Egyptian surveillance covered even the guards, creating a full hierarchy of oversight.

Evidence

No one before had thought to organise Egypt as one would barrack and discipline an army. The acts of confinement, regulation, and supervision of the population dawned suddenly. Wherever people looked, they were to be inspected, supervised, or instructed. If they left the village, it was generally under guard, forcibly drafted into the still harsher discipline of the corvée or the military camp – unless they were ‘absconders’ who abandoned their homes and fled, as tens of thousands began to do. If they were guards rather than those who were guarded, they still did not escape surveillance. Spies were placed at every point, and the hierarchy of supervision and inspection was to ascend from the field and the shop, through the levels of village, district, regional and provincial supervision, to the central Bureaux of Inspection (dawawin al-taftish) under the direct supervision of the Governor. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 130

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the dawawin al-taftish, the central Bureaux of Inspection — a key term of Muhammad Ali’s administrative machine.