Much has been written about the Egyptian military as a national institution, its impact on Egyptian national politics, and its place within a wider security establishment. For obvious reasons, however, there has been little scholarly attention on the military as seen from the perspective of ordinary conscripts. Since the Free Officers Revolt in 1952, the Egyptian military has been held in high esteem among Egyptians at large. Within an Egyptian nationalist narrative, the military and its soldiers are widely regarded as the ‘guardians of the nation,’ credited with securing Egypt’s independence, and defending its integrity against both foreign and domestic threats. Since the removal of President Morsi in July 2013, public support for the military has grown even stronger among those who opposed the former president. At the same time, individual military service - compulsory for Egyptian men who have at least one brother - is met with mixed attitudes, and military service means widely different things to men of different background. Young men who firmly support the military as an institution often face their own military service with great dread. Based on fieldwork and extensive interviews with young men in Alexandria, Egypt, this paper will focus on young men who have left the army, and look at how they talk about their own military service in the company of friends and family members. It will be argued that young men talk about their military service in ways that reflect 1) the limits of acceptable opinion within their social environments 2) their own positioning within Egypt’s socio-economic order and political outlook, and 3) how they wish to present themselves, as men, especially in relation to their male peers. The way they talk about their military service, the tasks assigned to them, their interaction with fellow privates as well as officers, will serve as a lens towards young men’s sociopolitical identification and masculine self-presentation. This paper will present the cases of four young men, who offer widely different descriptions and personal reflections on their time in the military. Further on, the accounts presented by these men will be seen in relation to their socio-economic status, religious background, political orientation, and the context in which they are delivered. A special focus will be placed on how these men describe their own actions, and ways of handling social tensions and difficult situations as conscripts in the military.

The second agricultural revolution, the global transformation of agriculture during the nineteenth century through the application of knowledge and skills associated with disciplines such as chemistry and botany, entrenched science as the primary way to know the soil, understand the lives of plants, and organize production in the field. While Egyptian agriculture was, and is, a focus of intensive scientific investigation since the mid-nineteenth century, we still know relatively little about the history of agricultural science in modern Egypt. My paper confronts this problem by examining the comparatively unknown work of Ahmed Nada (d. 1877), an Egyptian translator, educator, and author who contemporaries like poet Ahmed Shawqi and agricultural reformer Muhammad Safwat remembered as one of Egypt’s foremost science popularizers. I show how Nada’s attempt to synthesize European agricultural science and older Arab agronomic traditions in Husn al-sina`a fi `ilm al-zira`a (Good Industry in Agricultural Science, 1874) not only represented a contribution to the global popularization of agricultural science during the nineteenth century, but also participated in the colonization of Egyptian agriculture by naturalizing the social and environmental orders of capitalist agriculture emerging in the post-cotton boom era. In his work, large landownership became a way to scientifically organize the processes of production, rather than a product of Khedivial power. Soil exhaustion, a problem dealt with by the medieval Andalusian agronomists and recently rediscovered by Europeans, became the result of lost practices instead of a consequence of Egypt’s transformation into a vast cotton plantation. Nada also used agricultural science to define new agrarian ideals, urging cultivators to abandon tradition and become more like scientists and businessmen to take advantage of European demand for agricultural commodities. Nada’s scientific reinterpretation of Egyptian agriculture’s capitalist transformation underscores how many non-Western efforts to popularize science participated in an ancillary colonizing process. In effect, much of the world was colonized by attempts to indigenize Western knowledge well before the arrival of European armies in the era of New Imperialism. These ancillary processes laid the foundation for the technocratic regimes which, under the sign of science, have dominated the development of Arab societies into the modern era.

