The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt 9781503609662

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The Lived Nile

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The Lived Nile Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Eg ypt

Jennifer L. Derr

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

S ta nfor d U n i v er si t y Pr e ss Stanford, California ©2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Derr, Jennifer L., 1976– author. Title: The lived Nile : environment, disease, and material colonial economy in Egypt / Jennifer L. Derr. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: L CCN 2018047940 | ISBN 9781503608672 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609655 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781503609662 (epub) Subjects: L C SH: Nile River—History. | Aswan Dam (Egypt)—History. | River engineering—Egypt—History. | Irrigation engineering— Egypt—History. | Dams—Environmental aspects—Egypt—History. | Irrigation farming—Health aspects—Egypt—History. | Agriculture— Economic aspects—Egypt—History. | Egypt—History— British occupation, 1882-1936. Classification: L CC DT116 .D48 2019 | DDC 962/.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047940 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover image: Cotton boll, CSIRO Science Image, via Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons license Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

For my mother, Margaret F. Jacoby

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Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Note on Transliterationxiii INTRODUC TION A River, Remade: Making Subjects on the Perennial Nile

1

1 Nile Articulations: Decolonizing the History of Irrigation Engineering

15

2 The Dammed Nile: The Thirty-Year Project to Build Khazan Aswan

45

3 Beyond the Frontier: Negotiating the Geography of Authority in Egypt’s South

75

4 Cruel Summer: Environmental Labors and the Scales of Subject Making

99

5 Treated Subjects: Irrigating the Veins of the Nation

127

CONCLUSION

The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject

157

Notes165 References207 Index231

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Acknowledgments

The work of this book has spanned continents and epochs of my life. While the book is recorded as mine alone, its writing would have been impossible without the support and care of more people than I can list in these short pages. Generous financial support for its research and writing was provided by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, the Society of Fellows in British Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Committee on Research of the Academic Senate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. The staffs and archivists at the Egyptian National Library and Archives in Cairo, the archives of the French Ministère des Affaires Etrangères in Paris and Nantes, the British National Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Wellcome Collection, the Institution of Civil Engineers, and the World Health Organization have also provided me with guidance and assistance. I would like to thank Lee Hilzik at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Nadia Mustafa at the Egyptian National Archives, and Reynald Erard at the archives of the World Health Organization in particular. Douglas Haynes, Omnia El Shakry, and Louis Warren are among those who generously gave me their time and feedback at a manuscript workshop that I hosted. Tom Pyun was my writing companion and fellow bureaucrat. Nathan Fonder, Will Hanley, Alan Mikhail, and Shane Minkin provided valuable company and conversation in the archives in Cairo. Corry Barreveld, René Barreveld, and Amil Khan housed me in faraway places while I did this work.

x Acknowledgments

I have had the tremendous fortune of colleagues who have made life in academia a joy and an inspiration. Jon Anjaria, Allison McKim, Dina Ramadan, Damon Root, and Geoffrey Sanborn made my time at Bard College a pleasure. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, this group includes Mark Amengual, Alan Christy, Muriam Haleh Davis, Alma Heckman, Mark Massoud, Adam Millard-Ball, Greg O’Malley, Thomas Serres, Juned Shaikh, and Elaine Sullivan. Emily Honig and Noriko Aso read and offered their feedback on early versions of the book. Mayanthi Fernando and Jenny Reardon have kept me fierce, and my other family, Dorian Bell, Vilashini Cooppan, Rohan Cooppan-Boyd, Jody Greene, Marc Matera, Samantha Matherne, and Maya Peterson, have kept me warm. Finally, Peter Limbrick, Lisa Rofel, and Gail Hershatter have been mentors and dear friends. Within the field of Middle Eastern history, there is inspiration all about. Zeinab Abul-Magd, On Barak, Beth Baron, Michelle Campos, Yoav Di Capua, Pascale Ghazaleh, Aaron Jakes, Toby Jones, Richard Keller, Shane Minkin, Ahmed Ragab, Nancy Reynolds, Sherene Seikaly, Ahmed Shokr, and Naghmeh Sohrabi have been valuable interlocutors. Gregg Mitman set this project on a different path and has inspired and challenged me along the way. Mara Naselli read and offered insightful feedback on early drafts of the chapters. In many ways, my career as a Middle Eastern historian is a love letter to the city of Cairo, a place where all told I have spent a decade of my life. Shahinaz Ahmed, Elena Chardakliyska, Ibrahim Dawoud, Pascale Ghazaleh, Mahmoud Hamza, Nadine El-Hadi, Sebastien Moros, Iman Mosaad, Noha Rifaat, Sarah Rifky, Sue Salih, Ahmed El Shandawily, Waseem El Tanahi, and Sherif Zohny give the city a tangible human form to love and find joy in. Other dear friends have supported me in different corners of the world. They include Prithika Balakrishnan, Madhi Connors, Erin Decker, Alix Dunn, Guy Geltner, Courtney Gillespie, Brendan Harney, Shelly Makleff, Adina Saperstein, Tara Todras-Whitehill, and Elijah Zarwan. There are those who have sustained me personally and intellectually throughout the writing process. I cannot imagine this book without them. They include Ulka Anjaria, Pablo Gómez, Aaron Jakes, Ahmed Ragab, Dina Ramadan, Naghmeh Sohrabi, Sherene Seikaly, and my chief of staff, Marc Matera. Ari Ariel, Sebastian Barreveld, Antje Barreveld, and Yasmine Ramadan have given freely of every possible form of support and care for as many years as I can remember. Christian Amorello has reminded me that the most promising beginnings come from an ending and has shown me a new path forward, one paved with love. I have learned much from Kate Wahl



Acknowledgments xi

as an editor, and she has given generously of her time and wise counsel. My family—Annette Jones, Walter Derr, Kerry Derr, Robert Jacoby, and Julie Stratton Jacoby—have supported me in every way they know how. Joel Beinin plucked me out of a seminar my junior year at university and has been a mentor, a sounding board, and a friend ever since. Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother, Peggy Jacoby. It is with great sadness that I finished this project when she was not here to see it to its end. It is to her that this book is dedicated, as through her capacity to weather pain with boundless love and joy she opened for me a different world.

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Note on Transliteration

I have followed the International Journal of Middle East Studies System for the Transliteration of Arabic words, simplified by the omission of diacritical marks except for the hamza glottal stop (’) and the letter ayn (‘). Common and well-known spellings for places (Luxor) and names (Nasser) have been retained. The names of smaller towns and village for which there is no agreed-on English-language spelling been transliterated according to the system outlined above, with definite articles in the name of said town or village removed. I have preserved the English spellings of the Arabic names of authors of English-language texts as recorded in the text; those of company names correspond to official documentation.

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The Lived Nile

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

A River, Remade Making Subjects on the Perennial Nile

and the inhabitants of Shallal lay in wait. In the winter to come, the waters of the Nile River would accumulate behind a new dam, Khazan Aswan, and drown the southern Egyptian village. A handful of other communities situated upstream of the dam shared its fate; some would be totally submerged, others only partially, by the reservoir that would stretch south of the dam for sixty miles.1 In June 1902, the month that construction on the dam was complete, the Egyptian Council of Ministers published a decree in Le Journal Officiel, the published record of the state, outlining processes of expropriation and compensation for those who would be displaced. The state seized all taxable lands in the district of the village of Shallal, as well as those that made up portions of five other villages. Within the village of Marwaw, it took land that belonged to thirteen hamlets.2 Claimants were offered compensation for the value of their land, and that of the buildings, date palms, and henna plants that stood on it. Should anyone object, challenges were to be brought to a special commission within thirty days.3 The first filling of the reservoir began in October of 1902, when the dam’s sluices were lowered to allow a reservoir to accumulate. When all was said and done, the aforementioned villages disappeared underneath the waters of the Nile, with the partially submerged form of the ancient Egyptian Philae Temple being the most visible reminder of the world that had drowned. The villages displaced by the construction of Khazan Aswan belonged to the territory of historical northern Nubia, which began at the town of Aswan, near the site of the dam, and extended south to Wadi Halfa in IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1902

2 Introduction

northern Sudan. While the political history of this region was linked to that of more northern regions of Egypt, the Nubians possessed a culture that was ethnically, linguistically, and historically distinct. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Nubia lost its political autonomy when Egypt’s strong Ottoman governor Mehmed Ali invaded and occupied Sudan. In the century that followed, the very ground on which it stood would disappear. For those displaced by the construction of Khazan Aswan, the Nile that they had once known would exist no longer and their relationship with the river would take a turn. The progressive erasure of the territories that once constituted historical northern Nubia is but one chapter in a story about the emergence of a new Nile River. In the period that stretched from the second decade of the nineteenth century, the built space of the Nile River was transformed. Networks of irrigation canals replaced the large basins that had lined the Nile Delta and Nile Valley and given form to Egyptian agriculture. Barrages augmented the height of the river and fed irrigation canals. Khazan Aswan stored water that was released in the late spring and early summer to irrigate crops when the Nile sunk lowest. Egyptian agriculture had long paired with the temporality of the annual Nile flood and its seasons, its primary crops

The inauguration of Khazan Aswan, either the one held in December 1902 or the second inauguration in December 1912. Photograph P768876 belongs to the Henry Mowbray Cadell Photographic Archive, deposited at the British Geological Survey. FIGURE 1. 



A River, Remade

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planted following the recession of floodwaters. Canals, barrages, and the dam facilitated the practice of perennial irrigation, which severed the relationship between agriculture and the flood. Perennial irrigation facilitated year-round agricultural production and the cultivation of multiple crops on the same piece of land each year. By the second decade of the twentieth century, “the perennial Nile River” had spread throughout the Nile Delta and central Egypt and extended into portions of Egypt’s deep south. At the root of this riparian transformation lay the coalescence of a colonial economy based on the production of cotton for export, which helped to cement the political economic relationship between Egypt and Britain. In the approximate century over which Egypt’s colonial economy stretched, an ascendant class of large landowners held sway in the countryside, and many peasants were forced into existences as sharecroppers and agricultural wage laborers. A rich body of historiography recounts the history of Egypt’s colonial economy from the vantage point of its primary commodity and the social relations of rural Egypt.4 The Lived Nile approaches the history of colonial economy from a different angle, that of the environmental transformations that enabled it. Its object of analysis is the perennial Nile River, which I argue was central to the production of particular forms of subjectivity within Egypt’s colonial economy. Authority was made manifest through the practices of perennial agriculture; the river helped to shape the futures of technocratic knowledge; the bodies of those who inhabited rural communities were transformed through the environmental intimacies that constituted their daily lives. At the root of this investigation lies the notion that the Nile is not an always, already constituted singular entity but a realm of practice and a set of temporally, spatially, and materially specific relations that helped to structure experiences of colonial economy. The Lived Nile is an exploration of the scalar, material, and bodily histories of agrarian colonial economy; it is also an argument for the centrality of a dynamic and material environment in our readings of political economy.

Beyond the History of Egyptian Cotton Before the nineteenth century, the agricultural year in Egypt consisted of three seasons—flood, winter, and summer—that corresponded to the temporalities of the annual Nile inundation. Egypt was the richest of the Ottoman provinces, its production of wheat central to its wealth.5 The crop grew in large basins that lined the Nile Delta and Nile Valley.6 Each year after the flood arrived cultivators cut the banks of the river

4 Introduction

to admit its waters into basins where they soaked the soil. When basins were full, Egyptian villages resembled small islands dotting a vast riparian sea. Following the evacuation of floodwaters, cultivators planted crops in basins. Egypt’s primary agricultural bounty came in the form of these crops, shitwi or winter crops, which were harvested in spring. Other produce grew during summer, sayfi crops, and the season of the flood, nili crops. Summer crops included sugarcane, cotton, rice, and a rich array of fruits and vegetables. These crops could not be planted in basins, as they remained in the ground after the flood arrived. Some grew in separate enclosed basins. They also covered the berms that formed basins and the banks of the river. While the surface area planted in summer crops was smaller than that occupied by winter crops, these crops were important as exports and in local diets. In the nineteenth century, summer and flood crops crept from the fringes and berms of Egypt’s agricultural landscape to colonize its primary fields. This process began with the interventions of the Ottoman-Egyptian state, in particular Egypt’s viceroy Mehmed Ali, who exercised a strong hand in the administration of agriculture. In 1820, Mehmed Ali began to promote the production of export-oriented, long-staple cotton. Cotton was not new to Egypt. It had long been cultivated as an annual in the Nile Delta and a perennial in Egypt’s south.7 However, it was only after the French textile engineer Louis Alexis Jumel discovered a new varietal in a Cairo garden and began experiments with its cultivation that its production for export began. Mehmed Ali directed the excavation of deep canals in the Nile Delta to irrigate cotton fields during the hot months before the arrival of the flood. These canals enabled the practice of perennial irrigation. Between 1821 and 1837, the Ottoman-Egyptian state mandated export-oriented cotton cultivation in some regions of the Delta, established itself as the only legal buyer, and purchased the crop from cultivators at below-market prices.8 While production began under Mehmed Ali, it was not until the 1860s that a colonial economy rooted in cotton developed. When the outbreak of civil war in the United States and the Union’s blockade of the Confederacy drove the price of the commodity sky high, Egyptian cultivators expanded production. During the four decades of the British occupation, the country’s dependence on the commodity only increased. The colonial regime directed the construction of irrigation works throughout the Nile Delta and deep into central Egypt to enable its cultivation.



A River, Remade

5

When, in the period that followed World War I, the occupation formally ended, some of Egypt’s most powerful economic actors worried about the dominance of cash crop agriculture, that of cotton specifically, and the underdevelopment of industry in Egypt. Despite their concerns, under the quasi-independent state that formed in Egypt in 1923, cotton retained its position as Egypt’s top-ranking export. The modes of production that characterized Egypt’s colonial economy and the dominance of the commodity within it came to an end only in the years that followed the 1952 Free Officers coup. Within the historiography of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt, cotton more often than not serves as the measure of colonial economy. But despite its prominence—historically and historiographically— cotton was not the only product of the perennial Nile. The irrigation regimes that defined this river also facilitated the more widespread cultivation of other crops that grew during summer and the period of the flood. Maize was one of the most important of these crops, which Egyptian cultivators usually planted in the flood season.9 Whereas cotton meant capital for its cultivators, maize was sustenance, especially for the very poor. Easy to grow and quick to produce, in the second half of the nineteenth century corn replaced other more traditional food staples among rural communities in the Nile Delta. By the late nineteenth century, it had also become one of Egypt’s top-ranking exports.10 In the Nile Delta, fields were planted with cotton and maize in the scorched months of summer and during the flood. In central and southern Egypt, sugarcane was the produce of summer. While it had long grown in southern Egypt in the area surrounding the town of Farshut in the province of Qina, the Ottoman-Egyptian state began to promote the crop in the first half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by models of industrial production from the colonies of the British and French empires, Mehmed Ali built a handful of mills in central Egypt. In the 1860s, his grandson Khedive Isma‘il poured resources into an expanded sugar industry in an effort to mitigate Egypt’s dependence on cotton. He situated this project on the royal Daira Sanieh estates, concentrated in central Egypt. In the first half of the twentieth century, sugar moved south, fueled by the expansion of the Egyptian Sugar Company. While attentive to the history of cotton production in Egypt, the frame for this book is that of the geography of the perennial Nile. Cotton was the most valuable produce of this geography on the world market, but it alone did not define the terms of agricultural life.

6 Introduction

The Lived Nile explores how a more robust accounting for the geographic and ecological diversity of the perennial Nile can tell a richer story about the lived experiences of rural Egyptian subjects.

