Naked violence alone failed, forcing states to adopt a gentler language of improvement

Evidence

The nature of the problem emerges from the very contradiction of these texts. There is a conflict between the unprecedented penetration of the new methods of power, and the need to make them more acceptable, more unnoticed, more effective against diseases like ‘nostalgia’, and thereby more efficient. On the one hand, to escape conscription the greater part of the peasants were prepared to maim or mutilate themselves. Public hangings and other uses of violence had failed to deter entire populations from abandoning their villages and fleeing. The regimentation of the ‘productive powers’ of the country had made cultivation and forced labour a duty almost as oppressive as conscription into the army. The only relief for peasant families was to abandon their homes and ‘abscond’. On the other hand, the state had already begun to search for a new language, ‘in order to drop the word absconder entirely hereafter’. It announces, as widely as possible, ‘that Tillage and Agriculture are the foundation of the comfort, happiness, and prosperity of the Egyptian population’. In the same way, Muhammad Ali had written in 1836 to the Inspector General of the military factories, in response to news that workers were being interned there and deprived of their wages, warning that the ordinary Egyptian (‘the peasant’) was to be properly treated, to ensure the government its income. ‘Attend to his comfort, increase his pay, so that he applies himself to his work with complete satisfaction.’ The new methods of power were to seek to work through the very language and process of improvement. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 155

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is a genuinely important observation about how coercion is self-undermining and must be refashioned as improvement — the contradiction at the heart of modern state power. It resists a one-line summary.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the theme of sacrifice and coercion — the state’s violence against the peasant body parallels ritual sacrifice as a stabilizing mechanism, here inverted as conscription-driven self-mutilation.