Imagined Empires (2 page)

The pasha’s empire did not survive long. It collapsed in the face of “informal” British imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. A European-led, capitalist world system emerged to undo and replace the old Indian Ocean one, cutting off Qina Province from its regional trade connections. Cairo’s incumbents—who were the grandsons of Muhammad ‘Ali and inherited his unified state—shifted Egypt’s economic center to the cotton-producing north, the Delta, in order to meet the demands of the British industrialists. Moreover, the informal British Empire pressured Cairo to introduce market measures, such as free trade, to the south. Once more, in 1864, the increasingly impoverished inhabitants of Qina Province embarked on a massive revolt against Cairo’s regime.
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When the British Empire formally colonized Egypt in 1882, it was time again to fully subjugate and incorporate the ever-rebellious south. The colonial regime worked with Cairo’s ruling elite to forge a nation-state, unifying the north with the south in one capitalist market. But the introduction of colonial capitalism in the south failed, generating a
cholera epidemic and provoking novel forms of subaltern unrest—against both the empire and the nation-state—in Qina Province.

Thus, Upper Egypt, and particularly Qina Province, had a fundamentally different relation with world empires than the north did. Nonetheless, the prevailing nationalistic historiography of Egypt ignores this and positions the perspectives of Cairo and the Delta as the one narrative of a presumed “nation.” The integration of the south into a northern regime, followed by the south’s peripheralization within the centralized state from the nineteenth century onward, also facilitated the region’s marginalization in historical accounts. Both Arabic and English histories of Egypt are overwhelmingly Cairo- or north-centered. Moreover, they celebrate bourgeois struggles against colonialism in which elite Cairene female and male heroes champion nationalistic resistance against the empire, and they intentionally miss subaltern struggles in the south.
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Only a few historians have attempted to recount the history of Upper Egypt. Peter Gran sheds light on the ignored narrative of the impoverished south, especially under British colonialism. From a Marxian stance, Gran applies Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “Southern Question” to Upper Egypt. “In . . . a certain kind of capitalist nation-state hegemony, . . . the Northern ruling class exploits the Southern peasantry with the collusion and assistance of the Southern ruling elite by playing the Northern worker against this Southern peasant,” Gran explains.
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He argues that British colonialism generated such a phenomenon in Egypt when it expanded capitalist cotton cultivation and helped create a modern industrial sector in the Delta, turning Upper Egyptians into a mere peasantry. In another treatment of southern Egypt’s history, Martina Rieker applies a subaltern studies approach to the question of Upper Egypt under British rule, also within the nation–state confinements. She argues that under the British administration the successful process of building a modernized state made the populations of Cairo and the Delta into citizens and reduced the southern population to cheap labor.
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This book attempts to add nuanced analysis to the invaluable contributions of Gran and Rieker by expanding the time period of Upper Egyptian history under study from the Ottoman to the contemporary era and by inviting the empire as a unit of analysis.

The dominant unit of analysis in Middle Eastern history has long been the nation-state, which renders local stories of the margin or low-class resentment unimportant within the larger heroic tale of bourgeois national independence and elite nation building. As this book shifts the unit of analysis
from the nation-state to the empire, it recovers the history of Upper Egypt from the universalized nationalist narratives and restores the silenced voices of the subalterns of the south. This book retrieves the history of Upper Egypt from within alternative histories of failed empires. It frees the south from the nationalistic narrative and then investigates particular ramifications of colonialism and unique modes of resistance in its remote capital province, Qina.

THEORIZING THE EMPIRE

While narrating the story of Qina Province and the empire, this book relies on variant theoretical approaches to analyze the relation between the local southern communities and their external hegemons. Marxist, dependency, world-system, postcolonial, and subaltern studies approaches have previously deconstructed major myths about early modern and modern empires in global history at large and Middle Eastern history in particular. They have attempted to reveal the destructive faces and present an undermining critique of colonialism. This book brings many insights of these theories into the study of Upper Egypt and through their lenses attempts to show novel intricacies in the case of Qina.

In
Empire,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri affirm that empire is still alive and well. With a Marxian stance and postmodern rhetoric, Hardt and Negri indicate that today’s empire is different from traditional imperialism. Whereas imperialism in the past was based on a European nation-state’s territorial expansion outside its borders of sovereignty, the new existing empire “is a
decentered
and
deterritorializing
apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers. . . . The rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depth of the social world. . . . The object of its rule is social life in its entirety. . . . [It is] the paradigmatic form of biopower.”
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Thus, contrary to what many think, empire concerns not just the United States; rather, it is a global system governed by NGOs, multinational corporations, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and, to a significant degree, the United States. In Hardt and Negri’s argument, there is a tone of fascination, albeit with criticism, for empire as a legendary entity whose “rule has no limits.” It is “a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality.”
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The global exploited subjects, or the “multitude” as the authors call them, could try and resist the empire, but they would have to
invent new tools of mobilization through interconnectedness to take the empire down—perhaps in the distant future.