Ecologies of Pain The spread of perennial irrigation in Egypt produced a transformation of the relational agricultural ecologies that made up the Nile River. Under basin irrigation, floodwaters deposited their silt, a natural fertilizer, on fields. They also washed soils, preventing the accumulation of salts and minerals that might stunt the growth of crops. During the dry season that followed harvest, soil dried and cracked in the sun. This aerated it and broke apart colloids, which released nutrients and moisture. Perennial irrigation produced a changed relationship between the Nile River and the fields that lined its banks. Planted with summer crops, fields were no longer rinsed annually by floodwaters. Salts and minerals accumulated, leaving soils increasingly saline. Year-round agricultural production meant that soil was not left to dry with the regularity that it once had been, and consequently it did not aerate. As the subsoil water table rose, the earth became waterlogged.11 Perennial irrigation also meant an increased demand for artificial fertilizers. Cotton leached nutrients from the soil, and floodwaters no longer deposited their silt. By the 1930s, Egyptian agriculture consumed a larger portion of artificial fertilizers per area of cultivated land than any other region in the world.12 New worlds of animal life also flourished along the perennial Nile. In 1866, the bollworm was discovered in Egypt. Laying its eggs in cotton stalks, the worm attacks the seed of the plant after it begins to flower, preventing the development of its capsule.13 In the 1870s, cotton worms, nourished by the Egyptian clover (birsim) that was often planted before cotton in crop rotations, began to feast on the leaves, shoots, and buds of young plants.14 The construction of Khazan Aswan facilitated the migration of new species of mosquitoes into Egypt. The dam slowed the pace of the river, allowing large islands of the curly pondweed (Potamogeton crispus) to form. Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes infected with the Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes malaria laid eggs on these islands. As Timothy Mitchell demonstrates, this changed ecology of the Nile contributed to the outbreak of a malaria epidemic during World War II.15 Mitchell’s work is but one example of a rich body of historiography in the field of environmental history that explores the relationships among human bodies, environmental change, and questions of disease and illness.16



A River, Remade

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In rural villages that depended on the Nile for their water, the canals that facilitated perennial irrigation became centers of village life. Approaching the Nile could be treacherous, especially when the river ran high and fast during flood. At the turn of the nineteenth century, when Egyptian villages lacked running water, canals became the site of a whole host of activities. Men labored in these waterways, women fetched water and washed clothes in them, and children frolicked in their waters when the temperature soared. In a landscape devoid of cover, they were also common sites at which to urinate and defecate, especially for cultivators engaged in the act of irrigation.17 Canals produced new forms of multispecies relationality that included the human bodies that populated rural communities along the perennial Nile. One effect of their centrality in daily life was a dramatic increase in the prevalence of parasitic disease. Those who labored in agriculture suffered the worst ravages of the new illnesses that spread throughout the countryside. A robust body of literature describes the history of labor in Egypt’s colonial economy.18 The Lived Nile contributes to this historiography by critically considering the significance of labor as a physical and environmentally situated act. The relations that bound human bodies to the ecologies of the perennial Nile were significant in the production of subjectivity. The trick to figuring bodies conceptually is reconciling their consistency—the composite nature of human bodies in any historical moment is remarkably similar— with the porousness that marks them as spatially and temporally specific entities. Within the geographies of the perennial Nile, normative experiences of the body included the symptoms of disease, which ranged from the minor—digestive difficulties and rashes—to more severe conditions that included dementia and the appearance of debilitating growths. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues for the foregrounding of the body as a locus of perception and a site for the formation of the subject. He explains: “In other words my body is permanently stationed before things in order to perceive them and, conversely, appearances are always enveloped for me in a certain bodily attitude. In so far, therefore, as I know the relation of appearances to the kinaesthetic situation, this is not in virtue of any law or in terms of any formula, but to the extent that I have a body, and that through that body I am at grips with the world.”19 Merleau-Ponty rebuts the notion that any sense of the self can be divorced from that of the body, and in this vein, The Lived Nile thinks the production of subjectivity through ecological and phenomenological entanglements. The subjects who lived

8 Introduction

in regions with access to perennial irrigation were molded through social categories that included questions of gender, class, and religious affiliation.20 They were also shaped by encounters with disease and the presence of physical pain in their daily lives. It is a tricky business reading pain from the archive, but the certainty of its presence demands that we grapple with it as a historical force. The symptoms of environmental disease were one form of violence that rural communities along the perennial Nile lived daily. Our historical readings must account for the manner in which human bodies function as the agents and sites of a complex array of violent acts, some explicit, others structural and slow.21 Explicit violence was rife in the Egyptian countryside. Seeking to avoid the nineteenth-century state’s arduous corvée and military conscription campaigns, large numbers of peasants maimed themselves, cutting off their fingers, extracting their own teeth, and blinding themselves.22 In the countryside, physical force was a common means of disciplining labor in fields and factories. The Ottoman-Egyptian state even used physical punishment to discipline its own officials. However, not all violence was bounded and explicit. Poverty, dispossession, and disease were part and parcel of life along the perennial Nile. The Lived Nile argues that by focusing exclusively on the explicit we risk blindness to the everyday forms of mundane violence that were present in the environments that made up Egypt’s colonial economy.

Perennial Subjects and the Geographies of Authority The production of the subject along the perennial Nile was also rooted in the constitution of authority. Within the countryside, a varied array of actors exercised a hand in dictating agricultural production and the conditions of rural life. Large landholders were one locus of authority. One of the legacies of Mehmed Ali’s rule was a set of state policies that enabled a new class of elites to consolidate their control over agricultural land. The Pasha distributed land to elites to reward loyalty and to make it possible for them to produce revenue for the state. The recipients of these land grants included members of the royal family, loyal state officials, military men, and local officials.23 His successors continued the practice, and in the second half of the nineteenth century a series of legal decrees, the most notable of which was the 1858 land law (al-La’iha al-Sa‘idiyya), enabled the consolidation of property rights by these elites.24 This process coincided with the dispossession of many peasant



A River, Remade

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landholders, who were forced to abdicate the land that they cultivated because of heavy taxation and the state’s corvée labor and conscription demands. In the period of the occupation, the power of large landowners was further entrenched. Many peasants were forced into existences as sharecroppers on large estates, ‘izab (sing. ‘izba), where they labored over cotton crops in exchange for a piece of land for subsistence. The state was another facet of the assemblage of authority in Egypt’s countryside. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mehmed Ali built a centralized bureaucratic state in Egypt, administered by a cadre of new officials. He also established the first state ministries. His grandson Khedive Isma‘il expanded the ministerial system during his rule (1863–78). State officials played important roles in organizing agricultural production. They also helped build and administer the perennial Nile River. Local officials, the most prominent among whom was the village headman or ‘umda, exercised a strong hand in rural areas.25 The British occupation complicated the structure of the state. While the power of large landowners and state officials in the countryside persisted, colonial officials directed a state whose various branches were sometimes at odds with one another. Egypt was the “Veiled Protectorate,” its veiling the pretense that it was not in fact a British colony. During the four decades of the occupation, an Egyptian government, replete with a viceroy, Egyptian government officials, and a system of ministries, continued to stand. British authority was imposed through the Foreign Office, and the British agent and consul general was Egypt’s unofficial ruler. From 1883 through 1907, Evelyn Baring—Lord Cromer—held this position. Cromer appointed British “advisers” to the different ministries of the Egyptian government; these advisers dictated policy. British appointees also came to dominate higherlevel posts within the ministries, serving alongside government ministers and presiding over staffs who were primarily Egyptian. When a new quasi-independent Egyptian state took power in 1923, the social relations that made up life in the countryside persisted. Large landowners and local officials continued to hold sway, the authority of some augmented by their positions as parliamentarians and officials of the new state. A new class of Egyptian capitalists sought to appropriate the spoils of colonial economy, their wealth in part derived from their control of agricultural land.26 The presence of state officials in the countryside, however, became more pronounced. Officials from the Public Works Ministry had been important arbiters of rural life since the period of Khedive Isma‘il’s

10 Introduction

rule. In the interwar period, Egyptian engineers rose to new positions of prominence within the ministry.27 In the nationalist imaginary of the period, the irrigation engineer was cast as hero. In the 1920s, a newly activist Public Health Department, which became a ministry in 1936, also began to extend its reach. By the early 1950s, the clinics that it managed treated more than a million patients each year. In the 1930s and 1940s, the downtrodden Egyptian peasant also became an object of elite rescue. Elites organized efforts to improve the conditions of agricultural production.28 The king and elite women’s organizations attended to the outbreak of cholera and malaria epidemics. The Rockefeller Foundation also sponsored several projects in Egypt, with rural communities becoming the sites of international public health interventions. The Lived Nile argues that in the century of Egypt’s colonial economy, authority in the countryside was constituted and experienced as an assemblage. The expression, experience, and negotiation of this authority was materially grounded and geographically variable. Moments of political transition helped to shape this assemblage, but they were not always determinative, nor was their significance consistent throughout the territories of the perennial Nile. Some forms of power persisted despite shifts in high politics; some evolutions in the assemblage of authority were the product of local developments. Nonetheless particular themes helped to shape the constitution of authority, one being the close relationship between the state and capital. Timothy Mitchell has argued that the boundary of the state “never marks a real exterior” but rather is “a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained.”29 In Egypt’s colonial economy, the boundary distinguishing the state from private interests was often blurred, which had important implications for the geographically variable matrix that constituted authority in the countryside. Experiences of authority were also intertwined with the production and practice of agricultural space. In her work on colonial India, historian Manu Goswami argues that colonial rule was made manifest through its production of colonial state space, which was constituted by “the complex ensemble of practices, ideologies, and state projects that underpinned the restructuring of the institutional and spatiotemporal matrices of colonial power and everyday life.”30 This work deploys a similarly spatialized notion of political authority to interrogate questions of subjectivity. Its unit of analysis, however, is not—or not only—the colonial state but the



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assemblages of authority that held sway in certain territories of Egypt’s colonial economy. The Lived Nile explores the expression, encounter, and negotiation of authority through the material geographies of the perennial Nile and the spatiotemporal practices that helped to produce it.

The Performance of Expertise Technocratic experts were one embodiment of state authority in the countryside. Irrigation engineers dreamed, designed, and administered the constructions that made the perennial Nile; physicians and public health officials treated the diseases whose prevalence skyrocketed along its banks. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fields of engineering and medicine underwent dramatic transformations with the emergence of new—and newly universalizing—frameworks. A global field of civil engineering came into being during this period, firmly rooted in the use of mathematics and methods of abstraction. In the field of medicine, the rise of the contagion theory of infection produced a shift in how physicians understood questions of health and illness. While these new frameworks guided the construction and practice of the perennial Nile, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, The Lived Nile argues that the materialities of this river were also central to the nature of expertise. Just like the laborers whose bodies were sickened through the daily motions of agricultural life, technocrats were themselves subjects of the perennial Nile. Among engineers, the production and practice of expertise was a conversation with the materialities of the river, which framed what they knew in the present and how they would imagine environmental futures. The particularity of the engineered Nile and the diseases with which it was associated also shaped the conditions of possibility for the production of expertise in the fields of medicine and public health. In the interwar period, the sky-high prevalence of parasitic disease helped Egyptian scientists establish international reputations in a field of tropical medicine that continued to be dominated by the racial hierarchies of colonialism. In short, the material world was not just an object of expert creation; it was also implicated in the production of experts as subjects. The material rootedness of expertise provided unique opportunities for its performance. The Lived Nile not only explores the what, who, and how of expertise; it argues that expertise is a performance, the fact of which is central to the process through which the possession of particular forms of knowledge is recognized and read as authoritative. Among irrigation

12 Introduction

engineers, the physical structures that built the Nile were only one form of evidence demonstrating their knowledge. These engineers also relied on other modes of (material) performance that enabled their recognition as experts. One mode was the authorship of texts, a voluminous body of which constructed the perennial Nile in the British imperial imagination and that of Egyptian nationalists. Authorship of these texts allowed engineers to perform their mastery of the Nile and lay claim to it. The circulation of the texts was one means of actualizing expertise. Other modes of performance were rooted in the body itself. During the interwar period, the bodies of millions of Egyptians became the raw material for the demonstration of Egyptian expertise in public health. The production of national expert and subject were consubstantial. European and American medical experts used their own bodies, to different effect, in acts of expert performance. The Lived Nile explores the forms of environmental and bodily knowledge that were central to the production of expert subjectivity as well as the modes of performance that gave them heft.

Sources and Plan of the Book The sources that inform this book derive from a number of archives, including the Egyptian National Library and Archives in Cairo (Dar alKutub wal-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya al-Misriyya), the archives of the French Ministère des Affaires Etrangères in Paris and Nantes, the British National Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, and the archives and library of the World Health Organization in Geneva. A wide array of published contemporaneous sources, including the reports of the Egyptian Public Works Ministry and Public Health Department and Ministry, also inform this work. Each chapter of The Lived Nile charts the material histories of colonial economy in Egypt and the production of its subjects by following the waters of the river into a different scale of spatial practice, with the method of the work intended to illustrate the significance of materiality in shaping the conditions of historical possibility. The first three chapters explore the relationships among authority, capital, and the materiality of the perennial Nile River. Chapter 1 chronicles the construction of this river over the course of the nineteenth century and the histories of the Egyptian and British engineers who built it. It revisits the work of the British engineers appointed to the Public Works Ministry in the first decade of the occupation, their struggles, and the strategies that they deployed to lay claim to



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the river. The book’s second chapter chronicles the construction of the first modern dam on the Nile River. This chapter traces the roles of political officials, capitalists, engineers, and laborers in building the dam and producing the landscapes of capital and aspiration with which it was associated. The book’s third chapter explores the history of the perennial Nile in central and southern Egypt, the structure of authority in regions of Egypt where sugarcane was produced, and the relationship of this crop to the capital that built Khazan Aswan and the geographies of cash crop agriculture. Chapters 4 and 5 then follow the vasculature of the perennial Nile into the human bodies of those who lived and labored along its banks. Chapter 4 traces the pathways of the river in the bodies of its human subjects, paying close attention to the manner in which rural life on the perennial Nile, labor in particular, helped to produce a new normative Egyptian body. Racialized through the diseases of perennial irrigation, this body lay at the center of the project of colonial medicine in Egypt. The fifth and final chapter explores the government treatment programs that millions of Egyptians passed through during the interwar period and the efforts of scientists at the Rockefeller Foundation to stop the spread of parasitic disease. Throughout, The Lived Nile interrogates the complex ways in which rural populations and experts alike were rendered subjects of colonial economy through their entanglements with the river that watered it.

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1 Nile Articulations Decolonizing the History of Irrigation Engineering Science has been defined as the medium through which the knowledge of the few can be rendered available to the many; and among the first to avail himself of this knowledge is the engineer. He has created a young science, the offspring, as it were of the older sciences for without them engineering could have no existence. —Colin Scott-Moncrieff 1

IN 1905, Colin Scott-Moncrieff, a renowned British irrigation engineer, delivered the presidential address at the meeting of the Engineering Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The conference was held in South Africa, where Scott-Moncrieff arrived fresh with triumph. Just three years earlier, British irrigation engineers had successfully directed the construction of the first modern dam on the Nile River, Khazan Aswan, the dam with which this book began. The waters of the reservoir that the dam formed enabled the spread of perennial irrigation and the practice of year-round agriculture throughout much of the Nile Delta and central Egypt. As a result of their work in India and in Egypt, British irrigation engineers rose to positions of great prominence through the accomplishments that they claimed. Globally this work made them legends. Scott-Moncrieff’s own history was typical of that of British irrigation engineers of his generation. Born in Scotland in 1836, he attended the East India Company’s military academy at Addiscombe. His first post was in India, where he was sent during the 1857 rebellion. In India, he spent a brief stint working on the construction of a military cantonment at Sitapur before he moved, in the summer of 1859, to the Ganges Canal. He worked as an irrigation engineer at the canal, where he quickly rose through the ranks to become its superintending engineer. He remained there for nearly two decades. Scott-Moncrieff moved to Egypt in the early days of the British

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occupation and was there first appointed inspector general of irrigation before being promoted to undersecretary of state for the Egyptian Public Works Ministry. From 1884 until 1892, he directed the work of the ministry, including the administration of irrigation, from this position.2 There was an irony to Scott-Moncrieff’s characterization of engineering as a young science. During the nineteenth century, a relatively more formalized practice of engineering rooted in scientific abstraction took form in continental Europe. It did in Egypt as well. Beginning during the rule of Mehmed Ali, Ottoman-Egyptian engineers, trained at a new school of engineering, helped to build the beginnings of the perennial Nile River. When the British occupied Egypt and its Public Works Ministry, British engineers encountered a complex landscape of irrigation, of which they knew little, and a world populated by other engineers. Over the course of his long career, Scott Moncrieff had disparaged the notion of an engineering practice based on scientific abstractions. He continued to do so during his tenure in Egypt. This chapter explores the construction of the perennial Nile during the nineteenth century, paying close attention to its relationships with questions of state form and the evolution of engineering in different parts of the globe. When scholars have treated the history of British irrigation engineering in Egypt, they have begun with the assumption that the British appointees to the Egyptian Public Works Ministry possessed great skill, which subsequently guided the development of the perennial Nile.3 I take a more critical view of this history and the bravado of these colonial officials to argue that the work of these engineers and their relationship with the Nile River must be analyzed against the specific backdrop of Egypt and the challenges that British irrigation engineers faced when they arrived in the country. This chapter considers the processes and categories through which British “irrigation engineers” in Egypt learned the Nile as well as the performative strategies that they developed to establish themselves as experts. Many of the sources that inform this chapter are the texts produced by these engineers, which I read as records of Nile measurement, material performances of expertise, and reflections of the frameworks and imaginaries through which British irrigation engineers came to understand the Nile River.

