The same order that coordinated soldiers made confining peasants to districts conceivable

Evidence

In the barracks, in the training camps and schools, and in battle, this principle of order made it possible to ‘fix’ men in place, to keep them ‘steady in the performance of their duty’, and to coordinate them as the separate parts of a single military machine. In the village and the cotton fields, the application of the same principle ‘over the whole surface of society’ made it suddenly conceivable to confine the population to their native districts, and (as the government was said to claim) ‘to initiate people to an industry far superior to their own’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 147

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the concern in your social-capital notes about mobility decisions being imposed on people without consent — here the state confines whole populations to native districts.