Orderly written registers underwrote Mehmed Ali’s new state power

Evidence

Given this importance of inscription, of the written word and of registers, the scribe appears during Mehmed Ali’s reign as an official of utmost significance. It was upon him that the government’s machinery of manipulation, surveillance and control was based, and it was with him that the key to the power of its impersonal nature was to be found. A law passed in 1844 organizing the internal structure of the civilian bureacuracy explicitly stated that the pages of the bureaucracy’s registers had to be clean and tidy. “The pages of the register (defter) have to be stamped and numbered. Writing has to be continuous with no blank pages in the middle. It has to be clear and legible, without any crossings-out or corrections.” The clean, blank page which was sequentially numbered and neatly bound in a register was a symbol of the new power of the state: self-assured, rational, and consistent. When words were crossed out, when gaps existed between writing, or when the register itself was lost the whole system and machinery of the government was implicitly challenged. For example, on being informed that the scribe of the military hospital in Haifa had fled taking with him the hospital’s registers, Lokman Efendi, the director of hospital, was ordered by the administrative governor of Syria under Egyptian rule to set out immediately to catch him and to take even more care to find the registers at any cost. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 487

Categorization

• DEFINE: Exemplifies paper/registration discipline as a distinct mechanism of state power worth retaining.
• XREF: Connects to Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ ideas on legibility; also to the literacy-technology theme treated in Communication as Culture readings.