Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

Скачать книгу

moral leadership,’” Arrighi asserts.22 He suggests that in early modern and modern global history, there were three successive capitalist hegemons: the Italians, the Dutch, and the British. He adds that the United States inherited the British Empire in becoming a global capitalist hegemon today. Despite recognizing the fallacies of Western capitalism, Arrighi assigns it a triumphant role in creating the modern world system that assimilated economies in and outside Europe into one interstate system.23 He shows that the British Empire, for instance, was successful in establishing world hegemony through imposing free-trade agreements, and native resistance could not end this exploitive situation. “Under British hegemony,” says Arrighi, “non-Western people did not qualify as national communities in the eyes of the hegemonic power and of its allies, clients, and followers. . . . Non-Western people . . . had from the start resisted those aspects of Free-Trade Imperialism that more directly impinged upon their customary rights to self determination and to livelihood. By and large, however, this resistance had been ineffectual.”24

      The dependency and world-system theories, offshoots of Marxism, reach similar conclusions. They assert that modern European empires were successful in dividing the world into industrial, capitalist cores and economically dependent peripheries. The two theories perceive Western empires as able to reduce vast territories of the world into mere subjugated margins. Canonical texts within these theories, such as Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System, Andre Gunder Frank’s Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment, and Samir Amin’s Imperialism and Unequal Development, have for decades provided the social sciences with profound insights into understanding Western empires and their presence in the Third World, whether in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. The two theories trace the dynamics through which the European core came to dominate and peripheralize the economy of the controlled territories. They assert that the capitalist, industrial West expanded externally in pursuit of raw material and open markets in the colonies. Limiting the economic activities of the colonized lands to the primitive production of raw material kept them in a peripheral, undeveloped status in the modern world economy controlled by European cores located in Britain and France. Dependency and world-system theories assert that colonized societies in the Third World went through almost identical experiences in this regard.25

      Postcolonial theory, a more recent approach, attempts to deconstruct Eurocentric discursive practices concerning imperialism. It positions the colonized as an object of close surveillance, with the purpose of close control, of the metropolis. The colonizer observes the natives, monopolizes the process of “representation” of them, allows them to move only within the confines of the images the imperialist forges, finally trapping them in certain social constructs—especially regarding race. Prominent postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha are heavily informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of knowledge and power, meaning that Western ownership of knowledge has served as an indispensable tool of imperial domination. “The most formidable ally of economic and political control had long been the business of ‘knowing’ other peoples because this ‘knowing’ underpinned imperial dominance and became the mode by which they were increasingly persuaded to know themselves: that is, as subordinate to Europe,” Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin affirm in The Post-colonial Studies Reader.26

      Postcolonial theory is primarily informed by Foucauldian insights into how the European modern state developed new discourses and institutions of intensive, yet noncoercive, control of the citizen. Foucault uncovers the genealogy of how the birth of modern political economy accompanied the birth of the nation-state that further disciplines the bodies and lives of its subjects—rather than setting them free from early modern monarchical and church repression. Nineteenth-century centralized governments, primarily Victorian England, created certain institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons, that put their subjects under close supervision and gave the state an elusive control over their bodies. Postcolonial analysts demonstrate that nineteenth-century empire imported these tactics of power to the colony and, thus, maximized its penetration of the natives’ daily life.27 For example, Ann Laura Stoler writes that “many students of colonialism have been quick to note that another crucial ‘Victorian’ project—ruling colonies—entailed colonizing both bodies and minds. A number of studies . . . have turned on a similar premise that the discursive management of sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things. We have been able to show how discourses of sexuality at once classified colonial subjects onto distinct human kinds, while policing the domestic recesses of imperial rule.”28

      Since the late 1970s, historiography of the Middle East has applied the above theoretical approaches to explore the region’s colonized societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the 1980s, many books were published detailing how the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces, such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, were incorporated into the modern world system or integrated into a European-led world economy. For instance, eminent historians almost unanimously affirm that Egypt under British colonialism (1882–1952) was turned into a mere producer of raw material, namely cotton, for English textile industrialists. This process destroyed traditional, native industries and transformed the country into a peripheral economy with agrarian “retarded capitalism.”29 This caused Egypt to remain in an underdeveloped condition even after liberation from British rule. Egypt and other Arab countries experienced a state of economic “dependency” comparable to those of many other countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.30

      The postcolonial approach to Middle Eastern history has added complex insights to the economic reduction and peripheralization narrative. Many historians in the field adopt Foucauldian concepts to argue that empire is penetrative beyond one’s imagination—reaching under the native’s skin. Its semidivine omnipresence is invisibly manifest through “biopower,” that is, through the control of the bodies of its subjects by modern discourses and institutions such as the hospital, prison, and school. In other words, the postcolonial approach presumes that the colonizer does not control the colonized through coercion but rather through surveillance and discipline of her or his body. In this regard, recent literature on the Middle East uses Foucault’s notions to study issues such as governmentality, biopolitics, medicine, marginalization, education, and sexuality within colonial contexts. Such studies imply that empire is an invincible, yet subtle, construct that can penetrate the native’s own body through the softest practices of power without even being noticed.31

      Timothy Mitchell applies existing theories, especially the postcolonial framework, in order to point out the inefficiency rather than the almightiness of empire. Mitchell is a leading critic of “modernity” as introduced by British imperialism to Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his Rule of Experts particularly deconstructs one facet of failed colonial modernity: the empire’s market economy. Mitchell asserts that the economy is just another social construct produced by the modern social sciences—similar to class, nation, gender, race, and so on—yet it is neglected in postcolonial critique because of the general perception that statistics and figures constitute “universal” and “neutral” truth. Mitchell deploys Karl Polanyi’s criticism of the free economy, which insists that the idea of a “self-regulating market” is a myth: such a market existed in European history only for a very short period and was never the norm. Mitchell argues that although the colonizer introduced the market economy—the conventional wisdom in today’s liberal and neoliberal theories—to the colonized as an imagined universal model for reaching economic progress, this market never functioned in the ideal way that the empire claimed. The European colonizer brought this myth of a proficient laissez-faire economy to colonies like Egypt, only for it to fail and bring about environmental destruction. Instead of delivering the allegedly long-awaited modernity, European free market experts left the natives with diseases and biological catastrophes.32 This book is heavily informed by Mitchell’s critique of modernity and its market economy.

      Using the insights of the above theoretical approaches, each chapter in this book closely deconstructs a historical myth that an early modern or a modern empire invented about itself. It attempts to undermine these myths through new Arabic archival evidence from Qina Province. As the book investigates issues of colonial modernity, market transformation, and environmental destruction in the province,

Скачать книгу