My paper revisits and questions historiographical tropes about the nature of urban life in Cairo in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through a reading of Mikhail Sharubim’s work of amateur history al-Kafi fi tarikh Misr al-qadim wa al-hadith I attempt to present an alternative picture to that traditionally derived from the accounts of Cairo’s most famous planner, Ali Pasha Mubarak. My reading of Sharubim aims to tease out a more richly textured sense of the city in the late nineteenth Century. I look at how social interactions in urban space produced the city as a place of overlapping geographies, both imagined and real. Rather than accept simplistic descriptions of a dual city, this paper looks at how the changing urban landscape and the novel interventions which the state made in urban life created new conflicts that both divided Cairenes and brought them together in new ways. I attempt to show that the state was actively involved and made its presence known in all areas of the city, rather than being exclusively concerned with presenting itself as belonging to the “modern,” newly Europeanized quarters of Cairo. Moreover, the state was concerned with the city not just as an object of governance but as a stage for symbolic representation in which it comfortably presented itself both as an agent of progress and as the upholder of tradition. Against the prevailing image of a divided city, I show that a closer examination of the day-to-day life of the city reveals a deeply interconnected if highly differentiated space. The different parts of Cairo and their inhabitants were linked in the second half of the nineteenth century through new modes of disciplinary governance, threats of epidemic and official concerns with public health, the representational practices of the state and popular mass media. At the same time, different classes of Cairenes were affected differently by these new state practices.

The story of an early twentieth century experiment of harnessing solar power for the irrigation of cotton plantations in the tropics offers an opportunity to examine the place of energy in the economic history of Egypt before the First World War, in the context of a global energy transition during the early decades of the twentieth century. The experiment, led by the American inventor Frank Shuman, was hailed by the press as a technical breakthrough and a practical solution to ‘the coal question’. Yet despite its success, the anticipated global shift towards solar energy did not take place, and instead gave way to the advent and primacy of oil after the war. I recount this episode of technical and entrepreneurial triumph and its abrupt termination, taking place over the span of eight years, to investigate how this circumscribed event was long in the making over the long nineteenth century. I read this ‘event’ as an encounter between multiple paths of economic, technological, and environmental developments, whose consequences are affecting the way we currently debate the role of energy in political changes in the Middle East. I also use this case to raise more general questions about energy history and its problematics of periodization, how a history of infrastructure can inform a spatial reading of the modern state and its political power, as well as about the relation of micro-historical events to global and longue-durée histories.

In 1871 Europe was shook by the Paris Commune. A decade later Egypt was to witness the ‘Urabi revolt/rebellion/sedition, or, as the Legitimists’ mouthpiece the Gazette de France proclaimed, the “Commune au Caire.” The same discursive tools that were used against the Commune would be dug up and used against ‘Urabi: the Urabists are crazy incendiaries (just like the Petreoleuses of the Commune, the racialization of the ‘Urabists replacing the gendering of the Petroleuses), and ‘Urabi “has only learnt from history its darkest lessons, and thus went on imitating the rebels of Paris” (according to one Egyptian newspaper) and he even “sullied his ranks with the socialists who burnt the city of Paris” (according to the famous pan-Ottoman al-Jawa’ib). Still a decade later LeBon, haunted by both the memory of the Paris Commune and the threat of the colonies, would publish The Crowd, in which he proclaims the crowds to be like women and primitives. Its racial bias notwithstanding, The Crowd would later become part of the cannon of an emerging nationalist but highly colonized Egyptian intelligentsia. A back-and-forth dynamic between the colony and the metropole can therefore be observed: the threat of the colony is projected on the European revolutionary crowd (thus, for example, various orientalist and civilizationalist tropes were used to depict the Commune), and the threat of the European revolutionary crowd is projected onto the crowd in the colony (hence the “Commune au Caire.”) Through a close reading of diverse sources (including Arabic newspaper reports on the Paris Commune, French and English newspaper reports on the ‘Urabi revolt, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, emblematic of the mid-19th century discourse on the crowd, haunted by the Indian rebellion, and later an important part of the Egyptian cannon and school system) this paper aims to study the mapping of the (revolutionary) crowd and the (savage) population of the colony onto one another, while paying a close attention to the interconnectedness of the racialization and gendering dynamics of this mapping. Through these mappings the crowd, and especially the revolutionary crowd, becomes a licentious space that produces bad subjects and threatens the dissolution of good subjectivity, even individuality. This inquiry is part of a larger project that aims to understand the history and rationale behind the contemporary counterrevolutionary discourse, unleashed post-2011, that understands revolution (or political activism) as a licentious space and depicts political activists as licentious subjects.