Egypt had among the world’s highest railway density per capita by 1900

Evidence

Perhaps the practice of issuing ‘tickets’ was borrowed from the country’s rapidly expanding system of railways, another locus of unprecedented mechanisms of discipline. By the end of the century the number of miles of railway in Egypt, per capita and per inhabited area, was among the highest in the world. The railways carried 4.7 million passengers in 1890 and almost 30 million in 1906, and they employed the largest permanent workforce in the country. Besides supervising and controlling this workforce, the railway authorities had to organise the issuing and collecting of tickets for every one of the millions of passengers, and run their own army of guards, policemen and inspectors ‘for the maintenance of discipline upon them’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 323

Categorization

• XREF: Railway tickets as a mass-scale mechanism of disciplining both workers and passengers ties into the broader theme of documentation- and pass-systems as technologies of control recurring across this book’s argument about order and supervision.