were all undertaken as an enframing, and hence had the effect of re-presenting a realm of the conceptual, conjuring up for the first time the prior abstractions of progress, reason, law, discipline, history, colonial authority and order. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 654

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay angle: how irrigation canals and barracks across 19th-century Egypt produced the very concepts of progress and law rather than merely expressing them.