Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

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due here about this book’s adoption of the theoretical term subaltern to analyze low-class rebellion against the empire in Upper Egypt. Like the above theories, subaltern studies—an offshoot of the postcolonial theory—attempts to restore the voices of marginalized groups, such as peasants and women, and grants them greater and effective agency vis-à-vis the imperialist.33 This theory takes Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern, which he coined in Prison Notebooks, from its original Italian context to the study of colonial India. Subaltern studies also looks beyond conventional Marxist theory—beyond factory workers in uniforms—to forge a new notion of lower classes engaged in resistance against power structures, such as silenced peasants. Ranajit Guha insists that the historiography of anticolonial struggles has been a subject of a “bourgeois-nationalist elitism,” one that celebrates only upper-class, urban, nationalist activism, led by the wealthy and Western-educated groups in the city, and almost ignores the narratives of the countryside and the underprivileged. This bourgeois monopoly is mainly a product of the British mind-set that granted respect and consideration only to the clean, rich elite—whether on the side of the colonizer or colonized.34 Guha adds that “during the colonial period in India subaltern politics constituted an ‘autonomous domain’ which ‘neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend upon the latter.’” He attributes the roots of these resistance politics to precolonial practices that reemerged under imperial rule, taking forms such as riots and popular movements.35

      This book invites subaltern studies to investigate nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against the empire and its co-opted ruling elites in Qina Province and southern Egypt. Furthermore, it places a significant emphasis on the social bandits of Qina and their rebellious operations against elite figures and properties, considering them an integral part of subaltern resistance.36

      ON ARCHIVAL SOURCES

      In order to tell a five-hundred-year story of incompetent imperialism, environmental destruction, and revolt in Qina Province, this book taps into a wide range of newly discovered archival and primary sources. It relies on sources that were not produced in the imperial center or even in Cairo: sources written in an unnoticed place and revealing unexpected truths. The book utilizes, for the first time, Arabic archival collections concerning Qina Province from the National Archives of Egypt (Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya) that were only made available to researchers in the last few years.37 This study complements this archival material with Arabic manuscripts and published books, documents from the British National Archives (formerly Public Record Office), military records, and various French travelers’ accounts. Arabic documents about the province include collections from Islamic court records, official correspondence between the central government in Cairo and provincial bureaucrats, thousands of individual and collective petitions submitted by the lower classes to provincial and central authorities, minutes of the Supreme Court, parliamentary minutes, and much more.

      For the period before and during the Ottoman Empire, the records of the shari‘a court of the city of Isna and its rural vicinities in Qina illuminate political and socioeconomic developments in the province. These records uncover facts about the independent southern government and its relation to Istanbul and to subaltern and elite subjects; the archives also illuminate regional commerce, the landownership system, gender relations, Christian Copts, and more.38 Classical works of history used here include al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat, al-Damurdashi’s Al-Durra al-Musana, al-Idfawi’s biographical dictionary of Upper Egyptian scholars titled Al-Tali‘ al-Sa‘id, al-Jabarti’s ‘Aja’ib al-’Athar, and an unpublished manuscript about the Turkish governors of Upper Egypt with the title of “Risala fi man Tawalla al-Sa‘id.” Furthermore, Layla ‘Abd al-Latif’s study on the most famous autonomous ruler of Upper Egypt, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, is essential in understanding the period.

      For the short-lived French Empire, this book uses accounts of French travelers, Egyptologists, military officers, and soldiers who landed in Qina Province. For the natives of Qina, the book relies on Isna Court records during the period of the Napoleonic campaign (1798–1801) to investigate the situation in villages and small towns. The same court records are also used to locate the Ottoman sultan’s decrees, or fermans, which were disseminated in the province during the campaign. This book uses Arabic books that analyze the French presence in Upper Egypt, particularly Nasir Ahmad Ibrahim’s Al-Faransiyyun fi Sa‘id Misr, in addition to French and Arabic translations of correspondence between the campaign’s generals in Upper Egypt and its headquarters of operations in Cairo.

      As for Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha’s empire, several sources furnish vivid stories, making the voices of women and men from subaltern groups accessible and heard. Although shari‘a court records remain an important source for this period, they are surpassed by the enormous and rich collections of the daily official correspondence between the central government in Cairo and every district and subdistrict in Qina Province, such as Sadir and Warid Mudiriyyat, Qina and Isna, which provide details about the viceroy’s modern imperial institutions of hegemony, the provincial ruling elite, and how the subalterns of the province reacted to them. The people of Qina submitted thousands of petitions, or ‘ardhalas, either individually or collectively, directly to Muhammad ‘Ali’s court, to the general inspector of Upper Egypt, or to other high-ranking officials in order to complain about the ramifications of modern imperial hegemony. In addition, the minutes of the modern representative body that the viceroy created, the Council of Consultation, or Majlis al-Mashura, serve as an important source for understanding the pasha’s modern institutions of internal colonialism. Legal codes promulgated by this council, such as La’ihat al-Fallah for agricultural organization and the Syasatname for the bureaucracy, are analyzed here as discourses of hegemony.

      Concerning the middle period of the informal British Empire, the same previous sources—shari‘a court records, official correspondence, and petitions—continue to provide the backbone of the narrative, but another source makes the story even richer and more vivid: the minutes of the Council of Rules, or Madabit Majlis al-Ahkam, an institution that served as both a supreme court and a legislature in Cairo. Cases that failed to reach a final verdict in local courts and civil councils in the province were referred to Cairo to be heard in the Council of Rules, which kept extensive minutes, sometimes tens of pages for each case. The lively details in these minutes show a province subject to the modernity of the market economy and uncover forgotten stories of rebellious bandits and other forms of subaltern resistance. Because there is a special focus on the legal codes in this part of the study, the minutes of the newly established Parliament, or Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab, show how both central and local ruling elites peripheralized the province through the promulgation of modern laws. Filib Jallad’s encyclopedia of modern Egyptian laws, Qamus al-’Idara wa-l-Qada’, is another essential primary source in this regard. Furthermore, ‘Ali Mubarak’s geographical and biographical encyclopedia, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya, makes it easier for this book to follow modern transformations in the economic and social life in the provinces’ villages under the informal empire. Luckily, an Englishwoman, Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon, happened to live in Qina when the massive 1864 revolt erupted there, and she provided an interesting account of the revolt in detailed letters to her relatives back home.

      Finally, for the British colonial period, in addition to all previous sources in the Cairo archives, records from the British National Archives in London illustrate the failures of colonial capitalism. The annual administrative and financial reports of British high commissioners, consuls, and consular agents in Egypt are crucial for understanding British liberalism as a discourse of hegemony and how it functioned through allegedly democratic and capitalist institutions. Some confidential memoranda in the records of the British Foreign Office also reveal hidden facts about how foreign capital worked. The National Archives of Egypt also provide this part of the study with a new variety of sources, including the minutes of the Cabinet of Ministers, or Maljis al-Wuzara’; the minutes of the two bodies of the reformed Parliament, or Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab and al-Jam‘iyya al-‘Umumiyya; and a collection of a new kind of petitions sent to the viceroy’s court, called iltimasat. Furthermore, the annual provincial reports, Majmu‘at Taqarir al-Mudiriyyat, and published collections of decrees and orders, Al-Qararat wa-l-Manshurat, show new faces of mythical imperialism and rebellion.39

      ONE

      Ottomans,

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