Egyptian publishing societies copied British working-class self-improvement institutions

Evidence

In 1868 an organisation called the Society of Knowledge for the Publication of Useful Books (Jamiyyat al-maarif li-nashr al-kutub al-nafi`a) was founded in Cairo by Muhammad Arif Pasha, one of the graduates of the Egyptian school in Paris. It was perhaps modelled on Lord Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the organisation set up to teach the values of self-discipline and industriousness to the working class of England. Muhammad Arif was a high-ranking government official, as were many of the other men involved in its founding. It was established by general subscription, and 660 people participated as shareholders, most of them landowners or government officials. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the pattern from Milgrom’s law-merchant work: institutions are transplanted/adapted across contexts to inculcate commercial self-discipline. — connects to: Activists self-consciously copied Egyptian protest tactics for international audiences — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 484
• SEED: Angle: the global diffusion of ‘useful knowledge’ societies as a soft-colonial technology of self-discipline, and how the receiver colony inverted who the target ‘working class’ was.