Nineteenth-century Egyptian observers read French prosperity as a product of street order and discipline.

Evidence

Similarly when they continued on to Paris, their first reaction to the city was ‘astonishment at how well it is organised, at the number of people there, the breadth of its streets and their order, the vigour of its commerce and the elegance and tidiness of its commercial establishments’. Inside the shops, they were ‘amazed at how well they were organised’, and how business was done without having to talk and argue and raise voices. They also visited the public gardens of Paris and Versailles, where even the play of children was clean, orderly, and quiet. The calm, the diligence, and the order of life on the street and in public places were the very characteristics that indicated and made possible the material prosperity of the French and the progress of their society. All this bore no resemblance to the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, where ‘hardly an hour can pass without people being interfered with and disturbed, with the amount of shouting and yelling and cursing and foul language’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 212

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the corridor work on noise/silence as social control and to the moral-panic literature on public order as civilizational signal.
• SEED: An essay angle: how colonized observers’ own diagnoses of European superiority shaped their reform programs before European administrators even arrived.