Building State Space In Egypt, the Nile River has long been a built space administered by the state. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt in 1517, they sought to encourage its agriculture, especially the production of wheat. Composed in 1525, the Ottoman legal code for Egypt, the Kanunname-i



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Mısır, charged villages with the maintenance of local irrigation works and each district or village leader with the responsibility to repair and dredge irrigation canals. The code also mandated that peasants sow crops each year on all land that had been watered by the flood.4 In the early seventeenth century, tax farms became the primary means of administering agricultural land, and tax farmers assumed responsibility for the maintenance of irrigation works.5 Alan Mikhail describes the administration of irrigation in Egypt in the long eighteenth century as a cooperative effort negotiated between Egyptian villages and the Ottoman state. While the state financed the maintenance and expansion of irrigation works, it relied on local officials and their vernacular knowledge of the Nile to manage the irrigation of basins when the flood arrived.6 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Mehmed Ali and the bureaucrats appointed to his state exercised a heavier hand in the administration of agriculture and the management of irrigation than had previous Ottoman authorities.7 The introduction of perennial irrigation dates to the period of his rule. In 1816, Mehmed Ali directed the excavation of deeper irrigation canals in the Nile Delta to promote the cultivation of rice, indigo, linseed, and sesame, all summer crops. When, in 1821, he began to promote more widespread cotton cultivation, these canals watered land on the eastern bank of the Nile’s Damietta branch.8 In central Egypt, perennial canals were dug to support the cultivation of sugarcane.9 To feed these canals, small barrages raised the level of the river in summer.10 In 1833, construction began on the Delta Barrage.11 The barrage would cut across the two branches of the Nile where they split northwest of Cairo. While it would not be complete until 1861, it was intended to provide irrigation water in summer to cotton crops in the provinces of Bahira, Minufiyya, Gharbiyya, Qalyubiyya, Sharqiyya, and Daqahliyya. In 1798, summer crops had covered a mere 250,000 feddans of agricultural land.12 By 1833, Mehmed Ali’s state had dug 240 miles of deep irrigation canals that irrigated 600,000 feddans of land, more than doubling the surface area of land available for the cultivation of summer crops.13 State-compelled labor excavated new canals and constructed barrages. While various incarnations of the state in Egypt had long demanded an annual labor tax from the Egyptian peasantry, Mehmed Ali transformed the nature of corvée. For much of the Ottoman period, peasants had labored in or around their own villages, constructing, maintaining, and repairing the local irrigation works that supported their own agricultural production.14 Under the rule of Mehmed Ali, the state marshaled ever-larger numbers of laborers for its

Me di t e rr a ne a n Se a

Nile Delta

Alexandria

Tanta Qalyub

Fayum

Cairo

R iv e r

Giza

Canal

Minuf

Suez

Mansura

Ni l e

Beni Suef

Minya Dayrut

R ed

Asyut Sohag

Se a Qina

Girga

Kharga Oasis

Luxor Esna Edfu

Ni

le

Ri

ve

r

Aswan

MAP 1.

The agricultural towns of the Egyptian countryside.

I have transliterated the names of towns according to guidelines specified in the IJMES transliteration guide. I have omitted defi nite articles from the names of towns where they exist. In cases in which there is an accepted standard English transliteration for the name of the town, I have included it. Alternate transliterations of towns listed on the map include Bani Suwayf (Beni Suef), Suhaj (Sohag), Isna (Esna), and Idfu (Edfu).



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extensive public works projects. These individuals were forced to work under dangerous conditions and travel great distances at considerable hardship to themselves and their families.15 Completed in 1820, the Mahmudiyya Canal, which was intended to provide the city of Alexandria with sweet water and a navigable passage to the Nile River, was the most infamous of Mehmed Ali’s public works projects because of the heavy price paid by its laborers, many of whom lost their lives.16 The introduction and extension of perennial irrigation also depended on corvée. These laborers dug perennial canals and threw up barrages.17 Moreover, perennial canals were not stable or fixed pieces of infrastructure. Laborers dug them in the first instance and then repaired and cleared them each year of the large quantities of mud deposited by the sediment-rich Nile waters that flowed through them. The centralization of the administration of irrigation complemented the transformation of the Nile River that began under Mehmed Ali. Published between December 1829 and January 1830, “the statute of peasant agriculture” dictated the terms of agricultural production, including those related to irrigation. The code charged specific state officials with the cutting of basin dikes to inundate agricultural land during the flood, the supervision of drainage when the flood season drew to a close, the cleaning of irrigation canals during winter, and the maintenance of irrigation implements for their region.18 The publication of Mehmed Ali’s agricultural code was followed by the formation of new institutions to direct public works. In 1830, Mehmed Ali formed Diwan al-Abniya, the Council of Buildings, one function of which was to oversee the construction and repair of public works.19 When Mehmed Ali reorganized the state bureaucracy in 1837, Public Works became a division of the Department of Education.20 With this reorganization of the state, the French Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds became the director of public works. Linant was educated by his naval officer father in mathematics, drawing, and painting. In 1817, as a naval trainee, he landed in Egypt, where he fancied himself an explorer, traveling to Nubia, the Sinai Peninsula, and the oases at Fayum and Siwa. He also became a state engineer. Before his promotion to director of public works, Linant served as the chief engineer for Upper Egypt.21 Linant was only one of the Europeans whom Mehmed Ali appointed to prominent positions in his state. A new conception of the engineer came into being through the institutions of Mehmed Ali’s state. Before the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman imperial courts decided conflicts that concerned irrigation works,

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they called upon “local men of knowledge, expertise, and experience,” ahl al-wuquf or ahl al-khibra, to inspect these works.22 Consistent with his approach to state bureaucracy more broadly, Mehmed Ali built a relatively more formalized system, which consisted of institutions to educate engineers and missions abroad for additional education and training.23 Established in October 1816, Dar al-Handasa, which taught land surveying, was the first of these institutions. Rohidin, an Ottoman functionary sent from Istanbul to direct the construction of the Mahmudiyya Canal, oversaw its formation and taught at the institution.24 While mathematics and science education was not new in Egypt—studies of astronomy, geometry, trigonometry, technical drawing, and geography long preceded the nineteenth century—the institutionalization of these studies and their relationship to state employment were innovations of Mehmed Ali’s state.25 In 1834, the state reorganized Dar al-Handasa, moving it to Cairo’s Bulaq neighborhood, where it became known as the Muhandiskhanah or alternatively the Polytechnique.26 The training of engineers at the institution bore a strong resemblance to that in France, where, as in Egypt, the construction of new state institutions in the nineteenth century transformed the profession.27 The French École Polytechnique was established in 1794 near Paris to train civilian engineers. The curriculum of the institution consisted primarily of mathematics and theoretical mechanics but also included courses in physics, chemistry, literature, and a small selection of applied subjects.28 After graduation, students proceeded to an école d’application, where they studied a practical specialty before beginning government service.29 The curriculum at the Muhandiskhanah closely resembled that of the École Polytechnique. Two years after its move, the Muhandiskhanah underwent significant restructuring. A newly convened committee on education, majlis shura li-l-madaris wa-l-makatib, divided it into a central department and departments of mining and public works. The student body was set at 225 students, and the teaching staff was composed of a director, al-nazir, his assistant, al-wakil, and professors of mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geodesy, plan making, linear drawing, mining, geology, mineralogy, architecture, constructions, and hydraulic works.30 Some graduates of the Muhandiskhanah acquired additional training abroad. Between 1809 and 1849, Mehmed Ali dispatched a total of 349 young men to Europe to study a range of different subjects; a subset of this group were engineers who attended the École Polytechnique.31 Many of those sent to Europe became important state functionaries following their



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return. Engineers in particular were appointed to prominent positions in the Public Works section and the Education Department.32 The 1826 delegation was the first of its kind dispatched to France. From this delegation, Artin Sikyas al-Armani helped to reorganize the Muhandiskhanah after its move to Bulaq, and Muhammad al-Bayumi became an instructor at the institution.33 The Delta Barrage was completed under the supervision of Muhammad Mazhar, who later directed public works for the state.34 Somewhat fittingly, the names of some of the most prominent Egyptian engineers of the nineteenth century now mark some of Cairo’s streets, downtown and on the island of Zamalek, in urban neighborhoods that date back to the second half of the nineteenth century.35 For a period after Mehmed Ali’s death, the state played a less active role in the administration of irrigation and the sponsorship of new works. Under his grandson ‘Abbas Pasha (r. 1848–54) and his son Sa‘id Pasha (r. 1854–63), perennial canals clogged with silt and fell into disrepair. Many peasants reverted to the cultivation of crops that could be watered by the annual flood. Wealthy landholders turned to irrigation pumps, which had been introduced in Egypt in 1848, to support perennial irrigation.36 Insomuch as there was a geography of the perennial Nile under ‘Abbas and Sa‘id, it was one governed by the class of large landholders who had begun to consolidate their hold over agricultural land in this period. Even Linant, who directed the early phases of construction on the Delta Barrage, came to believe that as technology improved, pumps were a better way to irrigate agricultural land.37 But despite the waning interest of the state in the administration of irrigation, Egypt’s infrastructure continued to develop more broadly. In 1854, the first branch of the railway connected Alexandria to the town of Kafr al-Zayyat in the Nile Delta; tracks linked Cairo to Alexandria two years later and to Suez the following year. Work also began on the Suez Canal in 1859. When Mehmed Ali’s grandson Isma‘il came to power in 1863, the state once again took an active interest in the administration of irrigation and the expansion of the geographies of the perennial Nile. Keenly interested in promoting cash crop agriculture, especially on his own estates, the Daira Sanieh, Isma‘il directed the excavation of 112 new canals, a length of 8,400 miles.38 The most notable of these canals was the Ibrahimiyya Canal, completed in 1873, which provided perennial irrigation to the Daira Sanieh to support sugarcane cultivation. One of the delegates sent to France in 1826, Mustafa Mahramji—Bahgat Pasha—directed its construction.

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Mustafa Mahramji had ascended through the ranks of the government’s engineering divisions. He was an engineering inspector under ‘Abbas, a surveyor for Sa‘id, and an inspector once more under Isma‘il. In 1870, he became the director of public works and education.39 The state’s interest in irrigation also included the lands of the Nile Delta, where the construction of the Isma‘iliyya Canal allowed for the reclamation of agricultural land in the province of al-Sharqiyya in the eastern region of the Delta.40 The state also repaired and deepened the Minufiyya Canal, which assisted with the irrigation of the Minufiyya and Gharbiyya provinces.41 By 1873, the surface area of cultivable land in Egypt had expanded to 4,632,221 feddans, more than a million feddans larger than it had been in 1813.42 Isma‘il also invested in the institutions that trained state engineers and administered public works. The Muhandiskhanah had survived the rule of ‘Abbas but was closed by his successor, Sa‘id.43 In June of 1866 Isma‘il reopened the institution, and two years later he moved it to the educational complex in the palace at Darb al-Jamamiz.44 In 1864, he had established a Public Works Ministry, one charge of which was to oversee the construction and repair of dams, canals, and dikes.45 Graduates of the Muhandiskhanah formed the corps of this ministry, which hired eighteen of them between 1865 and 1875.46 In 1869, Isma‘il formed five agricultural councils—three in Egypt’s south and two in the north—to manage matters related to agriculture, including the condition of irrigation works. A president and a deputy engineer directed these councils.47 Two years later, the state established administrative councils in large towns and provincial capitals that oversaw local public works.48 A staff of engineers was also attached to the Ministry of Interior, which had been established in 1857 under Sa‘id Pasha.49 Finally, the khedive reestablished Diwan al-Madaris (the Council of Schools), linking it to the Public Works Ministry.50 Isma‘il’s investments in the built form of the state extended beyond irrigation. In the late 1860s, he presided over the construction of a new section of Cairo, Isma‘iliyya. The new quarter sought to establish Cairo as a capital among capitals, visually representative of the traits that characterized the nineteenth-century European city. Isma‘iliyya was modeled on Haussman’s reconstruction of downtown Paris, with its wide streets, traffic circles, shopping arcades, and cafes.51 As minister of public works and education, Ali Mubarak oversaw the construction of the new quarter. Originally from a family of notables in the village of Birinbal al-Jadida in Daqahliyya, Mubarak was the archetype of an Egyptian state engineer.



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He had been educated at the Muhandiskhanah before being chosen for Mehmed Ali’s 1844 student delegation to France. While abroad, he studied engineering at the Polytechnique, completing his studies with distinction, and served a brief stint in the French army. The trajectory of Ali Mubarak’s adult life was divided between periods of great success, during which he held high-ranking positions, and those verging on poverty, the result of his estrangement from the state. Among his positions, he served as the nazir of the Muhandiskhanah from 1849 until 1854 and, under Isma‘il, as the nazir of the Delta Barrage.52 When Isma‘il appointed him minister in 1868, he became the first Muslim Egyptian minister of the Ottoman-Egyptian state.53 While Egyptians filled the ranks of the bureaucracy—many trained as engineers—those who directed branches of government were most often European or members of the Turkish-speaking Ottoman elite.54 Ali Mubarak’s rise is illustrative of that of Egyptians within the state bureaucracy, his varied career only the most well known of those of the engineers who served it.55

Engineering Empire The training of engineers in Britain was relatively less formalized than in Egypt. British engineers were not educated in the abstract sciences at formal institutions resembling the Polytechnique or the Muhandiskhanah. They were rather trained through a system of apprenticeship in the field.56 In 1818, the Institution of Civil Engineers was established in London, and while it served as a gathering place, it did not train or examine its members.57 Historian R. A. Buchanan describes British engineering before 1830 as “both home brewed and parochial,” since it possessed little to no relationship with practices of civil engineering as configured elsewhere in continental Europe, much less globally, until the middle of the nineteenth century.58 While a system of apprenticeship structured the profession of engineering within England, the military trained those dispatched to the lands conquered for the empire. In 1809, the East India Company established a seminary at Addiscombe, on the outskirts of London, to train officers for the East India Company army, among them engineers.59 After finishing their studies at Addiscombe, engineering graduates completed an additional year of training at the Royal Engineers School, now the Royal School of Military Engineering. In the first half of the nineteenth century, British military engineers associated with the East India Company supervised the construction of a wide array of works of infrastructure in India, including four large irrigation canals. Despite their training, the engineers of this period did not

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yet possess the specialized knowledge that would come to characterize the field of civil engineering during a later period. Historians Brendan Cuddy and Toni Mansell argue that “Indian conditions at the time meant that a military engineer was likely to be called upon to serve as an architect, or as a builder of bridges, roads, and canals, but he was not specifically trained for such roles, as a civil engineer would have been.”60 Formal institutions to train British civilian engineers grew up in the territories of empire. In 1848, the British government established the College of Civil Engineering, later renamed the Thomason College of Civil Engineering, in the town of Roorkee in northern India. They subsequently established three additional colleges at Calcutta, Madras, and Poona. In northern India specifically, extensive networks of irrigation canals constructed during the Mughal period posed a challenge for British engineers, who, before the conquest of India, had had no occasion to develop expertise in irrigation. Engineers at Thomason assisted with the construction of northern India’s largest canal, the Ganges Canal, begun in 1842 and completed in 1854. After the canal was complete, an autonomous Indian Public Works Department was created, envisioned by Thomason as a means of staffing the department with trained civilian engineers.61 Little existed in Britain itself in the nineteenth century that would approach the standard of formalized civil engineering training in India.62 Despite the establishment of Thomason, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century military engineers who had been trained in Britain continued to dominate the Indian Public Works Department and higher-level teaching positions at Thomason.63 In part, their continued dominance was the result of the composition of Thomason’s student body, which consisted of three categories of students. The top category, the engineers, included military officers, European civilians, and a small number of well-educated Indians whom the colonial regime envisioned as the future of the Indian Public Works Department.64 However, between 1848 and 1871, approximately only 10 percent of students belonged to this class, and the vast majority of students were in either the upper or the lower subordinate class.65 While Thomason would eventually become closely linked to the Public Works Department of the colonial state, the scarcity of secondary educational facilities in India during this period posed a barrier for both British and Indian local students who desired to enroll at the institution.66 Compounding this difficulty, engineering recruits from Europe proved difficult to lure, as “the expense of travelling to India to attend Roorkee with no prior appointment to the IPWD made it an unattractive proposition for men in Britain.”67



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Educated at Addiscombe and eventually posted to Thomason, Colin Scott-Moncrieff epitomized the trajectory of British civil engineering in India in this period. Scott-Moncrieff was not an irrigation engineer of great skill, nor did he claim to be. When he arrived in northern India, he had barely begun to acquire experience as an engineer; he had no knowledge of irrigation. He once pithily surmised the British ignorance of irrigation by explaining, “Irrigation is an art which there is no occasion to practice in England.”68 His initial lack of exposure to irrigation did not prevent him from exercising a tremendous influence over the development of irrigation in India. He was quickly promoted, becoming the superintending engineer of the Ganges Canal. During his time in India, he also worked on the Jumna Canal and directed irrigation in Burma for a period.69 After a furlough spent touring the irrigation works of Italy, Spain, and southern France, Scott-Moncrieff reflected on his approach to his work, concluding: “Much can be done in irrigation without the help of very scientific irrigation. This is humbling perhaps to the mere engineer, but surely gratifying to one who knows how often in India sound sense and energy are to be met with in the absence of any great professional knowledge.”70 For Scott-Moncrieff, it was common sense and the logic of the (necessarily white) expert that made the colonial engineer.

