Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (review)

In this well-written, fast-paced book, Timothy Mitchell examines technology, governance, and violence in modern Egypt. Arab-world specialists and nonspecialists alike will find his observations insightful and engaging.

Mitchell argues that Egypt underwent four significant transformations in the twentieth century. First, massive construction projects changed the flow of the Nile. Second, artificial nitrates pioneered the increased use of synthetic chemicals. Third, new irrigation schemes, population movements, and agricultural innovations created conditions for the spread of malaria, a deadly infectious disease. Finally, mechanized warfare concentrated state power. Taking that history as its context, Rule of Experts is Mitchell's critique of the idea of modernization in the "developing" world—that is, the idea that European and North American histories predict how the rest of the world will adopt and use technologies, and that one part of the world can help another through the transfer of technology.

Historians of global technologies, military and civilian, will find in Rule of Experts a number of worthwhile observations on postcolonial states and property law. Mitchell notes, for instance, that nineteenth-century mapping and communications technologies gave "political power . . . a new form; the knowledge and command of space" (p. 90). In Egypt, "private ownership emerged not as a right won by individuals against the state but as part of a penalty imposed upon them as a means of paying government debts, a penalty that in fact caused many smaller landholders to fall into debt themselves and lose their land" (p. 67). Referring to J. H. Andrews's idea of a "paper landscape," Mitchell describes modern statecraft as a series of practices developed in those parts of the world that experienced imperialism—places as diverse as Ireland and India. These practices yielded an imperfect correlation between representation and real estate. In a move anticipated by Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1996), Mitchell argues that, as states and markets expanded, so too did the exercise of arbitrary and often violent forms of power. In describing the Egyptian government's cadastral survey and the concomitant rise in private debt, Mitchell invokes companion themes such as exception (pp. 70–74), exclusion (p. 110), invisibility (p. 108), difference (p. 103), and untranslatability (p. 105)—all alternate realms of violence.

There are some minor flaws. While Mitchell suggests directions for further work ("examining what happened in Egypt will enable us to introduce the issue of colonialism into the history of economics" [p. 83]), his omission of references to the work of Peter Cain, John Gallagher, Anthony Hopkins, or Ronald Robinson is regrettable, especially as Mitchell offers a refreshing return to the "Cambridge school" of imperialism studies. And although Rule of Experts identifies continuities between nineteenth-century imperialism and late-twentieth-century neoimperialism, joining in a conversation that touches on Gustave Le Bon's invention of the peasant and Robert Critchfield and Henry Ayrout's reinvention of agricultural workers in nationalist imaginings, the book's bibliography is surprisingly silent regarding A. V. Chayanov's work on the peasant economy and Eric Wolf's on peasant politics.

Nevertheless, Mitchell's critiques of technology-centered development and of the area sciences' model of knowledge are instructive. Rule of Experts is a welcome addition to the literature.