About a century before the birth of Hardt and Negri’s postmodern empire, Marxist theory asserted that modern imperialism was, in the words of Lenin “the highest stage of capitalism.” A prominent Marxist critic of Western imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi defines empire as the main capitalist hegemon that dominates the world in one historical moment or another. Arrighi extended Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—which he coined to analyze noncoercive, persuasive nation-state authority—to understand how empire has exercised power over subjugated states and economies. “The power of the hegemon is something more and different than ‘dominance’ pure and simple. It is the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of ‘intellectual and moral leadership,’” Arrighi asserts.
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He suggests that in early modern and modern global history, there were three successive capitalist hegemons: the Italians, the Dutch, and the British. He adds that the United States inherited the British Empire in becoming a global capitalist hegemon today. Despite recognizing the fallacies of Western capitalism, Arrighi assigns it a triumphant role in creating the modern world system that assimilated economies in and outside Europe into one interstate system.
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He shows that the British Empire, for instance, was successful in establishing world hegemony through imposing free-trade agreements, and native resistance could not end this exploitive situation. “Under British hegemony,” says Arrighi, “non-Western people did not qualify as national communities in the eyes of the hegemonic power and of its allies, clients, and followers. . . . Non-Western people . . . had from the start resisted those aspects of Free-Trade Imperialism that more directly impinged upon their customary rights to self determination and to livelihood. By and large, however, this resistance had been ineffectual.”
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The dependency and world-system theories, offshoots of Marxism, reach similar conclusions. They assert that modern European empires were successful in dividing the world into industrial, capitalist cores and economically dependent peripheries. The two theories perceive Western empires as able to reduce vast territories of the world into mere subjugated margins. Canonical texts within these theories, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s
Modern World-System,
Andre Gunder Frank’s
Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment,
and Samir Amin’s
Imperialism and Unequal Development,
have for decades provided the social sciences with profound insights into understanding Western empires and their presence in the Third
World, whether in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. The two theories trace the dynamics through which the European core came to dominate and peripheralize the economy of the controlled territories. They assert that the capitalist, industrial West expanded externally in pursuit of raw material and open markets in the colonies. Limiting the economic activities of the colonized lands to the primitive production of raw material kept them in a peripheral, undeveloped status in the modern world economy controlled by European cores located in Britain and France. Dependency and world-system theories assert that colonized societies in the Third World went through almost identical experiences in this regard.
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Postcolonial theory, a more recent approach, attempts to deconstruct Eurocentric discursive practices concerning imperialism. It positions the colonized as an object of close surveillance, with the purpose of close control, of the metropolis. The colonizer observes the natives, monopolizes the process of “representation” of them, allows them to move only within the confines of the images the imperialist forges, finally trapping them in certain social constructs—especially regarding race. Prominent postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha are heavily informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of knowledge and power, meaning that Western ownership of knowledge has served as an indispensable tool of imperial domination. “The most formidable ally of economic and political control had long been the business of ‘knowing’ other peoples because this ‘knowing’ underpinned imperial dominance and became the mode by which they were increasingly persuaded to know themselves: that is, as subordinate to Europe,” Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin affirm in
The Post-colonial Studies Reader.
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Postcolonial theory is primarily informed by Foucauldian insights into how the European modern state developed new discourses and institutions of intensive, yet noncoercive, control of the citizen. Foucault uncovers the genealogy of how the birth of modern political economy accompanied the birth of the nation-state that further disciplines the bodies and lives of its subjects—rather than setting them free from early modern monarchical and church repression. Nineteenth-century centralized governments, primarily Victorian England, created certain institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons, that put their subjects under close supervision and gave the state an elusive control over their bodies. Postcolonial analysts demonstrate that nineteenth-century empire imported these tactics of power to the colony and, thus, maximized its penetration of the natives’ daily life.
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For example, Ann Laura Stoler
writes that “many students of colonialism have been quick to note that another crucial ‘Victorian’ project—ruling colonies—entailed colonizing both bodies and minds. A number of studies . . . have turned on a similar premise that the discursive management of sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things. We have been able to show how discourses of sexuality at once classified colonial subjects onto distinct human kinds, while policing the domestic recesses of imperial rule.”
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Since the late 1970s, historiography of the Middle East has applied the above theoretical approaches to explore the region’s colonized societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the 1980s, many books were published detailing how the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces, such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, were incorporated into the modern world system or integrated into a European-led world economy. For instance, eminent historians almost unanimously affirm that Egypt under British colonialism (1882–1952) was turned into a mere producer of raw material, namely cotton, for English textile industrialists. This process destroyed traditional, native industries and transformed the country into a peripheral economy with agrarian “retarded capitalism.”
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This caused Egypt to remain in an underdeveloped condition even after liberation from British rule. Egypt and other Arab countries experienced a state of economic “dependency” comparable to those of many other countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
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The postcolonial approach to Middle Eastern history has added complex insights to the economic reduction and peripheralization narrative. Many historians in the field adopt Foucauldian concepts to argue that empire is penetrative beyond one’s imagination—reaching under the native’s skin. Its semidivine omnipresence is invisibly manifest through “biopower,” that is, through the control of the bodies of its subjects by modern discourses and institutions such as the hospital, prison, and school. In other words, the postcolonial approach presumes that the colonizer does not control the colonized through coercion but rather through surveillance and discipline of her or his body. In this regard, recent literature on the Middle East uses Foucault’s notions to study issues such as governmentality, biopolitics, medicine, marginalization, education, and sexuality within colonial contexts. Such studies imply that empire is an invincible, yet subtle, construct that can penetrate the native’s own body through the softest practices of power without even being noticed.
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