Modern state power replaced personal command with measured, diffused control over bodies and space

Evidence

The politics of the modern state were modelled on this method of replacing a power concentrated in personal command, and always liable to diminish, with powers that were systematically and uniformally diffused. The diffusion of control required mechanisms that were measured rather than excessive and continuous rather than sporadic, working by invigilation and the management of space. Besides schooling and the army, these mechanisms included such civilising innovations as the supervision of hygiene and public health, a military-style system of permanent rural policing, the building of model villages on new, privately-owned agricultural estates, the construction of networks to channel and control the movement of commodities, Nile waters and tourists, the surveillance of workers on irrigation projects, on the railways and in factories, the opening up of towns and cities to continuous inspection with wide thoroughfares, street lighting and police forces, and the organisation of a system of criminal courts, prisons and insane asylums. … Within the language of improvement and civilisation reside the strategies of order that provided an unprecedented hold upon the bodies of individuals. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 542

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power and the panopticon, plus Milgrom’s institutions-as-information mechanisms. — connects to: Control society replaced confinement with self-created open space — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 51
• ADDENDUM: The ‘hold upon the bodies of individuals’ through hygiene, policing, model villages, and infrastructure resonates with the grafting/infrastructure essay’s worldbuilding angle on how states imprint on landscapes.