The Vernacular of the Nile Good News! The field of the laborer will be flooded It is necessary to prepare the harness and the plough Good news! Go tell the laborer that the Nile is high Repair your plough, buy your seeds You shine o Nile, like the eyes of a female water buffalo You take us each year again as your fiancé Oh beautiful Nile, it is from you that our destiny comes —Egyptian folk song71

With the occupation of Egypt, British irrigation engineering moved out of India and into new fields. In Egypt, British irrigation engineers would make a global reputation for themselves; they would also be integral to the project of colonial economy, specifically the production of cotton. During the first decades of the occupation, the project of irrigation engineering was that of repaying the Egyptian state’s deep debt, much of it accrued during the period of Khedive Isma‘il’s rule. Six years before the occupation began, control of the state’s finances had

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been transferred into the hands of a colonial administration, La Caisse de la Dette Publique (the Public Debt Commission). The state’s finances were subject to the commission’s oversight, and nearly half of the total state budget went to paying down its debt during the first decade of the occupation.72 Occupation authorities trained their gaze on agriculture, irrigation in particular, which they viewed as the path to financial redemption. The land tax was the state’s primary source of revenue, and land that was not irrigated and planted did not pay. While other branches of the Egyptian government were starved of resources, funds were channeled toward the Public Works Ministry. In 1885, Egypt was offered a £9 million loan at the Convention of London, £1 million of which, “the irrigation million,” was devoted to the repair and maintenance of irrigation works.73 When those funds ran dry, the Public Works Ministry was given another £800,000.74 Irrigation would be the wrench that cranked the state’s finances from red to black. In 1883, Colin Scott-Moncrieff was appointed inspector general of irrigation in Egypt. The following year, he was promoted to undersecretary of state for the Public Works Ministry.75 Within the Irrigation Department, Scott-Moncrieff presided over an inspector general of irrigation, inspectors of irrigation for Lower and Upper Egypt, and the directors of Egypt’s six irrigation districts. This last set of appointees was responsible for overseeing the “cleaning of canals, building smaller diversion works, repairing masonry structures, keeping the gauge heights on the Nile and on canals, and dividing the water among canals in accordance with the area under each or as the inspector-general might otherwise instruct.”76 The first and second circles were located in the Nile Delta and the offices of the third circle in Alexandria, the fourth in Minya in central Egypt, and the fifth and sixth in Qina and Suhaj in Egypt’s south.77 Irrigation inspectors worked closely with local engineers in each circle and with local officials, who were charged with organizing the labor to maintain infrastructure and stand guard during the flood each year.78 In his first two years at the ministry, Scott-Moncrieff appointed a group of British irrigation engineers to fill these positions. British engineers oversaw irrigation in five of the six districts, and the remaining circle was directed by an Egyptian engineer. The backgrounds of the British engineers chosen to direct irrigation in Egypt illustrate the possible routes through which British engineers were made in this period. Like Scott-Moncrieff, some were of an earlier generation and had trained as engineers in the military. Others had acquired their



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education at civilian institutions that included Thomason.79 Among this initial group of recruits, William Willcocks left the deepest historical legacy in Egypt. He spent the better part of fifty years in the country, where he died in 1932. The son of a British military engineer, Willcocks grew up in India and attended Thomason. In India, he worked as Scott-Moncrieff’s assistant, even marrying his niece. When he arrived in Egypt, his first post was as inspector of irrigation in the second circle, located at the site of the Delta Barrage.80 The post was important, as the vast majority of Egypt’s cotton production was concentrated in the Delta. During the first decade of the occupation, the new British appointees to the Public Works Ministry were tasked with the maintenance and repair of existent infrastructure, meaning they needed to master the administration of the Nile River’s built space.81 The category of the “irrigation engineer,” as it took form in nineteenth-century Egypt, was an odd hybrid. It suggested that one possessed both the technical skill of an engineer and a deep vernacular knowledge of Nile irrigation. Eager to demonstrate their efforts to learn this landscape, the new British appointees made tours of the Egyptian countryside. In letters to family and friends, Scott-Moncrieff boasted, “All the year 1884, I was in Cairo, or traveling on the Nile. My inspectors were constantly traveling. They learned Arabic very quickly.”82 Recalling his work in Egypt, Captain Hanbury Brown similarly described the efforts of this first generation: “During the latter half of the year 1883, Sir Colin ‘went throughout all the land of Egypt’ to make himself acquainted by personal inspection with the condition of the problems with which he had to deal. Within twelve months from the date of his appointment his staff of four engineers of the Indian Irrigation Service had joined him.”83 The results of these travels took form in text. In 1884, the Public Works Ministry published its first report under British direction, authored by Scott-Moncrieff. Its primary objective was to map the infrastructural landscape of irrigation and propose a budget for its repair and expansion. While Arabic terms are nearly absent in this report, in the decade that followed, British engineers learned to articulate, measure, and interpret the agricultural environment of the Nile River through the frameworks deployed by Egyptian cultivators and local officials. One of the first tools that British engineers adopted was the Nilometer. A gauge that measured the height of the river, each consisted of a large stone pillar that stood in the middle of a well, connected to a passageway to the Nile. The use of Nilometers dated to the dynasties of ancient Egypt

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when gauges stood at Aswan, Memphis, and Dendera in southern Egypt, and on the island of Rawda near Cairo in the north.84 When the British occupied Egypt, Nilometers stood at Aswan in Egypt’s deep south and at Rawda in Cairo.85 As the flood approached and the river swelled, measurements of the river’s height foretold the fate of Egyptian agriculture in the year to come. Like their Egyptian predecessors, British engineers turned to Nilometers to measure the river’s rise, and these measurements were published in the annual reports of the Public Works Ministry. In his 1884 report, Scott-Moncrieff lists measurements of the height of the river during flood from the gauge at Rawda that date back 126 years. These measurements were recorded in the units of pics and kirats that marked the Nilometers. The height of the river at its peak (al-salib), reached in late September, was recorded each year.86 In an effort to demonstrate his grasp of its implications, Scott-Moncrieff reported: “Above 25 pics is a dangerously high Nile, likely to lead to inundation. Above 23 pics is a good Nile. Above 20 pics is not bad. The present year is one of the eleven between 19 and 20 pics, and some loss of cultivation is anticipated in Upper Egypt.”87 In the years that followed, British engineers used these measurements in their attempts to predict how the flood would develop. An 1887 description read: “The distinct rise at Assouan did not begin until the 16th of June, when the gauge stood at 2 pics 5 kirats, exactly the same gauge as on the same date in 1886. But here the similarity ceased.”88 Another for 1891 explained: “The Nile Flood of 1891 was a very regular one marked by the absence of abrupt rises and falls.”89 The measurements of the Nilometer allowed British engineers to consider the flood in quantitative terms in order to assess the character of the annual inundation and formulate irrigation policy in the year to come. As its height rose and fell, so did the composition of the river’s water change. When the flood arrived, its waters ran red, charged with fertilizing silt. Red water was the most common sensorial measure used to refer to a seasonally variable Nile River. Associated with the nurture of crops, the mud of the annual inundation, tin iblis (the devil’s soil), was reportedly served with a lemon and consumed in agricultural communities as a celebration of its nurturing qualities.90 In 1891, Justin Ross, then inspector general of irrigation, worried that the Nile “was most decidedly low in August during the time of the best red water.”91 The qualities of this red water stood in stark contrast to the character of the river in the summer months before the flood arrived, when its waters were colored green and were thought



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dangerous, even poisonous.92 The green matter that colored its waters was vegetal, traveling down the White Nile from the swamps of Fashoda during the first flush of the flood.93 In an 1894 report, William Willcocks, who had then been appointed director general of reservoirs, argued that one of the potential benefits of constructing a reservoir on the Nile to store floodwaters was that “the effect of this quantity of wholesome water on the green water of the Nile in June and July of a low summer will be to dilute it and considerably improve it.”94 Of the Nile vernacular learned by British irrigation engineers, that concerning the practice of basin irrigation was most important. In regions where basins remained, the directors of irrigation circles were responsible for their filling, discharge, and maintenance. The filling of basins proceeded from south to north, with water being admitted into the southernmost basins in the middle of August and evacuated by the middle of October. The northernmost basins were emptied by the middle of November.95 The timing of discharge was critical: basins were constructed in chains to drain water from one to the next, and emptying them back into the Nile had to be carefully coordinated so as not to produce a river too full. In 1889, the Irrigation Department described what one should consider when admitting water into basins: “The behavior of the rising Nile is by far the most important to record. On it depends the entrance of the best water into the basins. The early Nile generally has at least one flush and one ebb of a marked type before August 10th, the general time of basin opening.”96 After water was let into basins, engineers needed to assess the level to which they should be filled and when water should be evacuated. When water was first admitted, basins were not filled. They were brought to a level known as tamam al-rayy late in the season before the process of emptying, al-sarf, began. In 1889, E. W. P. Foster, inspector general of irrigation in Lower Egypt, engaged these measurements in his assessment of irrigation for the season: “When it was found that the rise of the Nile was not sufficient to complete ‘Tamam Rayy,’ the Girzah [sic] head sluice was closed on the shore side.”97 British engineers also developed their own ideas concerning the conventions that surrounded basin irrigation. Some objected to the practice of filling basins to tamam al-rayy, viewing it as wasteful. They nonetheless continued to abide by the convention. Justin Ross reflected, “It must also be noted that the system of bringing to ‘Tamam Rayy’ or full level late in the season, is much practised in Gizah. I do not approve of it myself but the custom is established and requires reform.”98

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The administration of basin irrigation also demanded that British irrigation engineers learn the significance of the different calendars used to record and schedule the practice of agriculture. In addition to the three seasons of flood-based agriculture, Egyptians referenced the thirteen months of the Coptic Christian calendar, which they paired with the lunar year of the Islamic calendar to mark agricultural time.99 This practice persisted through the late nineteenth century. The Coptic year began on September 11, during the flood, in the month of tut. Egyptian cultivators associated changes in climate and the specificities of agricultural production with the Coptic months, which were derived from the traditions of ancient Egypt.100 In 1888, the Public Works Ministry sent William Willcocks south to investigate troubles connected to basin irrigation in the region. Willcocks’s description of his findings demonstrates that mastering the Coptic calendar was central to the administration of irrigation in the region: Water should not be permitted to enter any basin before the 1st Misra (6th August). If an irrigated basin is dry before the first Tȗt (10th September) it is Sharâki [sic]. If an irrigated basin is dry before the 17th Tȗt (26th September) it will yield a poor crop. The 1st Tȗt (10th September) is the feast of Nèrûz. The 17th Tȗt (26th September) is the salib of the Nile. Sarf cannot begin before the salib, that is before the 27th Septem˙ ber. The best date for sarf is ordinarily 1st Bâba (10th October). Lôk ˙ sowing begins generally on 8th Bâba (17th October). If sarf is delayed ˙ after the 20th Bâba (29th October) the crop will be damaged.101

Cultivators and local officials administered Nile irrigation through a system of unique calendars, observations, and historical forms of measurement, knowledge of which was crucial. While they learned the specificities of local irrigation from Egyptians, British engineers also complained of attempts to thwart their directives.102 As David Gilmartin illustrates in northern India, for British engineers and administrators who possessed comparably less knowledge than cultivators of local environments, the colonial management of irrigation necessitated the separation of irrigation administration from the forms of knowledge that colonized subjects possessed.103 Neither Indian nor Egyptian cultivators readily bowed to colonial engineers. In 1859, soon after his arrival in India as a young military engineer, Scott-Moncrieff had penned a letter home, expressing his frustration: “As long as I fight with Nature, there is no objection to the work, but, in my dealings with the natives. . .”104 His



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experience in Egypt would be similar. Despite the centralizing efforts of the nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian state, local communities frequently thwarted the authority of the ministry. In 1892, then undersecretary of state for public works William Garstin complained that villagers performed takhfif, the release of water from a basin, without the permission of the ministry: “The narrow strip of basins between the Fadilîyah and Tûkh-Dêr canals and the River from Mahgar Qurnah to Mahgar Dendara, was put into free communication with the Nile by many cuts, mostly made between the 12th and 22nd September, some made by the Irrigation Staff for Takhfîf but most of them by the villagers without authority, either for Takhfîf or to admit red water.”105 The local officials on whom the ministry depended also interfered with the centralizing efforts of British engineers at the ministry. In 1887, William Willcocks reported that the cultivators of one village complained that “their sheikh liked keeping the Nile badly cleared, and then selling water at a high price from his engine in August.”106 Finally, local inhabitants sometimes interfered with projects to construct new irrigation works. In the province of Bahira, British officials complained that difficulties digging the Nubariyya Canal were in part due to “the mischief of Bedouins who removed pegs and bench marks.”107

Performing Expertise through Text It is hard trying to reform people who don’t want to be reformed, with nothing behind us stronger than good advice. —Colin Scott-Moncrieff 108

While the new British appointees to the Public Works Ministry struggled to master the materialities of Egypt’s irrigation landscape, the notion that they might be its experts was undercut by the superior knowledge possessed by Egyptian engineers. In 1888–89, the monumental twenty-volume Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida was published, penned by Ali Mubarak, the former minister of education and public works, whom Scott-Moncrieff fired from his post at the Public Works Ministry after the occupation began.109 The khitat is a classical Arabic form that embodies an amalgamation of history and geography; one of the objectives of Ali Mubarak’s khitat was to map Egypt’s built landscape. The first six volumes describe the city of Cairo, and another volume Alexandria, through a detailed accounting of their streets, monuments, schools, mosques, churches, historical sites, and different neighborhoods; the volumes that follow al-

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phabetically list and describe most of Egypt’s towns and villages through their notable monuments, agricultural practices, and the written work of renowned local figures.110 Dedicated to the titular ruler of Egypt, Khedive Tawfiq, and published only six years after the British occupation, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya chronicles the accomplishments of the nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian state and establishes the erudition of its technocrats. Ali Mubarak was an Egyptian nationalist, his political sentiments entangled with the specific imagination of historical geography that frames Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya. The texts also represent a performance of his encyclopedic knowledge of Egypt’s natural, human, and historical geography. While it is unclear whether the British engineers who staffed the Public Works Ministry were aware of Mubarak’s texts or even their subject matter—it is doubtful that any of these engineers possessed a sufficient level of Arabic to read the volumes—Ali Mubarak’s khitat underscores the gulf of knowledge that separated the author from the British engineers who staffed the ministry he had once headed. Also in 1889, William Willcocks published the first edition of Egyptian Irrigation.111 Willcocks describes in rich detail the geology, agriculture, and constructions of the Nile River. The text similarly seeks to lay claim to Egypt’s geography through the performance of expertise, but Egyptian Irrigation is different in its subject matter and form. Unlike Ali Mubarak’s texts, which read the Nile as part and parcel of Egypt’s human geography, Egyptian Irrigation treats the river as a separate entity, an object to be engineered. While Mubarak’s writings were confined to an audience literate in Arabic, Willcocks’s English-language text traveled the globe, landing in farflung libraries and collections and thereby obtaining an imperial advantage as a performance of expertise. If Egyptian Irrigation endeavored to tame the Nile through description, Willcocks’s memoir, Sixty Years in the East, seeks to paint a portrait of the author as the colonial engineer par excellence. Always eager to offer demonstrations of his knowledge, he describes his intimate explorations of Egypt’s landscape in rich detail: “For ten shillings I persuaded an Arab to walk over the slimy bed with me, and though we started early it was after sunset when we reached our destination. I was left with only my shirt having got rid of everything in the desperate efforts I had to make when above my knees in slush. By rolling round and round, going on all fours, being helped by the stalwart Arab and using all my resources I just got across.”112 A child of empire, Willcocks never missed an opportunity to highlight his proximity to the



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colonized subject and environment. The act of traversing Egypt’s agricultural landscape was the means through which expertise was acquired; the citation of this travel in the text performed this knowledge to the reader. Descriptions of the Egyptian landscape were also embedded in the forms of (hi)story telling that helped to constitute colonial projects. Environmental historian Diana Davis has written of the endeavors of French scientists to attribute a history to Algeria’s natural landscape in which aridity overtook agricultural abundance as a result of the purported abuse of invading Arab populations.113 The narratives of Egyptian irrigation composed by British engineers were similarly marked by historical visions of the landscape and its infrastructure, specifically their fascination with the civilizations of ancient Egypt. Travel narratives of Egypt from the nineteenth century present an Egyptian environment dotted by ruins and inhabited by peasants living according to historical practices dating back thousands of years.114 Irrigation engineers offered similar readings, never missing an opportunity to describe basin irrigation as ancient and the landscape of the Nile as virtually unchanged.115 In From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan, Willcocks exemplifies this narrative approach: In Joseph’s day, the Pyramids were standing, the basin irrigation of the Nile valley had been functioning for some 3500 years, the low lands of the Delta had been reclaimed 600 years before, and all this wealth had been insured against inundation by the Lake Moeris escape, one of the wonders of the ancient world. We to-day have not succeeded in reclaiming one-tenth of the low lands of the Delta, and that tenth is uninsured against inundation. Three thousand five hundred years ago the Egyptian question was the irrigation question, even more thoroughly than it is in our day.116

Just as questions of colonial economy and ideas of the wastefulness of the Ottoman-Egyptian state helped to constitute imaginaries of Egypt’s agricultural environments among British irrigation engineers, so would notions of the ancient past shape the manner in which they imagined their own contributions to irrigation infrastructure.117 The association of Egyptian irrigation with ancient beginnings helped to obscure a more recent history in which local experts and accomplishments threatened to unsettle the possibility of their expertise. To establish their own expertise, British engineers often denigrated that of Egyptian engineers. Scott-Moncrieff concludes his 1884 “Note on

