Most colonial restructuring of Egypt predated the 1882 British occupation

Evidence

These are curiously passive sentences, in which the amorphous “power to colonise” is never quite situated yet possesses an incredible transformative power. In Colonising Egypt, Egyptian bureaucratic and political elites appear to be as responsible as the British administrators for the act of ordering Egypt into a colonial, eventually modern, shape. In fact, as represented in this book, most of the processes of colonialism—the intensive reordering of the military, the classification of the population into a census, the widening of streets in Egyptian towns, the reliance on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as an architectural model for Egyptian schools, towns, and prisons—all occurred well before the British occupation of 1882. Thus, with the title of his book, Mitchell raises a provocative question: exactly who is doing the colonizing here? — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 80

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt and the debate with Edward Said’s Orientalism on who does the colonizing.

Related

• Egyptian elites collaborated in their own colonial ordering before British occupation (similarity 0.89)
• Mitchell dates Egypt’s colonization earlier than the 1882 British occupation (similarity 0.85)
• Egyptian colonization began decades before the 1882 British occupation (similarity 0.84)
• Egypt was crushed between Ottoman decline, British occupation, and Sudanese uprising (similarity 0.82)
• Egypt faced a triangular colonial structure of Ottoman, British, and Mahdist pressures by 1882. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial descriptions of disorder doubled as portraits of Egyptian society needing reform (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian military reform enabled a regional empire that collapsed under European pressure (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian nationalists desired to recolonize Sudan even after losing it (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt functioned simultaneously as colonialism’s object and as its active subject (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt was simultaneously colonized by Britain and eager to recolonize the Sudan. (similarity 0.80)
• Egypt’s informal British occupation contrasted with its formal 1821 colonial rule over the Sudan (similarity 0.80)
• Nineteenth-century Egypt was simultaneously colonized and an aspiring colonizer of Sudan (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial power reproduced itself through local discourse and institutions, not just force (similarity 0.80)
• Egypt’s own imperial past complicates the binary colonial narrative. (similarity 0.80)
• Sudanese and Nubians moved into Egyptian cities as colonial subjects arrived (similarity 0.80)