Late-Victorian military administration converted inspection and discipline into continuous political power

Evidence

Colonel Herbert Kitchener, one of the British officers of the Egyptian army, was appointed Inspector-General of the Egyptian police. Kitchener exemplified the new style of late nineteenth-century soldier-administrator, like Lyautey in Morocco, who transformed modern military methods of inspection, communication and discipline into an uninterrupted process of political power, succeeding where the earlier attempts I have discussed had failed. … Besides the organisation of a police force, a comprehensive system of English inspection was established, set up within the Ministry of the Interior (as this new bureaucracy was called); the ‘interior’ of Egyptian village life was thus to be brought under continuous supervision. … The new methods of control were enormously successful. The groups of rural resistance were broken up, their leaders were shot or captured, the attacks on the new private property were brought to an end, and the power of ‘substantial landowners and traders’ made secure. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 325

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the Ministry of the Interior’s name literally encodes the imperial aim: bringing the ‘interior’ of village life under continuous supervision.
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: the parallel Mitchell draws between Kitchener and Lyautey in Morocco — a comparative frame for colonial ‘soldier-administrators’ as agents of disciplinary modernization.