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the Irrigation Works of Egypt” by stating: “It may be asked why not employ Native Engineers, to which I would merely reply, that as there have been no large Hydraulic Works carried on in Egypt for many years, there are no native engineers gifted with experience enough to warrant their designing or taking charge of large works. But I look to them for constant assistance, and when these works are completed, Egypt should possess some very well trained and capable officers of its own.”118 Scott-Moncrieff’s characterization disregarded the existence of the Muhandiskhanah, which, despite budget cuts, continued to train engineers, as well as the construction of important irrigation works under Isma‘il, including that of the Ibrahimiyya Canal, completed less than a decade before the British occupied Egypt. By 1890, there were a total of eighteen British appointees to the Public Works Ministry. In addition to the undersecretary of state and the inspector general of irrigation, there were “four inspectors of irrigation, three assistant inspectors of irrigation, one director of works, and eight engineers.”119 The subordinates of the new appointees, Egyptian engineers oversaw irrigation and ensured that the ministry’s directives were carried out in each irrigation circle. Many possessed more knowledge of Egyptian irrigation and formal training as engineers than their British superiors. In their rare appearances in public works literature, Egyptian engineers are at best eager and helpful. Never would these same engineers be credited with initiative or with being knowledgeable in a manner that British engineers understood as “scientific.” One strategy that British engineers deployed in writing Egyptian engineers was to undermine the capacity of Egyptian technocrats to behave rationally. Willcocks recounted a story in his memoirs in which he was traveling in a boat with an Egyptian engineer, ‘Abd al-Fattah, when one of the boat’s towing ropes caught, nearly pulling the boat, with them in it, under one of the gates of the Delta Barrage. When, in his own telling, Willcocks acted to free them by cutting the rope, the Egyptian engineer “threw himself upon him and threatened to cling to my legs and drown me if I cut it.”120 The anecdote’s rendering of ‘Abd al-Fattah as overcome with emotion serves to undermine the capability of the Egyptian engineer. In his 1888 report, Lord Cromer similarly defamed Egyptian engineers by claiming that they had been corrupted by their association with large landholders: “The native engineers had almost arbitrary powers as regards the regulations concerning the construction of dams, sluices, and pumps, and they naturally carried out such works for the convenience of the richer and more influential proprietors, who, doubtless, well repaid them for their services.”121



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British occupiers’ neglect of Egypt’s professional schools matched their denigration of Egyptian engineers in their writings. Eager to pay down Egypt’s debt, occupation authorities implemented sharp budget cuts. Throughout the first two decades of the occupation, the Muhandiskhanah continued to train students, but technical education was on the wane. Debt was not the only enemy of Egypt’s engineering school; Cromer’s experience in India had made him wary of the dangers of too much education. British policy in Egypt was to increase school fees and limit enrollment.122 The British neglect of Egyptian education meant that while formally trained Egyptian engineers existed when the British first occupied Egypt, only a small number were trained subsequently and appointments of Egyptian engineers to upper-level positions within the ministry were rare.123 Stories of corrupt local elites that nearly always laced memoirs of the field complemented those of irrational engineers. In his letters to friends and family, Scott-Moncrieff reported that Egyptian government officials rained terror over the countryside, claiming of the engineers that he appointed, “They very soon had inspired such confidence in the natives that the latter used to beg to have their cases in dispute to them rather than to their ‘Mudirs’ to whom they would have naturally referred.”124 The significance of Scott-Moncrieff’s claim was not its veracity: there were indeed corrupt officials whom local populations sought to subvert, and for much of the nineteenth century Egyptian peasants suffered under the burdens of conscription, corvée, and heavy taxation.125 The work of the text, however, and its blanket condemnation of provincial governors, was to position colonial actors as humble, practically knowledgeable, and appropriately detached from the local political conflicts that ran rife among elites and the subalterns over whom they presided. The characterization of local authority that marks these stories is a familiar colonial trope, affirming the necessity of European intervention. The performance of expertise in text—and its denigration—were central to the process through which experts were produced and recognized.

The Materialities of Maintenance The materialities of the constructed irrigation landscape complemented those of texts. In the last years of Khedive Isma‘il’s regime, amid the mounting crisis of the state’s debt, irrigation infrastructure had fallen into disrepair, as the budgets of the various state ministries were cut to make payments on the debt.126 During the first years of the occupation, no

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new irrigation works were constructed.127 In this period, British engineers maintained and repaired existent works. A highly constructed irrigation infrastructure was the mark of a sophisticated political history, one that threatened to unsettle the authority of British engineers, whose expertise rested on its association with the figure of the colonial bureaucrat.128 Not only did maintenance not inspire; it inherently attributed value to the work of other (Egyptian) engineers. While the British criticized these engineers in their writings, they maintained and preserved the systems that they had built in their daily work. The first major project completed under the occupation was the repair of basins in the south of Egypt.129 In agricultural lands divided into basins, the area of land cultivated each year had historically varied according to the size of the flood. Cultivable land that was included in the cadastral survey but left uncultivated, usually because it had not been irrigated by the flood that year, was known as sharaqi. In their reports, British engineers sometimes refer to this land as sharagi, reflecting one difference in pronunciation that distinguishes the colloquial dialect of southern Egypt from that of the north.130 As funds to maintain irrigation works ran low in the late 1870s, the surface area of sharaqi expanded. The presence of uncultivated and potentially profitable land represented a kind of scourge for the engineers charged with plotting Egypt’s crawl out of debt as it reduced returns from the land tax.131 Faced with a low flood, on September 11, 1888, William Willcocks, then inspector of the second circle of irrigation, boarded a train with the minister of public works, Muhammad Pasha Zaki, which was headed south to Upper Egypt. Upon their arrival, they met with inspectors of irrigation, provincial governors, chief engineers, and local notables to strategize how to irrigate the greatest expanse of land possible that year and how to minimize the area of land left as sharaqi. Following the mission, a portion of the second grant given to the Public Works Ministry was set aside for the repair of southern Egypt’s basins, directed by Justin Ross.132 British engineers and cultivators alike were interested in reducing sharaqi, but among the former the project highlighted the failures of the Ottoman-Egyptian regime. For British engineers, irrigation was invested with a system of values, and the critique of sharaqi derived from a broader narrative concerning the waste and decadence of Isma‘il’s state. The second major repair of Egypt’s irrigation works was that of the Delta Barrage. When the British occupied Egypt, the Delta Barrage system was only partially functional; the barrage that stretched across the Nile’s



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Rosetta branch had collapsed several seasons after its completion. As it supported perennial irrigation and cotton cultivation in the Nile Delta, the British were keen to ensure that the barrage was fully functional. Soon after his arrival, Scott-Moncrieff began to plot its repair. In his plans for the project, he rendered Egypt’s irrigation landscape commensurable to the world that he knew, that of northern India: “Following a well known Indian system suggested for this very work a few years ago by Mr. John Fowler C.E. Mr Willcocks has prepared a design for a second or Supplementary barrage.”133 In the same report, Scott-Moncrieff added: “I believe that even in low Nile, with proper water-distribution as now prevails in northern India, there is water enough for 400,000 acres of additional cultivation.”134 While the British engineers appointed to the Public Works Ministry might not have been experts in Egyptian irrigation, they marshaled their experience in India to establish their credibility. India was the space in which British irrigation engineers first had been exposed to irrigation, and thus its systems, with their embedded histories, social relations, and material particularities, helped to constitute British notions of irrigation engineering. In 1890, the Public Works Ministry completed a series of repairs on the structure. David Gilmartin has argued that “India, not London, was the centre from which new ideas in irrigation spread in the decades before World War I, around the Indian Ocean and beyond.”135 Within British irrigation engineering during this period, the new “ideas” in irrigation that flowed from India were not abstractions; they were rather, as the repair of the Delta Barrage demonstrated, material, specific, and rooted in the particularities of the Indian agricultural landscape.136 While India served as the basis for comparison and the field from which material ideas were generated, the environments supporting agriculture in northern Egypt and northern India were not striking in their similarities. Both regions were arid, but agriculture in northern India was flood based and rain fed, while Egyptian agriculture depended almost exclusively on irrigation from the Nile. However, the notion that the environments of northern India and Egypt were commensurable did not depend on “natural” similarities; these environments were to be rendered similar through the act of comparison and the construction of similar irrigation systems. The controversial nature of Egypt’s corvée labor regime provided a welcome distraction for British engineers in the early years of the occupation. No subject more aptly typified the endeavors of colonial technocrats to establish colonial rule as humane than the struggle over corvée. When

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the British occupied Egypt, nearly sixty thousand corvée laborers spent five months of the year maintaining perennial canals and clearing them of silt.137 Irrigation works were not the only pieces of infrastructure built by corvée laborers, but the transition to perennial irrigation in parts of the country fed the demand for labor. The irony of the nineteenth-century expansion of corvée was that this expansion also produced its demise. Perennial irrigation eliminated the agricultural dry season, the period in which the state had historically marshaled corvée labor. As perennial irrigation spread, the burden of this work fell increasingly on the shoulders of cultivators from regions without access to perennial irrigation, namely those from Egypt’s south. As Nathan Brown and more recently Anne Clement have argued, large landholders were fearful that the state might demand the labor on which they depended, even though the residents of these estates had been largely exempt from corvée.138 When the British occupation began, corvée was unpopular among laborers and wealthy landholders alike.139 Colonial administrators quickly joined the movement to end the practice. Opposition to corvée was consistent with a familiar colonial refrain enabling colonial bureaucrats to position themselves as social reformers.140 It also served another purpose, as it diverted attention away from the unglamorous work of maintenance. As director of the second circle of irrigation in the Nile Delta, William Willcocks took up the cause soon after he assumed his post in Egypt. He described the horrors of the practice in his memoirs: “They received no payment except in blows; they provided their own tools, carrying wet earth on their bare backs when they were too poor to provide baskets; they brought their own sack full of dry biscuits on which they existed; they slept out of doors on the bare ground in all weathers, with the bare sky above their heads both day and night. The Government did absolutely nothing for them except punish and imprison them when their stock of food failed and they ran away to beg or steal.”141 In 1885, the ministry opted to devote a portion of its funds to the suppression of the corvée.142 Four years later, Willcocks claimed his efforts a success. By December 1889, “The canal clearance Corvée was abolished, and the Public Works Department undertook to do all earth-work maintenance for £400,000 per annum.”143 The Public Works Ministry began to contract with local “shaykhs” who organized gangs of wage laborers; some of these shaykhs were the very same local officials who had been charged with the recruitment of corvée. The move away from corvée was not total. The Public Works Ministry continued to rely on these workers to monitor the



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river during flood and repair breaches in its banks.144 For British irrigation engineers, the debate over corvée, and their partial success in jettisoning the practice, provided a realm in which they might claim moral authority and material evidence of tangible change to Egyptian irrigation.

Environmental Dreamscapes As they learned Egyptian irrigation, British engineers developed their own frameworks through which they measured and valued the Nile River and its agriculture. The models that they developed did not simply reflect the world of Nile agriculture “as it was.” Notions of value, theories of material relation, and acts of exclusion structured these models. Imaginations of the present also created the conditions of possibility for the future. As early as 1884, Colin Scott-Moncrieff dreamed an agricultural landscape in Egypt that would function independently of the waterwheels, animals, and mechanical steam pumps on which so many cultivators relied to bring irrigation water to fields.145 For British engineers, Scott-Moncrieff in particular, the appeal of perennial irrigation was, in part, the fantasy that perennial canals would eliminate the need for the plethora of other devices and officials on which the act of irrigation depended, rendering irrigation simpler, more cost effective, and built into the land itself. In their dreams of transforming Egypt’s landscape of irrigation, British engineers mapped the methods through which capital was produced onto the fields fed by the Nile. They adopted the term “sefi” to refer to those lands, concentrated in the Nile Delta, that had access to perennial irrigation and could grow valuable summer crops.146 While the crops of flood-based agriculture were winter or shitwi crops, British engineers juxtaposed the term sefi with basin rather than shitwi to describe the geography of Egypt’s agricultural landscape. For these engineers, the distinction between basin and sayfi lands correlated with questions of value and notions of capital. Measures of the relative surface area of each category were quantitative assessments of progressive agricultural development, and the form of the basin was a mark of those regions ripe for advancement. Another measure that these engineers deployed to assess development was the quantity of water necessary to irrigate a unit of land, with the objective being to optimize this relationship so that the smallest possible quantity of water irrigated the largest possible surface area of land. British engineers understood and modeled Egypt’s agricultural environment as a simple set of components that included measurements of the area of cropped land, the volume of

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irrigation water, and the frequency of irrigation.147 That the vast majority of the water that supported agriculture came from the Nile, and not rainfall, simplified this relation. The injection of capital into Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure eventually bore fruit. As a result of the repair and maintenance of the canals and barrages in the Nile Delta, in the 1890s the area of taxable land increased and Egypt’s cotton crop doubled.148 However, while their measures achieved their desired end, British engineers dreamed of constructing their own Nile River. From the early days of the occupation, they had considered the possibility of building a dam on the Nile that would expand the surface area under perennial irrigation, facilitate land reclamation, and protect the summer cotton crop from the annual variations of the Nile flood. In 1880, a Frenchman, de la Motte, had proposed such a project at Gebel Silsila in Sudan. For the British engineers posted to the Public Works Ministry, the promise of a dam was not only its potential to increase cotton production; a dam would create a new irrigation landscape and position its British creators as experts. The production of new forms of expertise necessitated the creation of a material field that would function as its object, and that field was the dammed Nile. Modernist ideas of the potential of technology to remake the natural environment and bring nature to heel fed these fantasies, as did the desire to erase the practices and forms of knowledge that had long governed Egyptian agriculture. The Public Works Ministry sent William Willcocks on several expeditions to investigate potential sites at which a dam could be built. In 1891, Willcocks presented his first report on the subject to the government; two subsequent reports in 1894 and 1895 followed this initial presentation.149 In his 1894 report, Perennial Irrigation and Flood Protection for Egypt, Willcocks considered six different plans for a dam at three separate locations in southern Egypt. These sites included the Nile’s first cataract at Aswan, the Silsila pass, which lay seventy kilometers to the north of Aswan, and the area around the village of Kalabsha to Aswan’s south. The fourth site investigated was the Wadi Rayan depression, which lay in the desert to the west of the oasis of Fayum. Mehmed Ali, enamored with the legend that in ancient times a lake had existed in the depression, had sent Linant to investigate the site. The depression at Wadi Rayan had come to the attention of British irrigation engineers through the efforts of the American Frederic Cope Whitehouse, who, after he encountered the site in 1882, began to campaign for the construction of a reservoir in the depression.150 A



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handful of British irrigation engineers, Willcocks among them, lent support to Whitehouse’s theory and believed that it would serve as an appropriate location for a reservoir. Willcocks approached the technical aspects of building a dam on the Nile through a world of other dams, located in India, Algeria, Spain, France, and Italy, many constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, British civil engineering was an increasingly global—or globally imperial—field. Willcocks drew on the work of other European engineers to choose a site and design a dam. Inspired by Italian engineers who argued that dams should be built on exceedingly hard rocks like granite and limestone, he ultimately argued that the Nile’s first cataract at Aswan was the best place to construct a dam, in part because the sound rock that formed the riverbed would provide a firm foundation.151 Italian engineers were prominent voices in exchanges concerning irrigation, in large part because of their activities managing the Po River in northern Italy. Questions of the composition of river water complemented those of structure. The Nile’s high sediment load and the potential that a reservoir might silt up presented a challenge. Willcocks began his report by stating that engineers had yet to find a definitive solution to this problem, citing case studies presented at the 1889 Paris International Congress for the utilization of reservoirs formed by solid dams that had silted up on muddy rivers.152 He also described specific examples of dams in Spain and Algeria that had filled with silt.153 Inspired by the failures of dam projects in different corners of the globe, Willcocks proposed building a dam that would be pierced by sluices that could be opened, allowing water to pass through when the sediment charge of the river was highest, and closed to form a reservoir when the river’s waters contained less matter.154 On February 26, 1894, Sir Benjamin Baker, Monsieur Auguste Boulé, and Signor Giacomo Torricelli assembled in Cairo and prepared to journey south to Upper Egypt. William Garstin, who had become undersecretary of state for the Public Works Ministry in 1892, gathered the engineers to evaluate the sites that Willcocks had surveyed: “We have asked for this Commission, not from any want of confidence in ourselves or in our staff, but considering the gigantic nature of the work and the vastness of the interests involved, we have preferred subordinating our judgment to that of men justly celebrated for their mastery of all subjects connected with Hydraulic engineering.”155 At the time of the expedition, Benjamin Baker was vice president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Like

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many of his British peers, he had not received a formal engineering education but had rather apprenticed. He was the business partner of John Fowler, who had been commissioned by Khedive Isma‘il in the 1870s to conduct railway surveys in Egypt. Baker’s projects included the construction of the London Underground Railways and the Forth Bridge in Edinburgh. Before his work on the dam, Baker had arranged for the shipment of Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to London.156 Giacomo Torricelli was a lecturer of agricultural hydraulics at the Reale Scuola Superiore di Agricoltura, Portici, near Naples.157 Inspector general at the École des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, Auguste Boulé was well known for his work on the Seine.158 The commission’s composition and Garstin’s engagement with a world of civil engineering beyond the boundaries of British Empire gestured toward an increasingly global field of civil engineering and the practice of imagining commensurable environments, no longer constrained by the pathways that linked Egypt to India. Despite Garstin’s lofty aims, the record of the trip suggests that it was rife with practical challenges. While this form of exchange among engineers would become increasingly common, the most basic of challenges, that of language itself, thwarted the expedition. Boulé complained that while neither he nor Torricelli spoke English, Baker and Willcocks did not speak French well, the language Toricelli and Boulé shared and also, notably, that of government in colonial Egypt.159 Linguistic differences bled into those concerning the value of history. At the trip’s conclusion, the members of the committee were pointedly divided. Baker and Torricelli, seemingly undaunted by the linguistic challenges of the expedition, supported Willcocks’s recommendation that the dam be constructed at the Nile’s first cataract.160 Boulé agreed with the majority on several points including the dam’s design but rejected their choice of site, since the Philae Temple, one of the burial sites of Osiris, god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead within ancient Egyptian lore, would be flooded by the new reservoir. As the movement to build the dam gathered steam, archaeological circles in France and Britain would unite to protest the inundation of the temple.161 In response, the Public Works Ministry revised its plans for the dam, reducing the volume of the reservoir, which would only partially submerge the temple. The construction of Khazan Aswan, discussed in the next chapter, produced a new material object of expertise for the irrigation engineers at the Public Works Ministry. During the first decade of their work in Egypt, British irrigation engineers worked to learn the vernacular of Nile irrigation



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with its complex material histories. The daily work at the ministry did not provide them with opportunities to transform the irrigation systems of Egypt. They rather were engaged in the maintenance of irrigation systems constructed by other engineers, the physical landscape a tangible reminder that they were not the only experts in Egypt. British engineers developed other strategies to perform expertise, some of them textual, others administrative. The completion of Khazan Aswan would alter the built form of the Nile River and produce new knowledge practices for its engineers. It would also map the landscapes of value and aspiration that framed the work of British engineers onto the land itself.

