Egyptian private landownership began as delegated state coercion on personal estates

Evidence

After failing in the 1830s, when the attempt to penetrate and control the processes of production was made again in the 1840s a new method was used. The method this time was to place groups of villages in the custody of individual officials, beginning with members of the ruling family, and of European merchants. The villages were to be organised as personal estates, employing the same regime of spatial confinement, discipline and supervision. These estates can be taken to mark the origin of a system of private landownership in modern Egypt, on which production for the European market would now depend. On the private estates power as a localised process of order and discipline could now emerge and become entrenched, to the benefit of a new class of largely urban-based landowners and commercial landowning interests. As with the new army, this process of order would appear not as an arbitrary arrangement, but as order itself. The peculiar nature of such order can be further illustrated by examining what was to become a common feature of the new estates: the ‘model village’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 156 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Egypt’s private landownership system originated as delegation of state control to officials — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 156; Private property under capitalism was constructed by state institutions, not spontaneously — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 69

Broader Connections

• Egypt’s private landownership system originated as delegation of state control to officials #expands (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 156