In the spring of 1896, the British Consul-General and de facto colonial overlord of Egypt, Lord Cromer, submitted his annual report to Parliament on the "Progress of Reforms" in the preceding year. Among the proudest accomplishments he sought to advertise was a wholesale reorganization of the Ministry of the Interior under the supervision of a newly-attached British adviser. A streamlined administrative hierarchy extending from the Minister in Cairo down to the 'umdas and shaykhs of individual villages would thereafter ensure swift and consistent enforcement of the law and implementation of government policies across the Egyptian countryside. In claiming success for these changes, Cromer boasted that "village life is no longer to so great an extent troubled by political dissensions, the result, generally, of some Cairo complication which has been misunderstood and misinterpreted." Histories of the British occupation under Cromer have long focused on the Ministry of Public Works as the central institution of British rule in Egypt. According to such accounts, colonial officials, concerned primarily with revenue extraction for the repayment of Egypt’s public debt, selectively appropriated aspects of the Egyptian state as instruments of foreign capital interests. The present paper argues that while an ambitious program of agrarian reform was indeed central to the operations of colonial rule, that program depended upon and, in turn, reinforced a much more extensive reworking of the institutional organization, everyday practices, and ideological representations of the Egyptian state. And the British takeover of the Ministry of the Interior in 1894 played a central, if previously underappreciated, role in those transformations. Drawing on a range of new archival sources including peasant petitions and the reports of Khedive Abbas Hilmi II’s rural informants, the paper explores how British-led reforms to the Interior’s administrative apparatus aimed to reinvent the figure of the village headman as a faithful and reliable agent of agrarian development. Contrary to Cromer’s official pronouncements, the village shaykh’s new paper existence, freighted with an expanding array of bureaucratic responsibilities, failed to replace older modes of local authority. These changes did, however, help to redefine these figures as mere representatives of the central government in the village rather than leaders of discrete local communities. The ensuing reconceptualization of all sub-national institutions of rule as “administration” would serve to organize the political geography of anti-colonial struggle in Egypt for decades to come.

In 1912, a Greek cotton-dealer named Xenos Xenophon submitted a proposal to Viscount Kitchener, the Consul-General in Egypt, for the establishment of a ‘Commission of Verification.’ While previous government policies promoting capital-intensive agricultural development had led to an “agricultural crisis”, current policy, Xenophon argued, had done little to alleviate the impending “social crisis” caused by the resulting high levels of rural indebtedness and landlessness. Comprised of individuals intimately familiar with commercial practices in the countryside and housed under the Ministry of Interior, the commission would be tasked with the surveillance of cotton merchants, their rural agents and large landowners through the periodic audit of their account books and investigation into matters of expropriation. The work of the commission would, in turn, constitute a “bureau of information on the moral and financial situation of each, individual, indigenous and foreign” upon which could be constructed a “perfect order” balancing the spirit of enterprise with the demands of equity and justice between creditors and debtors. While the commission was never established, Xenophon’s proposal highlights how colonial governance became colonized by emergent forms of social scientific knowledge. The present paper traces the colonial genealogy of economy and security through the projects of colonial officials to surveil and regulate the relationship between small agriculturalists and village money lenders in the Egyptian countryside between 1898 and 1912. It examines how the problematic of agricultural debt instituted new regimes of knowledge production and how the site of this problematic within colonial governance shifted. While traditionally a concern of the Ministry of Finance in conjunction with the National Bank of Egypt, by 1912, the problematic of agricultural debt had devolved to the personnel of the Ministry of Interior now tasked with policing the boundary between new norms of market practice and usury: assuring the accuracy of scales, overseeing the operation of village cotton markets and facilitating the dissemination of cotton and cotton futures prices to rural agriculturalists. However, rather than the product of conflict between British and Egyptian officials, this paper argues that the devolution of economic surveillance and regulation to the Ministry of Interior was part of a more fundamental transformation in the nature of economic knowledge and its relation to collective life. This critical point is made by reassembling the professional and intellectual linkages between colonial administration and the Khedivial Society of Political Economy, Statistics and Legislation established in 1910.

Between 1930 and 1950, the Great Depression and Second World War provoked a transformative period of industrialization, urban migration and increasing wealth and income inequality in Egypt. As Nazi Germany prepared for war, British diplomats sought to salvage imperial hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean with a 1936 bilateral treaty that granted the Egypt state autonomy in domestic administration — including control of its Ministry of Interior. This paper argues that the problems of this era and the administrative choices made to address them helped establish the ministry at the center of the postcolonial Egyptian state and led it to develop methods not merely mimetic of colonial administration. The decolonization of the Ministry of Interior occurred at the same time as the British military reoccupied the country in 1939 with hundreds of thousands of troops. The Egyptian government employed a constitutional state of emergency that granted it sole legal jurisdiction over Egyptian civilians in security matters to limit the power and presence of the British in Egyptian space. Because the British still dominated the Egyptian military, the Ministry of Interior controlled the flow of cases and appeals in a military court system ostensibly run by the military and Justice Ministry. The creation of the Ministries of Public Health (1936), Social Affairs (1939) and Supply (1940) also helped in providing new sources of social intelligence, in putting a humanitarian service spin on these services and in breaking British influence over these areas. In reaction to the rise of urban industrial labor and urban protest, expert knowledge on policing in Egypt shifted from rural criminal psychology towards militarized crowd control tactics. However, as the staff of the ministry based in urban areas shifted from one to two thirds of the total, and wartime inflation ravaged the standard of living of wage employees, the police force experienced the same social unrest it had been tasked with suppressing. In April 1948, Cairo and Alexandria mid-grade police officers led their subordinates on strike that the resurgent Egyptian military intervened to stop. By 1950, the leadership of the Ministry of Interior had some confidence that it had established a liberal, neocolonial security state. At the same time, the same social and political changes that helped establish its power had also led to threats: bureaucratic malaise and military populist nationalism.

In May 1971, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat (r. 1970-1981) appointed police officer Mamdouh Salem to head the Ministry of Interior (MoI). Four years later, Salem became the country’s prime minister and the first police officer to be selected to such high executive position. Salem’s appointments registered a new shift under Sadat towards institutional independence. Although military men continued to control the presidency, a closer examination of dynamics of governance in Egypt shows that the MoI, a civilian institution of force, has gained control over domestic security since the 1970s. Under President Gamal Abd al-Nasser (r. 1952-1970), the military had full control over missions of external and internal security. During the 18 years of Nasser’s rule, the MoI was headed by military officers except for a brief period of 2 years. The military also controlled all intelligence apparatuses. This arrangement changed dramatically under Sadat, who awarded more independence to the MoI, enhanced its capacity and delegated missions of domestic control to it. This paper investigates the relationship between presidents Nasser and Sadat and their institutions of force as a case for changes in domestic security arrangements in militarized authoritarian regimes. Whereas most leaders in militarized regimes rely on militaries for domestic control, some re-assign this responsibility to civilian institutions of force such as ministries of interior (MoIs) and their police forces. This shift and the deepening of police powers since Sadat raise important questions that are relevant to our understanding of domestic security arrangements and authoritarian rule more generally. I ask: Why do authoritarian ruling elites shift their reliance on civilian institutions of force for domestic security? What conditions are necessary for this shift? And in what ways do civilian institutions of force support authoritarian regimes? I argue that leaders rely on MoIs to decrease their reliance on and vulnerability to their militaries, and ultimately minimize their interference in politics. The paper follows the comparative historical approach and relies on extensive field work that includes archival research, participant observation and interviews with experts and officers.