The barracks settlement physically regimented Egypt’s countryside beginning in 1822.

Evidence

Barracks and training camps were ordered to be built near major towns along the length of the Nile, from Aswan to Cairo and out across the Delta, with ‘each of the barracks to hold one thousand trainees and soldiers, and to be placed a quarter of an hour’s distance from the town’. The men were drafted into the army not for single campaigns but for several years and eventually for life. Their families often accompanied them where they went, building their own ‘mud barracks’ up against the walls of the camps. The country’s new regimentation can be said to begin with this event, the sudden spreading among the villages of the Nile of a new type of settlement, the barracks, and the drafting of ordinary Egyptians to populate them. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 134

Categorization

• XREF: The barracks-as-new-settlement-type and the spatial regimentation of the Nile valley echoes the reader’s interest in infrastructure and worldbuilding — the barracks as a landscape-scale imposition parallels trees-as-infrastructure thinking in the grafting article.
• FICTION: Life-term conscription with families building mud barracks alongside the camps is a potent image for a story about a society forcibly reorganized around a new institution.