Modern Egyptian statehood emerges from aligning urban and educational order with bodily discipline

Evidence

Laying out the streets of a city and planning institutions of learning did not come together only by accident, by some chance in the career of an exceptional individual. Ali Pasha Mubarak’s career indicated the concerns of his age. Streets and schools were built as the expression and achievement of an intellectual orderliness, a social tidiness, a physical cleanliness, that was coming to be considered the country’s fundamental political requirement. The new order of the army and the model village was to be extended to include the city and the civilian. In this process came into being the politics of the modern state. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 210

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Central thesis: the modern state is constituted by the articulation of spatial and educational ordering as a political requirement — dense enough to sit with.