The British colonial state crushed rural resistance through torture and mass imprisonment

Evidence

Rural Egypt was to become, like the classroom and the city, a place wherever possible of continuous supervision and control, of tickets and registration papers, of policing and inspection. … The so-called ‘Brigandage Commissions’ with which the government attempted to crush local armed groups in the countryside employed all the now-familiar techniques for overcoming peasant resistance to the new power of a modern state: military raids, secret police, informants, massive imprisonment (the country’s jails were filled to four times their capacity), and the systematic use of torture. Examples of torture used to extract confessions from suspects included hanging people from iron collars, and, in the case for instance of Mahmud Ali Sapidi, arrested at a café in Tanta by two secret policemen in April 1887, burning the body with red-hot iron nails. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 324

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the pattern of modern state discipline Mitchell develops across Colonising Egypt — the classroom, the city, and now the countryside as sites of continuous supervision.