In colonial Egypt, the project of modernization and nation-building did not only involve getting rid of British control and awakening national sentiments, but also to lay claim and control over the population in the name of the nationalist project. In this context, children started appearing as a category of “problem population” that needs to be subjectified, conducted and subverted through government sponsored institutions and projects that targeted children, were premised on the belief in the dependence, vulnerability and malleability of children. Such projects revolved around creating new subjectivities and appropriating them in the service of building the “nascent nation.” By examining a huge body of primary sources at the Egyptian national archives (mainly royal decrees, court orders and parliamentary proceedings discussing draft bills for laws pertaining to juvenile delinquency, child labour, children health and education) and the numerous treatises written by politicians, lawyers, educators, social reformers, psychiatrists and doctors on children and childhood (many of whom were deputies in the parliament and state officials), it becomes clear how the construction of “the new child” subjectivity did not happen tout à coup. The process was rather gradual, taking place in tandem with political, legal, and social upheavals creating discursive changes addressing certain anxieties at each stage and involving a complex process of normalizing, pathologizing, criminalizing, idealizing and fetishizing that ruled out multiple childhoods in favour of a “normal/ideal” middle class childhood that has been elaborately and carefully refined in accordance with the principles of medicine, psychology and education on the one hand and, on the other, in relation to the political goals of a nationalist state as propagated by the middle class effendis and a popular commitment to the family. Another important factor was the change in the governing mentalité, where the state now emerges as parens patriae, having not only a symbolic and emotional interest in the child, but also a political interest and legal responsibility for the protection and well-being of that child. This presentation will show that it is not despite of this one version of middle class childhood but rather because of it, the Egyptian state launched a full fledged project that “institutionalized childhood” both in its policy planning sense and incarcerating sense.

The history of mental health and psychiatry in the Middle East in general, and in Egypt in particular, reflects the myriad of ways in which colonial governments and modern nation-states defined both their national projects and relationships with their subjects. The interconnection between health and hegemonic power has been at the center of studies from a variety of fields, from history and political science to healthcare and public policy. This study investigates how mental health in particular has been used as an instrument of state power in nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. The study aims to explore the ways in which mental health has been used, invoked, and expanded for diverse colonial interests. Using mental health, or madness, as the lens through which to examine the state’s engagement with various actors, the study also explores how individuals sought to assert their own rights through various means of resistance and negotiation with state institutions. The study offers an expansive history, examining the ‘policing’ of mental illness under British rule and exploring why the management of lunacy assumed such a central role in the British administration’s governance and control of the Egyptian state. It not only highlights interconnections between power and mental health, it also argues that mental health, more than any other area of health and governance, was used as an instrument of state control by the British administration in Egypt. The governance of madness was further ‘securitized’ as asylums were distanced from the city and filled with those deemed criminally insane, thereby jeopardizing the medical nature of the institution. The primacy and centrality of lunacy for the British administration in Egypt was transplanted by more urgent public health priorities in the 1940s; namely rural poverty and health. The significance of lunacy as a means of social control in turn-of-the-century Egypt ceased to exist by the mid-twentieth century. Instead, the British authorities worked actively to establish strategic political and economic links with Egypt in an effort to retain the influence and prestige they had prior to 1922. The study relies on primary archival materials including administrative reports and correspondences from both Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmi'yah in Egypt and the National Archives at Kew Gardens in the UK as well as annual Lunacy Division and Department of Public Health reports from the Wellcome Library in the UK.

This paper argues that a new institution of motherhood was constructed through modernizing reforms in the realms of law and medicine in semi-colonial Egypt. I show that Egyptian women were cast as ignorant of basic principles of health and hygiene and blamed for the high infant mortality rate in turn-of-the-century Egypt. This coincided with an ongoing reorientation of the Egyptian family in popular and religious literature, wherein the woman was being recast as the central figure in shaping the child and tending the home. At the intersection of these phenomena, new discussions emerged about the significance of women as mothers and the proper way to perform motherhood as an Egyptian woman. A new institution of motherhood was then constructed, concretized, and enforced through medical and legal discourse and interventions that were opposable against women across Egypt. I show that British and Egyptian lawmakers privileged the role of women as mothers in debates surrounding the drafting of new labor legislation and that they sought to ensure the maturity of mothers and the mental and physical health of the Egyptian family in a series of controversial personal status law reforms throughout the semi-colonial period. Through a socio-legal history of the institution of motherhood, my paper examines how colonialism, nationalism, and claims to modernity affected Egyptians' daily lives and accessed family homes and women's bodies. Throughout the paper, I emphasize a conceptualization of modernization as a dialectical process. Modernization claims to liberate individuals, women, or a nation, but, at the same time, it creates elaborate structures for their discipline. My paper treats the institution of motherhood as one such structure and explores the roles of hygiene and domestic cleanliness, coloniality, and law in its construction in semi-colonial Egypt.