The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial quiescence, subterranean resistance ed. by Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman (review)

Beginning with Carl E. Schorske’s groundbreaking Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and culture, historians have examined Western, Central, and Eastern European metropolises of the late nineteenth century in great detail.¹ And for good reason. The turn of the century was a period of astonishing progress that shaped much of the following hundred years: decades of industrial development turned urban city centers into new hubs of domestic productivity and employment; cities swelled as people migrated from the countryside, giving birth to the modern, and some would argue, alien, metropolis; mass press outlets informed an increasingly literate audience; and nationalism, socialism and women’s rights, to name only a few movements, reshaped how people thought about day-to-day life.

Yet these momentous changes did not happen exclusively in the metropoles of Europe. In North Africa and the Middle East, too, people, ideas and technologies were being imported, exported, and exchanged. Colonial populations experienced their own process of transformation that, while influenced by European advancements in a number of fields, had their own distinct flavors and, more importantly, a high degree of local agency.

Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman’s edited collection, The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial quiescence, subterranean resistance, explores this remarkable period of social change and political contestation in Egypt as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Its scope runs from the beginning of the British occupation in 1882, following the Anglo-Egyptian War, to the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century. Previous scholarship on late nineteenth-century Egypt has concentrated mostly on political personalities, such as Lord Cromer, or how Whitehall tried to tighten its grip on Egypt’s blossoming economy and influence Egyptian social development through liberal imperialism. This collection, in contrast, digs much deeper. It reveals the extraordinary level of “subterranean resistance” to colonial authority in churches, mosques, classrooms, graveyards, fictional literature, and elsewhere. In short, it allows us to see life under British rule not from the viewpoint of the colonizers but instead from that of the colonized.

The collection’s thirteen chapters are grouped into three thematically linked sections, which, it must be said, work very well read together or apart. Part One considers the conventional and sometimes strange ways that British colonial authority was defined, redefined, and in the process challenged. Shane Minkin takes a novel approach to the question of identity politics by investigating death inquests from Alexandria. He argues that British subjects in Egypt defied the neat classifications that colonial authorities tried to place on them after death. During their lives many of them intermingled with other national and ethnic communities, had relationships with “foreigners,” and, as a consequence, rarely thought of themselves as strictly “British.” In short, death inquests, which for official purposes were required to identify the deceased’s nationality, failed to capture the varied and colorful lives of Egypt’s subjects. While Minkin’s focus is the regulation of Egyptian life after death, Mario R. Ruiz is more concerned with the living. He shows how British administrators used criminal statistics both to understand and to control Egyptian society as well as to provide a demarcation point between pre- and post-occupation Egypt. Aaron George Jakes’ chapter on agricultural road-building and the state’s transformation of rural space continues the section’s trend of challenging straightforward interpretations of British colonial rule and Egyptian agency. Jakes demonstrates that a good number of Egyptians understood colonialism and the state as “an arbiter of public utility” (74). Moreover, Egyptians actively worked within this system to lobby for infrastructural improvements and, on occasion, to challenge state authority from within. State authority could also be contested in the classroom and in religious spaces. Egyptian educators, as Hilary Kalmbach explains, forged close ties with European schools, especially French institutions. This happened in spite of British attempts to make the English educational system the primary influence on Egyptian pedagogy and instruction. Thus, we see how cross...