Egyptian elite drama policed social boundaries between pasha sons and servants.

Evidence

Al-`usfür fi al-qafas ends on an interesting note, with the pasha warning Hassan’s cousins not to view this reunion, or the increased allowance, as a reward for behavior that threatened to disrupt the family’s social fabric. He admonishes them instead to keep clear in their minds that the relationship between a son of the bäshawät and a servant is a terribly destabilizing social crime, and that this sort of breach of boundaries should not, in the future, be condoned. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 955

Categorization

• XREF: This boundary-policing between elites and servants parallels the reader’s framework of how internal hierarchies within colonized societies reinforce colonial structures.