Egypt forcibly returned escaped peasants to villages under threat of death

Evidence

In the 1840s, after Egypt’s growth into a regional military power had been halted by British intervention and its army reduced to 18,000 men, the government was still using its troops internally to gather up peasants not in their place of origin and return them forcibly to their native villages. In April 1844 a government minister issued a notice to district officials, which announced ‘that Tillage and Agriculture are the foundation of the comfort, happiness and prosperity of the Egyptian population, and in order to obtain the same it is found absolutely necessary that all those who have absented themselves from their primitive homes should return back to their native villages’. The notice was to be made known to the general public, and went on to order, as had frequently been ordered before, death by hanging for anyone harbouring peasants who had absconded from their villages ‘in order to drop the word absconder entirely hereafter’. It described as a warning to others the fate of Suliman Badruddin, native of Minyat al-Sarig, who had been found giving refuge to absconders and ‘was gibbeted in the Public Market ofthat place’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 153

Categorization

• CANDY: The bureaucratic irony — ordering death by hanging ‘in order to drop the word absconder entirely hereafter’ — is a darkly funny, tellable detail about how regimes announce the end of a crime by escalating its penalty.
• QUESTION: Why would a regime that had modernized its military need to chain peasants to their villages via gibbetting? What did flight from land threaten — tax base, conscription pool, or the very legibility of the new order?