Telegraph, railways, and schooling forced Egyptian language toward precise singular signs

Evidence

The telegraph and the printing press were among several kinds of new machinery and technique appearing in Egypt that introduced a modern practice of communication. (It was an Egyptian employee of one of the European telegraph companies, Abdullah Nadim, who had begun producing Egypt’s first popular nationalist newspaper in the summer and autumn of 1881.) The Egyptian army, as we saw, had adopted the new techniques of signalling, which made it possible to assemble and control the enormous modern armies of the nineteenth century. The operation of the new Egyptian railways, which as I mentioned were among the most extensive in the world in relation to the country’s size and population, depended on an elaborate system of signals and codes. A general aim of the British was ‘the improvement of communications, traffic and general commerce’. The gradual spread of government schooling involved new techniques of instruction and new methods of classroom obedience. These kinds of development all demanded, during the decades of the later nineteenth century, that language be employed not in the ‘proliferating’ manner examined above, but as a precise system of signs, in which words are handled as though they were the unambiguous representatives of singular meanings. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 481

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how infrastructure technologies (railway signalling, telegraph codes) silently dictate the epistemology of language — a materialist history of a philosophy of meaning.
• XREF: Connects to Harold Innis’s work on communication media shaping social organization, and to James C. Scott’s ‘seeing like a state’ on legibility.