Egyptian elite nationalism constructed the nation as a disciplined orderly crowd

Evidence

Nationalism was not a singular truth, but a different thing among these different social groups. My concern here is with those who secured new wealth and political power under the British, and maintained it as the British withdrew. Their political writings were concerned with the threatening presence of the mass of working and unemployed Egyptians. This threatening presence took most often the form of the crowd. Somehow this crowd was to be ordered and made obedient and industrious. Its individuals were to be formed into an organised and disciplined whole. It was this obedient and regulated whole that was to be imagined under the name of the ‘nation’, that was to be constructed as Egyptian ‘society’. And the word for this political process of discipline and formation was education. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 384

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Mitchell’s larger thesis about colonial ‘order’ and discipline, and to Foucault’s work on discipline and the formation of the subject.
• SEED: Angle: how nationalist projects are really elite projects of crowd-discipline — the nation as a euphemism for social control of the poor, applicable to many nationalisms.