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Imagined Empires. Zeinab Abul-Magd
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isbn 9780520956537
Автор произведения Zeinab Abul-Magd
Издательство Ingram
When the Ottoman Empire invaded Egypt in 1517, it did not conquer the south. Rather, it made peace treaties with the region’s ruling elite, leaving the native dynasty in power in return for an annual tribute. During the three centuries of Ottoman imperial rule in Egypt, the country was divided between a military Mamluk regime in the north, whose capital was Cairo, and a civil tribal regime in the south, whose capital was Qina. The southern regime reported directly to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and maintained administrative autonomy. Later attempts by the Ottomans to annex the south to the northern regime only brought about rebellion and plague. On the eve of the nineteenth century, the French mounted a campaign to “liberate” Egypt from the Mamluk despots of the Ottoman Empire, but they only did so in Cairo and the north. The French failed to control the south and faced a fierce war of Jihad led by native Arab tribes and Hijazi volunteers. This conflict led to a new wave of the plague, and eventually the French had to install the same Mamluk tyrants—the ancien régime—to rule over the autonomous state of Upper Egypt.
When Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1805–48) came to power in Egypt, he attempted to subjugate Upper Egypt and unify the north and south under a centralized government, ruled from his seat in Cairo. After six long years of vicious wars to conquer the south, Upper Egypt became the “first colony” in Muhammad ‘Ali’s expanding empire. He used the resources of Qina and the other provinces of Upper Egypt to support his military expansion and conquest of new territories outside Egypt. Shortly afterward, between 1820 and 1824, a series of unprecedented massive revolts erupted in Qina Province to overthrow the pasha’s government. Muhammad ‘Ali crushed these revolts and subsequently marginalized the south within his unified state and empire.15
The pasha’s empire did not survive long. It collapsed in the face of “informal” British imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. A European-led, capitalist world system emerged to undo and replace the old Indian Ocean one, cutting off Qina Province from its regional trade connections. Cairo’s incumbents—who were the grandsons of Muhammad ‘Ali and inherited his unified state—shifted Egypt’s economic center to the cotton-producing north, the Delta, in order to meet the demands of the British industrialists. Moreover, the informal British Empire pressured Cairo to introduce market measures, such as free trade, to the south. Once more, in 1864, the increasingly impoverished inhabitants of Qina Province embarked on a massive revolt against Cairo’s regime.16 When the British Empire formally colonized Egypt in 1882, it was time again to fully subjugate and incorporate the ever-rebellious south. The colonial regime worked with Cairo’s ruling elite to forge a nation-state, unifying the north with the south in one capitalist market. But the introduction of colonial capitalism in the south failed, generating a cholera epidemic and provoking novel forms of subaltern unrest—against both the empire and the nation-state—in Qina Province.
Thus, Upper Egypt, and particularly Qina Province, had a fundamentally different relation with world empires than the north did. Nonetheless, the prevailing nationalistic historiography of Egypt ignores this and positions the perspectives of Cairo and the Delta as the one narrative of a presumed “nation.” The integration of the south into a northern regime, followed by the south’s peripheralization within the centralized state from the nineteenth century onward, also facilitated the region’s marginalization in historical accounts. Both Arabic and English histories of Egypt are overwhelmingly Cairo- or north-centered. Moreover, they celebrate bourgeois struggles against colonialism in which elite Cairene female and male heroes champion nationalistic resistance against the empire, and they intentionally miss subaltern struggles in the south.17
Only a few historians have attempted to recount the history of Upper Egypt. Peter Gran sheds light on the ignored narrative of the impoverished south, especially under British colonialism. From a Marxian stance, Gran applies Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “Southern Question” to Upper Egypt. “In . . . a certain kind of capitalist nation-state hegemony, . . . the Northern ruling class exploits the Southern peasantry with the collusion and assistance of the Southern ruling elite by playing the Northern worker against this Southern peasant,” Gran explains.18 He argues that British colonialism generated such a phenomenon in Egypt when it expanded capitalist cotton cultivation and helped create a modern industrial sector in the Delta, turning Upper Egyptians into a mere peasantry. In another treatment of southern Egypt’s history, Martina Rieker applies a subaltern studies approach to the question of Upper Egypt under British rule, also within the nation–state confinements. She argues that under the British administration the successful process of building a modernized state made the populations of Cairo and the Delta into citizens and reduced the southern population to cheap labor.19 This book attempts to add nuanced analysis to the invaluable contributions of Gran and Rieker by expanding the time period of Upper Egyptian history under study from the Ottoman to the contemporary era and by inviting the empire as a unit of analysis.
The dominant unit of analysis in Middle Eastern history has long been the nation-state, which renders local stories of the margin or low-class resentment unimportant within the larger heroic tale of bourgeois national independence and elite nation building. As this book shifts the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the empire, it recovers the history of Upper Egypt from the universalized nationalist narratives and restores the silenced voices of the subalterns of the south. This book retrieves the history of Upper Egypt from within alternative histories of failed empires. It frees the south from the nationalistic narrative and then investigates particular ramifications of colonialism and unique modes of resistance in its remote capital province, Qina.
THEORIZING THE EMPIRE
While narrating the story of Qina Province and the empire, this book relies on variant theoretical approaches to analyze the relation between the local southern communities and their external hegemons. Marxist, dependency, world-system, postcolonial, and subaltern studies approaches have previously deconstructed major myths about early modern and modern empires in global history at large and Middle Eastern history in particular. They have attempted to reveal the destructive faces and present an undermining critique of colonialism. This book brings many insights of these theories into the study of Upper Egypt and through their lenses attempts to show novel intricacies in the case of Qina.
In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri affirm that empire is still alive and well. With a Marxian stance and postmodern rhetoric, Hardt and Negri indicate that today’s empire is different from traditional imperialism. Whereas imperialism in the past was based on a European nation-state’s territorial expansion outside its borders of sovereignty, the new existing empire “is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers. . . . The rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depth of the social world. . . . The object of its rule is social life in its entirety. . . . [It is] the paradigmatic form of biopower.”20 Thus, contrary to what many think, empire concerns not just the United States; rather, it is a global system governed by NGOs, multinational corporations, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and, to a significant degree, the United States. In Hardt and Negri’s argument, there is a tone of fascination, albeit with criticism, for empire as a legendary entity whose “rule has no limits.” It is “a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality.”21 The global exploited subjects, or the “multitude” as the authors call them, could try and resist the empire, but they would have to invent new tools of mobilization through interconnectedness to take the empire down—perhaps in the distant future.
About a century before the birth of Hardt and Negri’s postmodern empire, Marxist theory asserted that modern imperialism was, in the words of Lenin “the highest stage of capitalism.” A prominent Marxist critic of Western imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi defines empire as the main capitalist hegemon that dominates the world in one historical moment or another. Arrighi extended Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—which he coined to analyze noncoercive, persuasive nation-state authority—to understand how empire has exercised power over subjugated states and economies. “The power of the hegemon is something more and different than ‘dominance’