Modern politics emerged from concrete state practices, not from European word adoption alone.

Evidence

The modern notion of politics was to be defined by taking an Arabic term, siyasa, and associating it with the European word ‘polities’. Siyasa before now meant, among other things, the exercise of authority or power, ‘government’ in the sense of the activity of governing rather than of the body that governs. Lending the word an association with the European term ‘polities’, its meaning is altered from being one of several words for governing, to stand for a definite field of knowledge, debate, and practice. … In other words, the appearance of the notion of ‘polities’, siyasa, was neither simply the adoption of a word from Europe nor a concept creating its own space out of nothing. Politics was a field of practice, formed out of the supervision of people’s health, the policing of urban neighbourhoods, the reorganisation of streets, and, above all, the schooling of the people, all of which was taken up – on the whole from the 1860s onward – as the responsibility and nature of government. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 338

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reframing of conceptual history — a concept arising from practices rather than words — could usefully be tested against other ‘borrowed’ political concepts in colonized contexts.
• XREF: Connects to Mitchell’s broader thesis in Colonising Egypt about the material practices of ordering/shaping producing modern concepts — echoes Foucault’s genealogical method. — connects to: Political rationality originates outside the state yet organizes and conditions it. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 223