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2 The Dammed Nile The Thirty-Year Project to Build Khazan Aswan I’ve brought the tickets for those we love, and those who are dear to us are coming. I’ve brought the tickets for the valley of Aswan, and those who are dear to us are coming soon. I’ve brought the tickets for the valley of Qina, and those who are dear to us are coming. Welcome our guests who have come. This is a blessing to us and you honor us. We bake with all of our stored provisions for them. We kill a big calf of a cow for them. We lay out a silk sleeping mat bound with gold for them. —Folk song celebrating the completion of the 1902 Aswan Dam1

the first modern dam built on the Nile River, Khazan Aswan, was inaugurated. The dam cut the river at its first cataract, located near the town of Aswan in Egypt’s deep south. Aswan was a land of granite: the riverbed near the dam was formed of deep red granite, as were the hills that bounded the river on either side.2 To the west, these hills were covered with the yellow sand of the Sahara, but in the desert to the east, even the sand was granite.3 Khazan Aswan was a mass of masonry: the granite ashlar and rubble from which it was constructed had been extracted from local quarries, and this stone cemented the dam’s relationship to the place at which it stood.4 The act of construction was, in many ways, a rearrangement of stone. When the laborers who built the dam celebrated its completion, their songs marked the end of four long years of excavating, hauling, and piling Aswan’s granite. ON DECEMBER 10, 1902,

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The completion of Khazan Aswan produced a new Nile River. Thirtyseven meters tall at its highest point, the dam stored 980,000,000 cubic meters of water in a reservoir that stretched sixty miles to the south.5 In the spring and early summer, engineers released the waters stored in the reservoir, which irrigated Egyptian cotton. Once constructed, the dam and the practices of the Nile that it helped produce would not be undone. The dam was raised twice to increase its storage capacity and the surface area of agricultural land irrigated by its waters, first by the colonial regime that built it and again by the interwar-period Egyptian state. Building the dam, however, was not only a project of colonial officials; it was enabled by the investments of colonial capitalists who during the first half of the twentieth century reaped tremendous profits from the production of a perennial Nile geography. This chapter chronicles the construction of the perennial Nile through that of its first dam, exploring the convergence of extpertise, capital, labor, and political aspiration. This Nile and the landscapes that it carved might

One of the boulders from which Khazan Aswan was constructed. Courtesy of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), London. FIGURE 2. 



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have first been made material by colonial desire, but they became central facets of the project of national modernity and the environmental imaginaries of the Egyptian nation during the interwar period.

Capital Anticipation In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the project to dam the Nile gained traction because of the intersecting, though not identical, interests of colonial officials, engineers, and capitalists. The construction of a dam promised to further enable the extension of perennial irrigation, and as the project gathered steam the colonial regime made plans to link the state’s revenue stream to questions of irrigation. Colonial administrators complained that the rate at which land was taxed in Egypt had little to do with its productivity.6 The land tax system that was in place when the occupation began derived from classifications of agricultural land that came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1854, land that had been allocated to officials, bureaucrats, and family members by the viceroy was classified as ‘ushuriyya, which denoted it the effective property of an individual. Most land farmed by peasant small holders fell under the category of kharajiyya. The state taxed this land at a higher rate, meaning that those with the fewest resources tended to pay the highest taxes. Under Khedive Isma‘il, the surface area of land classified as ‘ushuriyya doubled, while that of kharajiyya holdings remained relatively stable.7 British efforts to “rationalize” the tax code were derived from the same formulations of value that framed notions of productivity and profit among irrigation engineers, and land tax reform was led by the most prominent among them. British interventions sought to link irrigation practice, specifically access to perennial irrigation, to government revenues.8 Beginning in 1891, the government implemented a series of tax rate reductions for landowners in Egypt’s southern provinces.9 Agricultural land in this region continued to be irrigated through the basin system, and cultivators whose lands could produce only a single annual crop suffered acutely under the tax code.10 In 1895, the government formed a committee to reassess the land tax, with William Willcocks as its chair. Its stated aim was not to increase the state’s taxation revenues per se but to reapportion taxation with an eye toward the productivity of the land in question.11 The following year, the committee began a cadastral survey in which it measured and recorded the area of taxable agricultural land in each of Egypt’s provinces and reassessed the taxation rate for each basin or hud, within which land was taxed at the

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same rate.12 The committee that conducted the surveys was composed of a European representative from the Public Works Ministry, an Egyptian representative from the Finance Ministry, and two village headmen.13 While the reassessment of the land tax was under way, the de facto ruler of Egypt, British Agent and Consul General Lord Cromer, searched for a way to fund the construction of a dam. Cromer understood the dam as a means of producing capital, with the state being one of its primary beneficiaries. His 1898 annual report included an estimate by then undersecretary of public works William Garstin that “if the reservoirs be constructed the annual wealth of the country will be increased by about £E [Egyptian pounds] 2,600,000, that the direct gain to the Government will be about £E 380,000 a-year, and that the value of the Government lands, which will be reclaimed, will be increased by more than £E 1,000,000.”14 A dam would store water for summer agriculture, allowing for the reclamation of land, an extension of perennial irrigation, and an increase in the rents earned from land. The Ottoman-Egyptian state’s large debt and the colonial austerity measures that had been imposed in the effort to pay it down made securing funding a challenge. Cromer first requested £E 500,000 from Egypt’s reserve fund, only to be refused by the French and Russian members of the Public Debt Commission. Following the Public Works Ministry mission to investigate possible sites for a dam, Cromer turned to the British government for funding, arguing that the profits that the dam would produce could help to offset the cost of an invasion of Sudan, which the British had committed Egypt to in 1896.15 Sudan had been a colony of the Ottoman-Egyptian state since Mehmed Ali’s 1820 invasion and subsequent occupation. In 1885, the Sudanese had thrown off the yoke of British-Egyptian rule when the messianic leader Muhammad Ahmad, known locally as al-mahdi, seized control of most of the territory. When the British government did not agree to fund the construction of a dam, Cromer looked to private capital. After lengthy negotiations, Rothschilds of London opted not to become involved, citing concerns about Egypt’s volatility. London financier Ernest Cassel stepped in.16 Ernest Cassel belonged to an elite group of financiers in the City of London. He was a close contact of Cromer’s brother, who directed the Baring Brothers firm. Most London financiers focused on particular regions of the world; Cassel’s investments ranged widely and included projects in the United States, Mexico, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Russia. He specialized in loans to governments and the financing of infrastructure.17



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Originally from Cologne, Germany, Cassel began his career in England as a clerk at the firm of Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt.18 He rapidly ascended through its ranks before leaving the firm in 1884 to strike out on his own. Cassel became one of the few financiers in the City of London to operate without the backing of a house. In 1888–89, he made his first entrée into Egypt when he provided a loan to the Egyptian government.19 Cromer was enthusiastic about the prospect of Cassel funding the construction of the dam. He hoped it would encourage more British investment in the country, which, despite Egypt’s booming economy of the 1890s, was less robust than he would have desired.20 In 1898, Cromer approached the Egyptian prime minister Mustafa Fahmy with the proposal that Cassel fund the dam. When Fahmy insisted on bringing the plan to the Council of Ministers for discussion, Cromer forced his hand, arguing that if the offer was not acted upon it would expire with Cassel’s departure from Egypt three days later.21 On February 21, 1898, the Egyptian government, represented by Public Works Minister Hussein Fakhry, signed contracts with Messrs. John Aird and Company of London for masonry work and with Messrs. Ransomes and Rapier for ironwork to construct a dam at Aswan and a smaller barrage at Asyut in central Egypt for £2 million.22 The Ransomes and Rapier firm had built the first stretch of railway in China in 1876.23 The deal with Messrs. John Aird and Company was the largest single construction project ever for a British firm. The government issued £4,716,780 in bonds with a series of dated pay warrants that came due over a thirty-year period, beginning in July 1903, to Messrs. John Aird and Company.24 Cassel then formed the Irrigation Investment Company, which took over the bonds from Aird, and paid the contractors in cash as the work proceeded. Any amount over the agreed-upon £2 million was to be paid by the Egyptian government.25 When all was said and done, Cassel profited handsomely from the repayment of the loan that built the dam.26

Dam Constructions In May of 1898, Maurice Fitzmaurice, the resident engineer-in-chief for the dam, and John A. C. Blue, the agent for John Aird and Co., arrived in Aswan. Fitzmaurice had worked as Benjamin Baker’s apprentice.27 Baker, who had been one of the members of the 1894 expedition to examine possible sites for a dam, was chosen as the consulting engineer for the project. He had also been president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London.28

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Aswan was a popular winter destination for European tourists, whose steamers snaked south on the Nile to visit the ruins of ancient Egyptian temples and bask in its warm climate. In summer, when temperatures climbed well beyond those that Europeans fancied as therapeutic, the town was relatively desolate. Perched at the southern edge of Egypt’s Nile Valley, Aswan sat at a frontier. For European tourists, ever curious about the ethnographic, the diversity that they encountered near the town was a site to behold. The northernmost border of historical Nubia, Aswan had become a military post from which the Ottoman-Egyptian army waged campaigns in Sudan beginning in 1820. The Kishaf, a community formed through the intermarriage of Nubian populations and exiled Turkish soldiers, were a legacy of this conflict. Other distinct groups, who lived in the desert and in lands to the south, also traveled in and around Aswan. When the dam was built, the population of Aswan underwent yet another evolution. Approximately ten thousand men traveled to the area to labor over its construction.29 The direction of this migration reversed the pathways that labor followed at the turn of the nineteenth century, when

FIGURE 3. 

Dated pay warrant, signed by Egyptian public works minister Husayn Fakhy.



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opportunities for work were concentrated in Cairo, Alexandria, the Suez Canal zone, and the cotton economy of the Nile Delta. Egyptian workers, many of them from the Nile Delta and central Egypt, came south to perform the unskilled labor of construction.30 Approximately nine hundred European laborers, of British, Greek, and Italian origin, also worked on the project.31 Greek laborers worked with Egyptians to excavate the site and build the dam’s rubble masonry. Northern Italian stonemasons dressed the large ashlar stones that formed the outer face of the dam.32 The presence of laborers from southern Europe was not unique to this project. In the second half of the nineteenth century, populations from southern Europe migrated to Egypt and other regions of North Africa for work. Within Egypt, these communities were considered mutamassir—Egyptianized—as they often spoke Arabic, worked as skilled labor, and lived among indigenous Egyptian populations.33 By 1917, 41,198 Italians and 56,751 Greeks would live in Egypt.34 Slated to last five years, construction began during the summer of 1898 with the process of building housing and facilities for those who would labor over the dam. Six months later, a “large European village,” populated by fifteen thousand inhabitants, sat near the construction site.35 The village contained a hospital, a restaurant, a church for Italian laborers, public baths, post and telegraph offices, and an array of shops. Food was imported from Cairo and Alexandria, and a reservoir tank was carved out of the rock that formed the eastern bank of the river to provide the village with water. An ice machine produced one ton of the substance daily for the village and the hospital.36 During these first phases of construction, laborers also built facilities to produce and transport the materials from which the dam would be built. They laid rail to move granite rubble and ashlar stones from local quarries. These materials would form the face of the dam. They also constructed limekilns, Hoffman brick kilns, cement sheds, and magazines. Coal had to be imported from England to Alexandria, where it then departed for Aswan.37 The dam was grouted together with cement mortar. The cement was burnt in England and exported to Egypt via the same route as coal, and the sand was collected locally.38 When construction began, supplies traveled by river as the army, fighting to reestablish the occupation of Sudan, monopolized the Egyptian railway. When the conflict in Sudan ended in 1899, supplies and food moved from the river to the railroad.39 During the next phase of construction, laborers excavated the site at which the dam would be built. When excavation began, engineers discovered

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that the granite that formed the river bottom was decomposed, so the foundations of the dam had to be established at a greater depth than originally planned.40 Excavation took longer than anticipated, and laborers were forced to work day and night to complete the work. Accidents with explosives were common.41 Laborers then turned to the construction of the dam’s masonry.42 Photographs present the dam as a tangle of human labor and materials: ropes, pulleys, and equipment litter the site, laborers haul building materials in baskets perched atop their heads, and masons sporting work pants and white sun hats balance atop the granite ashlars that litter the ground. From the top of the dam, men peer into surveying devices. Construction was seasonal. It could be performed only when the Nile was low in the hot months before the flood arrived. Aswan’s climate was scorching during these months. In June, work was suspended between the hours of noon and 4 p.m. as average temperatures in the sun at the work site hovered around an almost implausible 140° F but could climb to 160° F.

Construction of Khazan Aswan. Photograph by D. S. George. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. FIGURE 4. 



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At 108° F, the shade offered little relief.43 Cases of sunstroke, some fatal, were a daily occurrence, and three doctors lingered in tents at the work site, armed with cold water, to treat victims.44 Italian laborers went on strike at least once during construction to protest labor conditions.45 In June of 1902, one year ahead of schedule, work on the dam was complete.46 Grueling and dangerous experiences of labor yielded, at least in part, to a sense of celebration, with the chorus of one folk song celebrating the wages of labor: He brought me silk! With the money from the government! He brought me a garden! With the money from the dam! He brought me a lemon! And his mother is angry! He brought me an apple! And his mother is a peasant!47

Photographs of the dam’s inauguration the following December document an assemblage of elite interests standing atop its granite sweep. European women in their corseted finest, Egyptian elites topped with tarbush, and suited colonial businessmen were joined by the Duchess of Connaught, who laid a completion stone to mark the occasion. The stone matched the foundation stone that her husband the duke had placed three years earlier.48 Photographs by local Cairo commercial photographer D. S. George were commissioned to document the process of construction. His book, Nile Reservoir Works at Aswan and Asyut (1902), includes a foreword by William Garstin, the undersecretary of state for the Public Works Ministry. Just as the publications of the Public Works Ministry in the early years of the occupation demonstrated an awareness among colonial administrators of the power that material objects possessed to make the reputation of British engineering, so did photographs of the dam help to turn this reputation global. George’s images of the completed dam show the Nile severed by its cleanly cut, austere granite surfaces. Postcards and souvenir photos featured these images, rather than those that depicted construction. They portrayed the transformation of the Nile into a river tamed, and that of British irrigation engineers into its masters. Purchased by tourists to Aswan, some of whom stayed at the Cataract Hotel, which opened in 1899 very near the site of the dam, memorabilia were one vehicle by which the dam and the reputations of British engineers circulated the globe. The completion of the dam altered the terms of expertise within the field of irrigation engineering in Egypt. For British engineers, its operation produced a wide variety of new tasks. When the flood arrived, the 180 sluices

FIGURES 5A and B. 

Postcard sent from Aswan featuring the completed dam.



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that pierced the dam remained open to allow its sediment-rich waters to pass through so as not to silt up the reservoir. In the late fall or early winter, when the waters of the river were comparably free of suspended matter, engineers lowered the sluices, allowing the reservoir to fill. They were opened again to raise the level of the river and facilitate irrigation when cotton crops needed watering in late spring and early summer.49 During the first season of its operation, engineers lowered its sluices in October and began to release the waters of the reservoir in March.50 In his 1903 annual report, William Garstin remarked: The filling and discharging of the reservoir involves an immense amount of work in the shape of calculation, diagrams, etc., and besides constant watching of the river-levels, and very careful manipulation of the sluices of the dam. Considering that the year 1903 was the first in which the reservoir was utilized, and that there was no previous experience to serve as a guide, great credit is due to Mr. Webb, the Inspector-General of Irrigation, Mr. May, the Resident Engineer, and the whole staff for their very successful regulation of the supply.51

Khazan Aswan created a new material field to know and administer, one in which British irrigation engineers could claim unique expertise, solving the quandary that these engineers faced during their early years in Egypt. Following its first season of operation, engineers observed that the release of water from the reservoir was damaging the dam. Moving at a high velocity, water fell to a low riverbed formed of granite and other softer types of rock. The force of the falling water began to erode the softer rock of the downstream riverbed, creating a depression at the base of the dam. It also circulated the large pieces of hard rock that had been excavated during construction and littered the riverbed, making the erosion more severe.52 When the river had dropped low enough, engineers examined the structure and found that in places the riverbed had been eroded to the depth of the dam’s foundation, on average six to seven meters below the natural surface of the riverbed.53 The force of the water flowing through the dam was also eating away at the stone that formed the dam’s face.54 Engineers filled in the holes created by erosion and constructed an apron—a slanted protective surface—to rebuild the river bottom and slow the velocity of the falling water. These measures failed, and the water again ate away at the riverbed and the new apron.55 Just three years after its completion, the ministry was forced to begin a major project to shore up the dam. Between

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February 1905 and July 1906, more than four thousand laborers thickened the dam and constructed additional aprons.56 The completion of the dam coincided with a shift in the British approach to Egypt’s School of Engineering. At the end of the nineteenth century, both the numbers of students educated at the Muhandiskhanah and the numbers of its graduates hired by the Public Works Ministry began to climb. In 1898, the Irrigation Service hired nine of the twelve civil engineering graduates.57 In the report for 1903, Cromer stated that the irrigation inspectors had eagerly hired all successful graduates of the institution.58 In the years that followed, British policy supported the education of an elite, and what they hoped would be a quiescent, class of Egyptian civil servants that included engineers.59 Cromer worried that for this class engineering was more difficult than the comparable fields of medicine and law. Those hired by the ministry were posted to the provinces, often far from home. In the hope of boosting the numbers of engineering students, the Public Works Ministry raised the pay for assistant engineers.60 By the early twentieth century, British engineers had comfortably settled into their roles as experts in Egypt. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Egypt’s budget crisis abated, and the British turned their attention to the school of engineering. Cromer appointed Douglas Dunlop, a former missionary, to serve as special adviser to the Ministry of Education. Dunlop was tepid in his assessment of the education provided at the Muhandiskhanah: “The Polytechnic School appears to have made last year a nearer approach to efficiency in certain respects than in any previous year, but satisfactory progress continues to be seriously retarded by the faulty, oldfashioned methods of instruction and an overloaded, unpractical syllabus.”61 When the Public Works Ministry began to hire Egyptian engineers, two decades of neglect meant that Egyptian engineers were produced as comfortably subordinate. Moreover, as the number of Egyptian engineers at the Public Works Ministry climbed, so did that of the European engineers who presided over them. In 1896, the ministry employed 52 Europeans and 514 Egyptians. By 1906, the number of Europeans had almost doubled, while the number of Egyptian employees rose only slightly.62 Cromer justified the hire of so many European engineers by arguing that because the ministry’s budget had more than doubled in this same period, the “expenditure of these large sums of money had necessitated the employment of men possessing technical knowledge, which at present is rarely found amongst the Egyptians.”63



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In the first two decades of twentieth century, engineers controlled Nile irrigation through the operation of Khazan Aswan, which worked in conjunction with smaller barrages at Zifta, the apex of the Nile Delta, and Asyut in central Egypt.64 The Egyptian engineers trained in this period learned a Nile produced by the British, a change from two decades earlier when British engineers struggled to master the river and its irrigation. Isma‘il Sirri exemplified this trajectory, even if he found success at the ministry earlier than other Egyptian engineers. In 1889, Sirri was an assistant to the inspector of irrigation in the Fourth Circle.65 Three years later, he was promoted to inspector of the Girga region.66 In 1909, after twenty years of managing the Nile under the direction of British engineers, Sirri became the minister of public works.67 A reciprocal relationship bound expertise to environment: beginning in the nineteenth century, a new profession of engineering played a primary role in constructing the Nile River. Moving forward, the materialities of this river helped to shape the parameters and practices of knowledge in the field of irrigation engineering in Egypt.

The Downstream Landscape of Value The strong men who undertook the construction of the Aswan dam will not stand wavering and undecided when the whole country has fully made up its mind. They know well that when all this money is lying practically buried and almost barren, the Nile is pouring its surplus waters uselessly and unprofitably into the Mediterranean, surplus waters capable of being stored and converted into liquid gold. —William Willcocks68

The dam’s construction, and the vision of centralized Nile agriculture with which it was associated, enabled the emergence of a new geography of irrigation marked by distinct notions of value. During the first decade of the twentieth century, perennial irrigation moved south from the Nile Delta into central Egypt, and an irrigation frontier emerged at the town of Dayrut in the province of Asyut. The state provided perennial irrigation to regions to the north of this frontier; in the late spring and early summer, the new reservoir formed by Khazan Aswan supplied that irrigation water. Most of the land to the south of the frontier continued to practice basin irrigation and flood-based agriculture, with the exception of the agricultural lands administered by the Egyptian Sugar Company, the subject of the next chapter. The availability of more irrigation water also facilitated

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the reclamation of agricultural land. Following the dam’s completion, a number of companies formed to reclaim land, especially in the Nile Delta, where the value of land was highest. Hampered by faulty techniques, these schemes struggled at first but eventually became more successful.69 The purpose of the smaller weir at Asyut, also completed in 1902, was to raise the level of the Ibrahimiyya Canal and provide summer irrigation water to central Egypt. The conversion of central Egypt to perennial irrigation also necessitated the digging of new networks of canals. In the short years that followed the dam’s completion, the state directed a large-scale excavation project in this region.70 This work began in the province of Asyut and then moved north through the provinces of Minya, Bani Suwayf, and Giza.71 By the end of 1903, the Public Works Ministry had converted approximately 170,000 acres of land in central Egypt from basin to perennial irrigation.72 However, an increase in the value of land in the region slowed the progress of conversion. The government needed to purchase land to dig new irrigation canals. In anticipation of its conversion, land became more expensive and even the state paid higher prices. In 1903, Cromer complained that as a result of the price increase “the work will not, however, be nearly finished in 1904. Further grants will be necessary in 1905, and possibly in subsequent years.”73 The price of labor also rose because of the increased demand that resulted from the spread of year-round agriculture.74 The sale of the properties that had once belonged to Khedive Isma‘il’s private estates and those of his family, the Daira Sanieh, helped to fuel the rise of land values in central Egypt and the thirst for more irrigation water. A colonial commission, the Daira Sanieh Commission, had managed the estates since 1878, when the khedive had been forced to forfeit them as compensation for his ever-spiraling debt, one of the topics explored in the next chapter. When he agreed to fund the construction of the dam, Ernest Cassel purchased the estates with a group of local investors and formed the Daira Sanieh Land Company, whose charge was to sell the properties and use the proceeds to repay the loans against which the estates had been pledged before these loans came due in 1905.75 The businessmen would then share whatever profits remained with the government.76 As part of this arrangement, Cassel provided the colonial administration with a £500,000 loan to help finance its military campaign in Sudan.77 Cassel’s purchase of the Daira Sanieh was further evidence of his investment in the geographies of the perennial Nile. In a familiar turn, he approached William Willcocks to serve as the managing director for the



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Daira Sanieh Land Company. While the company did not anticipate selling the former estates before 1905, buyers began to make offers earlier, even though they were not permitted to take possession of land for a number of years. The portion of these lands that had been associated with Isma‘il’s ventures in sugarcane was perennially irrigated. Still more would gain access to year-round water as a result of the government’s project to extend perennial irrigation into central Egypt. When the offers started to arrive, the company organized a cadastral survey, divided land into individual plots, and arranged for their sale.78 The territories of the former Daira Sanieh became those of an ascendant class of large landowners.79 Wealthy individuals, some of them foreign, purchased the bulk of the Daira properties. Members of the royal family were among these buyers.80 While some, in particular those from Isma‘il’s branch, lost land when the Daira Sanieh Commission took control of the estates, the royal family continued to be the largest single landholder in Egypt.81 Speculators also purchased plots to resell for a profit.82 Willcocks claimed that before selling land to the public the company had approached local villagers. If after six months they opted not to purchase the land, the company then offered the property to the public through timed auctions in which the first financially secure bidder to make an offer won the bid.83 In 1904, Willcocks reported that the company sold some properties to villagers in Armant in Egypt’s south. Many villagers in this region had lost land during the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of Mehmed Ali’s punitive land seizures.84 The purchases in Armant, however, were exceptional. While the Daira Sanieh and the Crédit Foncier, the mortgage bank that facilitated many purchases, offered loans, the institutions catered to the wealthy.85 Most peasants were unable to “stand security,” or guarantee their financial stability as potential buyers.86 Between October of 1905 and March of 1906, owners took possession of 160,000 acres of new land, two years ahead of the original schedule.87 By 1906, the Daira Sanieh Company had sold the whole of its properties and paid off the remaining balance on its loan.88 The profits from the sales amounted to more than £E 6 million. After they split the profits with the government, the company’s investors walked away with at least £E 3 million.89 The sale of the Daira Sanieh helped to intensify the thirst for more irrigation water. Two years after the dam was complete, Willcocks reported that demand for irrigation water exceeded the supply made available by

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the new reservoir and that the government had been forced to refuse new applications for water.90 Moreover, not all of Egypt’s cultivable land was planted, which posed a problem for a state dependent on the proceeds of the land tax.91 In May of 1907, the government began a project to heighten the dam by five meters, which more than doubled the holding capacity of its reservoir.92 Engineers at the Public Works Ministry had never been satisfied with the reduction in the dam’s height that had resulted from the controversy over the submersion of the Philae Temple. The demand for more irrigation water finally triumphed over the opposition of those concerned about the threat that the reservoir posed to the temple.93 As with the original dam, the government did not open this project for bids but again awarded the contract to Messrs. Aird and Co. of London without an adjudication process.94 The ministry had also contracted with the firm to build a barrage at Isna to improve the irrigation of basins during flood in those regions that lay south of the irrigation frontier.95 Despite enthusiasm at the Public Works Ministry, some engineers had concerns about the safety of raising the dam. Engineers debated how masonry dams, like that at Aswan, bore stress. Mathematicians Karl Pearson and L. W. Atcherly argued that the prevailing methods of figuring stress on gravity masonry dams failed to account for all of its possible expressions and consequently that these dams were more vulnerable to compromises in their construction than originally thought.96 Benjamin Baker, who again served as consulting engineer for the project, worried about the integrity of the dam, as the ongoing problem of downstream erosion and the failure of several endeavors to mitigate it made the possibility of catastrophic failure all too real.97 The project to raise the dam was an experiment in engineering played out on the scale of Egypt. While Baker eventually concluded that Pearson and Atcherly’s theory of stress did not correctly model the function of masonry dams, he continued to worry. Multiple proposals for plans to add height to the dam were considered.98 William Willcocks and William Garstin advocated adding twenty feet of new masonry to the existing base of the dam.99 Concerned about the effect of temperature differentials on the integrity of the structure, Baker proposed building an extension downstream and keeping it separate from the dam until both reached the same temperature before grouting them together.100 Baker’s plan took into account that, since 1902, the temperature changes to which the dam was subject had caused eightytwo cracks to appear in the dam.101 Baker passed away in May 1907 in the



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early stages of the project, and Murdoch MacDonald, who had served as an assistant engineer during the dam’s construction and was its resident engineer, took over.102 MacDonald opted to follow Baker’s proposal.103 On December 23, 1912, Khazan Aswan was inaugurated a second time, with its holding capacity more than doubled.104 The project to heighten the dam provided the opportunity for further repairs, and the dam was again thickened to protect against erosion. Of the 5.3 million cultivable feddans in Egypt, 3.3 million now had access to perennial irrigation.105 MacDonald, who had graduated from his post as consulting engineer to become undersecretary of state for public works in 1912, reported that water for summer crops was available to all of the land that lay between Cairo and Asyut.106 Between 1879 and 1913, the amount of land planted with cotton almost doubled.107 A graduated terrain of value marked agricultural land: land in the Delta was the most valuable and that in basin-irrigated southern Egypt was the least.108 The landscape of value that colonial engineers, administrators, and capitalists envisioned had been established, and the “liquid gold” to which Willcocks had referred flowed from the reservoir through new networks of irrigation canals into the coffers of the state and the pockets of those who grew cotton.

The Material Path of National Modernity In the spring of 1919, protest erupted in Egypt. In the aftermath of World War I, many Egyptian nationalists assumed that Egypt would be rewarded with independence for its significant contributions to the British war effort. When they had attempted to send an Egyptian delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference only to be refused by the British, the nationalist Wafd party spearheaded a political campaign to demand independence for Egypt and an agrarian revolt erupted. While the British eventually quashed the protests, their control of Egypt remained tenuous and contested. As the conflict over Egypt’s political status raged, controversy unfolded concerning the allocation of the waters of the Nile River. Before the outbreak of World War I, construction had begun in Sudan on the Gezira agricultural scheme. The scheme was located southeast of Khartoum at the intersection of the Blue and White Niles. The British textile industry was enthusiastic about the possibility that the region would become one of the largest cotton-growing areas in the world.109 Murdoch MacDonald, undersecretary of state for the Public Works Ministry, referred to the area as a “second delta,” as its size rivaled that of the Nile Delta.110 When the

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war ended and British interest in the project revived, the Gezira scheme became a source of discontent for Egyptian nationalists. The publication of new work outlining British plans on the Nile fueled the simmering conflict over the Gezira scheme. In 1919, MacDonald published Nile Control Works: Note on a Series of Control Works to Regulate the Irrigation Water Supply of the Nile Valley, which outlined British plans for the construction of future irrigation works on the Nile River, most of which were to be located in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Of the projects he proposed, it was the construction of a dam at Sennar in Sudan to provide the Gezira scheme with irrigation water that was of most concern to Egyptian nationalists because of its potential to reduce Egypt’s share of the Nile.111 The controversy served as a reminder of what many Egyptians had long recognized but refused to accept: the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium that ruled Sudan was not a joint project but rather a flimsy pretense for British rule of Sudan. Sudan’s status was a thorn in the side of some Egyptian nationalists, who believed the country their rightful colonial possession. As nationalist opposition raged, a conflict over the technical aspects of MacDonald’s work developed. MacDonald had argued that the irrigation works he proposed would not threaten Egypt’s supply of irrigation water. William Willcocks and Lieutenant Colonel M. Ralston Kennedy disagreed. Kennedy argued that MacDonald had falsified his measurements of Nile flow during the lowest year included in the study.112 Willcocks’s issues with the report were manifold: he accused MacDonald of “producing inflated figures for Nile shortages in order to minimize the fear of future water shortages in Egypt, of overestimating the discharge of the Blue Nile, and of being wrong about the periods of river surplus and shortage in Egypt.”113 Never one to downplay his own contributions, Willcocks appealed to “the instincts of every fair minded man in the British Empire, and to the intelligence of every man the world over” when he published his rebuttal entitled The Nile Projects.114 As the battle over Egypt’s political status raged, Willcocks’s text and his stance vis-à-vis MacDonald became fodder for Egyptian nationalists.115 In the midst of this conflict, lower than usual supplies in the reservoir at Aswan fueled rumors that the Public Works Ministry was withholding water in order to demonstrate the necessity of the irrigation works that it had proposed.116 The Public Works Ministry attempted to assuage nationalist fears. In 1920, the ministry published a revision of MacDonald’s original work, but Egyptians continued to worry about British plans in Sudan.117 In an effort to lessen their concerns, the British formed the Nile Projects Commission to



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evaluate MacDonald’s publications and their critiques. Composed without a single Egyptian member, the commission stood by MacDonald, concluding that the criticisms leveled against him were baseless.118 In an attempt to clear his name, MacDonald brought Willcocks and Kennedy up on charges in British consular court, where Willcocks was convicted of slander. Despite his success in court, MacDonald was forced to leave his post as undersecretary of state for public works in 1921.119 Willcocks was comparatively unfazed; the Ministry of Finance complained of his attendance at a celebration for the king’s birthday held at the British Residency shortly after his conviction. More substantially, he continued to lobby the Egyptian government concerning the dangers of the proposed irrigation works in Sudan.120 When the British occupation of Egypt formally ended and a new regime was established in 1923, the Nile remained a zone of contestation, with Egypt’s position as the country furthest downstream being exploited by the British.121 In the period between the First and Second World Wars, the British continued to exercise undue, even coercive, influence in Egypt and maintained control over key facets of Egypt’s sovereignty.122 However, new fault lines marked the relationship between Britain and Egypt. An evolution in political status gave Egyptian politicians a means to contest British claims. Irrigation became a national issue under the new Egyptian regime, its claim on the waters of the Nile one prong of a nationalist position. The dawn of a new political era paved the way for Egyptian engineers to ascend to positions of authority. In 1917, among thirteen inspectors of irrigation in Egypt and Sudan, only four were Egyptian.123 Most Egyptian engineers were trapped in lower-level positions from which they directed irrigation in the field.124 With the formation of a new regime, the public works minister was no longer subject to the dictates of occupation authorities and the British undersecretary of state for public works, and Egyptians began to replace the British engineers who had dominated high-level positions. Despite a shift in the national identities of high-ranking irrigation engineers, the forms of knowledge and environmental imagination that guided the work of the ministry did not undergo a radical transformation. The river that Egyptians inherited, the river on which they honed their craft, had been built under British rule. Egyptian engineers had learned to conceptualize and administer the Nile through the practices, infrastructure, and notions of value that coalesced during the colonial period. Nationalist engineering sought to claim this river for Egypt and challenge the racial hierarchies of expertise that had prevailed during the occupation.

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That Egypt’s economy continued to depend on cash crop agriculture, cotton in particular, left it vulnerable to the British, who continued to control the lands that bordered the Nile to Egypt’s south. Independence for Egypt, even if circumscribed, meant that Britain and Egypt viewed the Nile River at different geographic scales: the Egyptian government sought to secure its access to irrigation and protect its agriculture, while the British viewed the river from the vantage point of their empire in East Africa.125 In 1925, the British went ahead and built the dam at Sennar that had caused so much conflict six years before. Egyptian prime minister Ahmad Ziwar complained that the dam violated Britain’s agreement with Egypt that the development of irrigation in Sudan should not harm Egyptian irrigation or interfere with the construction of future works on the Egyptian portion of the Nile.126 As conflict over the Nile raged, the Nile Water Commission was formed to negotiate between Egypt’s interests and those of the British presence in Sudan. Unlike the body that the British had formed less than a decade earlier to determine the integrity of MacDonald’s work, a representative of the Egyptian government served on this commission, in addition to a British representative from the Sudan administration and an international member.127 As Britain moved ahead with its plans on the Nile, the Egyptian government began to explore its own schemes. In 1928, it invited an international commission to Egypt to assess the safety and technical aspects of raising Khazan Aswan a second time, which would allow for the extension of perennial irrigation to another one million acres of land.128 Khazan Aswan had become a natural fact of the Egyptian agricultural landscape, and perennial irrigation a technology not to undo but to appropriate. Following the commission’s recommendations, the Egyptian government moved ahead with the project and planned for the remodeling and strengthening of the barrages at Asyut, Isna, and the apex of the Nile Delta.129 A new barrage was also built at Naj‘ Hamadi, between Aswan and Isna, to improve basin irrigation in Egypt’s deep south and to protect against sharaqi during years of low flood. This barrage had first been proposed nearly a decade before.130 As the project moved forward, the British and Egyptian governments came to an agreement regarding the distribution of the Nile. In May 1929, in an exchange of notes referred to as the “Nile Waters Agreement,” Egypt was guaranteed the necessary quantity of water to irrigate its five million acres under perennial irrigation. The two governments also agreed that Egypt’s irrigation needs would continue to take priority over those of Sudan and that upstream works that would interfere with Egypt’s access to the Nile should not be constructed.131



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When the project began to heighten the dam a second time, the echoes of past infrastructure projects were strong. The firms hired to do the work of construction were British. The Egyptian government signed contracts with Sir John Norton-Griffiths for the masonry work on the dam and again with Ransomes and Rapier for its ironwork. In a surprising turn, the government also hired MacDonald as the consulting engineer for the projects at Aswan, Isna, and Asyut. His long history as one of the dam’s engineers apparently outweighed past controversies. The project, which would earn the name “the Aswan Dam fiasco,” was troubled from the start. On September 19, 1930, the Egyptian prime minister Isma‘il Sidqi was informed that Sir John Norton-Griffiths had exhausted his financial resources. As a result of the global economic situation, support from his financial backers was not forthcoming.132 Norton-Griffiths requested that the Egyptian government provide the funds necessary to complete construction.133 He complained that his firm had encountered many problems resulting from what he claimed was the incompetency of the resident engineer and his staff. The resident engineer, Ahmad Khairy, was Egyptian, as was much of his staff.134 The British Residency wrote to the Foreign Office to report that Sidqi was prepared to cancel the contract with Norton-Griffiths if he was unable to provide the government with financial guarantees. The Residency expressed great concern that when the matter went public it would harm “the prestige of British engineering in particular, and British prestige in general.”135 Funds ran dry by the end of the month. MacDonald’s son, who worked on the staff of the resident engineer, telegrammed to report that the laborers employed to do the work of construction could not last any longer without payment. He inquired whether he had permission to offer the government’s assurance of payment so that local shopkeepers would extend them credit.136 Another letter described how the engineering staff, faced with “restive laborers,” was “very anxious.”137 In the end, tragedy intervened when, in the midst of negotiations, Sir John Norton-Griffiths committed suicide.138 Neither was MacDonald free from controversy. Before work on the dam began, an international commission had been formed to offer technical recommendations for the project. MacDonald departed from what had been agreed upon, and the departures were significant enough that the American member of the commission, Colonel Hugh Cooper, wrote to the Egyptian minister of public works Ibrahim Fahmy to recommend that instructions for all future work be submitted to its other two members before being allowed to

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proceed.139 Norton-Griffiths had also complained that MacDonald had been largely absent from the work site.140 After the death of Norton-Griffiths, the Egyptian government began to consider new contracting firms. MacDonald was similarly absent from Egypt during these negotiations, which did nothing to redeem him in the eyes of the government. While they would eventually terminate his contract, arguing that his plans differed from those of the Public Works Ministry, MacDonald’s dismissal hinged on the appointment of an engineer to replace him.141 Fahmy worried that as MacDonald was the vice president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, professional etiquette would prevent another qualified civil engineer from accepting his position.142 Egypt’s political status might have changed, but the dominance of British engineers in the field of public works persisted. The Egyptian government eventually chose Topham, Jones, and Railton as the new contractor.143 The firm had a relationship with one of Egypt’s most important businessmen of the period, Muhammad ‘Abbud Pasha. Educated at the University of Glasgow, ‘Abbud began his professional career as an engineer, working with William Willcocks on the construction of the Euphrates Dam in Ottoman Iraq. During World War I, he helped build the railroad that was constructed in Syria and Palestine.144 ‘Abbud’s turn toward business began in 1924 when he obtained a concession for the digging and dredging of government irrigation canals in Egypt.145 In the period that followed, his business interests, specifically those in public works, proliferated. By the early 1930s, when he stepped in to fund the completion of the project to heighten the dam, ‘Abbud was involved in every public works project sponsored by the Egyptian state.146 Despite its relationship with ‘Abbud, the choice of Topham, Jones, and Railton maintained the stranglehold of British civil engineering over Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure. The British engineers employed by the firm were plentiful at the construction site. They fondly recalled games of golf and billiards and evenings of dance and drink. Haggis was even served for a celebration of St. Andrews Day among Scotsmen.147 More significantly, Topham, Jones, and Railton was a contractor of British Empire. A cartoon sketched by its engineers depicts its resident director, H. Croft, holding a bag of money labeled “Aswan” above a “T J & R” cache, containing additional sacks of money printed with the names of two other dams. Croft is reaching for another sack labeled “Gebel Awlia.”148 A poem composed by these same engineers made a similar point: “We shall rest and, faith, we shall need it, get leave for a fortnight or two. Till the

“The Second Heightening of the Aswan Dam: A Souvenir.” Courtesy of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), London. FIGURE 6. 

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contract for Gebel Awlia shall call us to work anew.”149 Egyptian public works remained entrenched within the imperial circuits of expertise that traversed the British Empire. While British expertise had not yet been jettisoned from Egypt, Egyptian engineers deployed other means of staking their claim to the river. Like the technocrats of the colonial period, they authored texts that chronicled the history of Nile irrigation, texts that were substantially different from those composed by the British engineers of an earlier era. In 1916, before the occupation had come to an end, Amin Sami, an engineer by training and government bureaucrat by trade, began publishing the encyclopedic Taqwim al-Nil, or Almanac of the Nile. The project stretched for two decades, ending in 1936. Taqwim al-Nil is an expansive presentation of history and historical sources. It includes a number of documents unavailable elsewhere, and, like the reports of the Public Works Ministry, they present measurements of the Nile River, their fact and volume an argument that the quantitative management of the river long predated the British. When Sami began to write, newer forms of historical writing had replaced established Arabic genres like the khitat that influenced the structure of Ali Mubarak’s text.150 Taqwim al-Nil was a hybrid of past and present. Yoav Di-Capua reads the texts as “an attempt to fuse the khitat genre, with the statistical turn of the British colonial administration.”151 While a particular historical arch framed colonial accounts of Nile irrigation, Sami’s narrative of the river dates to the rise of Islam in the seventh century. His account includes the work of British colonial engineers but does not lionize their work like English-language accounts of Egyptian irrigation. Sami’s texts offer a rich narrative of Egypt’s history, with his inclusion of the Nile being an argument for the impossibility of disentangling this history from that of the river. Taqwim al-Nil claimed the river when Egypt had just begun to wrestle with Britain over its control. Like Mubarak’s text, it also served as textual evidence—and a performance—of the deep environmental and historical knowledge that Egyptian engineers possessed. Once more, the text offered an opportunity to subvert the racial hierarchies of technical expertise that continued to haunt irrigation engineering in Egypt. The year after the publication of Taqwim al-Nil had ended, the Egyptian minister of public works Husayn Sirri published Al-Rayy fi Misr: Mukhtasar ‘an Tarikhihi wa Tatawaratihi (Irrigation in Egypt: A summary of its history and developments). Sirri was the son of former public works minister Isma‘il Sirri. Husayn Sirri had been educated in Egypt before



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being sent to France to finish his education during World War I. His career included a range of varied appointments to the different ministries of state. In addition to serving as minister of public works more than once, he was appointed minister of finance, communications, foreign minister, and minister of the interior.152 Sirri’s text is rather more straightforward than Taqwim al-Nil. Al-Rayy fi Misr serves an introduction to the history of irrigation in Egypt. It includes photos and descriptions of the barrages that punctuated the Egyptian portions of the Nile River. The text demonstrates the Egyptian government’s appropriation of perennial irrigation and the infrastructure that enabled it, leaving no doubt as to the relationship that bound perennial irrigation to national—if not nationalist—agriculture. As in Taqwim al-Nil, Sirri treats the contributions of the British occupation, but within a longer trajectory of irrigation engineering.153 While British engineers continued to dominate large infrastructure projects like the heightening of the dam, within Egypt technocrats developed means of contesting the necessary location of technical expertise in the figure in the European expert.

Upstream Erasures With the second heightening of Khazan Aswan, the Egyptian government also appropriated the forms of erasure that this structure enabled. The completion of the project produced a third wave of displacements for the Nubian populations who lived to its south.154 The Nubians who had been displaced during the dam’s construction and first heightening had adopted a range of strategies to cope. Some had opted to rebuild their houses further up the steep granite hills that bordered the Nile south of Aswan, while others had relocated. Those who remained and farmed their land when the waters of the reservoir were released and their fields were exposed were forced to choose between cultivating a fast-growing summer crop or a fodder crop before the flood arrived and covered their lands once more. This was a far cry from a recent past in which Nubians had cultivated a rich array of irrigated crops that included wheat, barley, lupines, kidney beans, and maize.155 As abbreviated agricultural cycles drastically limited productivity, a stream of Nubian men traveled north to search for work. In the first half of the twentieth century, Nubia became a land sustained by remittances. As the geography of the perennial Nile expanded, so did the displacement of historical Nubia.156 In June of 1907, when the first project to raise

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the dam began, the government offered those who would be displaced a paltry two feddans of land in the area of Dongola, in the north of Sudan, as compensation. The displaced communities refused the offer, and the minister of public works remarked that these communities wanted to remain close to their land.157 In March of 1911, when the project as well as the implementation of a new land tax code were nearing completion, the Egyptian Council of Ministers reduced the taxation rate for 1,378 feddans of agricultural land in the villages of Dabud, Dahmit, and Ambirkab, in anticipation of a decline in its productivity. Even the government remarked that the crops of animal fodder that could be grown when fields were exposed by the release of reservoir waters were “of little value.”158 The second heightening of the dam produced even larger displacements, which extended beyond Egypt to the region of Wadi Halfa in northern Sudan.159 The Public Works Ministry estimated that forty Nubian villages would be submerged by the newly expanded reservoir, eleven year-round and the remaining twenty-nine for a significant portion of the year.160 The displacements that followed the second heightening were distinct not only because of their scale; they happened at the hands of a quasi-independent Egyptian state, signaling the territorial vision that marked the nationalist imagination. They also occurred during a period of rich debate about what it meant to be Egyptian and who did—or did not—fit that category.161 In February 1933, a year before the enlarged reservoir was filled for the first time, a debate occurred in the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies concerning the proposed compensation scheme for the displaced, the first evidence of an internal government debate, or any controversy at all, regarding the fate of Egypt’s Nubian population.162 One of the members of the chamber, Wahib Doss, who belonged to Egypt’s landholding and capitalist elite, observed that while the heightening of the dam “will benefit all the inhabitants of Egypt, it is a catastrophe for the inhabitants of the region of the reservoir.”163 In preparation for the displacements, the government organized a committee, composed of its own representatives and the senator and deputy from the Nubian village of al-Durr, the historical capital of the region, to assess the desires of the displaced populations.164 Doss argued that the compensation scheme proposed by the government represented a flagrant injustice for the displaced, who would lose their property and source of income.165 In his objection, he focused on two issues. He criticized the government proposition to compensate the displaced with state lands in the provinces of Aswan, Girga, Qina, and Asyut, arguing that



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these lands were only small parcels and not suitable for the resettlement of a large group or community. He also objected to the composition of the government commission formed to evaluate complaints concerning compensation, which was composed of a judge, a representative of the Ministry of Finance, and a member of the local provincial council. Doss argued that such a commission was biased toward the government and would not be just to the claimants. He recommended that the judicial representative be invested with more authority in determining judgments, or that a proper tribunal be formed to handle complaints. Finally, Doss argued that, in addition to its offer of payment in kind or a combination of land and cash as compensation, the government should offer the claimants the option of a cash payment.166 Fellow chamber member Tawfik Doss supported Wahib Doss’s position. In response to Doss’s critique, Muhammad Shafiq, then minister of public works, reported that in order to complete the process more quickly, the ministry had opted to disregard the existing protocols that dictated the expropriation of land for public works. He argued that a formal expropriation process, especially the evaluation of complaints, would have taken years and that the commission, as constituted, balanced the interests of the government with those of the inhabitants. The appointed judge was intended to serve as an arbiter between the local representative and the representative from the Ministry of Finance. In Shafiq’s assessment, the speedier process safeguarded the interests of the displaced and those of the nation. As a concession to Doss, the minister agreed to offer full cash payments as one compensation option.167 The debate in the Egyptian Chamber of Deputies made clear the Egyptian government’s view of the Nubian community. While he advocated on their behalf, Doss saw Nubians as distinct from other Egyptians, arguing that the displaced would be robbed of “their native soil,” which they considered “their own small country.”168 His was an argument for a distinct Nubian national identity. Representatives of the Nubian community took a similar tack in their opposition to the Egyptian government’s proposal. Not only did the Nubians begin to imagine themselves as a community in national terms, but the material realities of the state’s construction of infrastructure physically marginalized them from the national community that was Egypt. In February 1933, the same month of the debate in the Chamber of Deputies, Muhammad Jabr ‘Abd al-Salih wrote to the British Residency on behalf of approximately 150,000 Nubians who

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lived in the northern regions of historical Nubia, the lands that stretched between Aswan and Wadi Halfa. ‘Abd al-Salih attempted to capitalize on the new division between Egypt and Britain, and Sudan’s colonial status, to undermine the policies of the newly independent Egyptian state, arguing that it was the charge of the British high commissioner to protect the rights of the Nubian community.169 ‘Abd al-Salih’s protests were for naught. During the winter of 1933–34, the Aswan reservoir was filled for the first time with its added height and holding capacity, stretching from Aswan to Abu Simbel to its south.170 Some families decided to relocate to regions north of Aswan, near the town of Isna in particular, where they purchased land. Three Nubian communities opted to move to the region of Kom Ombo, developed and farmed by the Wadi Kom Ombo Company and the Egyptian Sugar Company.171 As in the past, still other communities expressed an interest in moving to higher ground and farming their land during the brief periods of exposure. For those who remained, compensation payments allowed them to build larger houses near the sites of their old residences. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, the dam and the political economic regimes with which it was associated progressively drowned what had been the historical homeland of Egypt’s Nubian population, an inundation made complete when the Aswan High Dam was sealed in 1964. They also extended into Sudan, creating another area of debate over constructions on the Nile. In 1932, when the dam was nearing completion, negotiations between the Egyptian government and the British Residency concerning the proposed compensation scheme in Sudan began. The Egyptian prime minister Isma‘il Sidqi argued that it was impossible to precisely determine the areas that would be flooded and the loss of productivity that would result from the submersion of farmland in advance as a result of the difficulty of predicting the “backwater curve” and that the best approach would be to determine compensation after the reservoir had filled and several years had passed.172 The displacements of the second heightening were the material effects of claiming the perennial Nile for the Egyptian nation. This nation was marked by a territorial vision that included a particular construction and practice of the Nile River, its production marked by erasures. This chapter has argued that the dam made permanent the vision of the perennial Nile that was the fantasy of British colonial officials in the late nineteenth century. The interests of the colonial regime were intertwined with those of colonial



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capitalists as they worked together to produce a more expansive perennial Nile during the last two decades of the occupation. Its construction was that of a new material object of expertise, which framed the objectives of irrigation engineering and the nationalist imaginary in Egypt in the decades that followed. The next chapter follows the waters of the perennial Nile and the capital that built it into central and southern Egypt to explore the assemblage of effects that constituted authority in the region and their relationship to the perennial Nile River and the capitalists who helped to build it.

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3 Beyond the Frontier Negotiating the Geography of Authority in Egypt’s South Upper Egypt differs entirely in its aspect from the Delta. Instead of the boundless plains of bright green cultivation, dotted all over with villages and palm groves, and intersected by canals, you find yourself in a valley of ever-varying width, bounded right and left by fawn-coloured flat-topped hills, sometimes sufficiently elevated to rank as mountains, they are entirely devoid of vegetation and form the home of the eagle, the vulture, the jackal and hyæna, and of the gazelle; there abound also in their recesses a ground game of snakes and lizards of various kinds. Between the hill-oases and the river are level plains of the richest verdure covered with wheat, beans and fodder crops. ­—Henry Villiers Stuart1

three months after the completion of Khazan Aswan, a French accountant was murdered in Egypt’s deep south. Henri Esnault worked for the Egyptian Sugar Company in the southern Egyptian village of Naj‘ Hamadi. