Nineteenth-century power shifted from intermittent extraction to continuous supervision of production.

Evidence

What was new in the nineteenth century was the nature of control. Earlier kinds of power, however centralised, were never continuous. They operated intermittently, typically in the form of levies, obligations and extortions imposed upon certain less powerful households, which in turn imposed levies on those less powerful around them, and so on. The irregular flows of revenue towards the centre were always weakened by the inevitable leakage at each juncture, the need to expand outwards, and the centrifugal tendency to disintegrate. From the nineteenth century for the first time political power sought to work in a manner that was continuous, meticulous and uniform. The method was no longer simply to take a share of what was produced and exchanged, but to enter into the process of production. By supervising each of its aspects separately and without interruption, political power attempted to discipline, coordinate and increase what were now thought of as the ‘productive powers’ of the country. The tendency of disciplinary mechanisms, as Michel Foucault has called these modern strategies of control, was not to expand and dissipate as before, but to infiltrate, re-order, and colonise. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 131

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between pre-modern intermittent extortionate power (leaky, centrifugal, dissipative) and modern continuous disciplinary power (infiltrative, colonising) is the book’s analytical spine — a paradigm-shifting frame for understanding political modernity that resists one-line summary.
• XREF: Directly connects to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish; also contrasts sharply with James C. Scott’s work on state legibility and Milgrom’s law-merchant institutions as pre-modern alternatives to continuous state power. — connects to: Industrial production modes drove the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 55
• ADDENDUM: The shift from ‘taking a share of what was produced’ to ‘entering into the process of production’ is a strong framing for sacrifice/extraction logics — power that colonises the productive body rather than merely taxing its output.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the intermittent vs continuous-power distinction map onto other domains — e.g., pre-modern armies raiding versus modern standing conscription, or taxation by tribute versus by census-linked assessment?