Mitchell extended Foucauldian analysis to nineteenth-century Egypt.

Evidence

Foucault’s ideas have rarely been used to gain insight into nineteenth-century Egyptian history. One important exception, though, is Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt which deals with so many of the “reforms” that Egypt witnessed in the nineteenth century, especially in the last third of it. Drawing heavily on Foucault’s work and especially on his Discipline and Punish, Mitchell shows how so many of these “reforms” were informed by ideas of power, order and progress that worked on physical bodies and material space in a minute, exact and meticulous manner, exhibiting what Foucault called disciplinary, microphysical power. In addition, and drawing from Derrida’s work on language, signs and the production of meaning, Mitchell argues (and here he differs from Foucault) that the system of power and order that Egypt witnessed in the last third of the nineteenth century had a metaphysical aspect to it. “It worked [he argues] by creating an appearance of order, an appearance of structure as some sort of separate, non-material realm … [The modern forms of] power now sought to work not only upon the exterior of the body ‘from the inside out’ – but by shaping the individual mind.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt would pair well with later colonial-governmentality scholarship in the reader’s knowledge base.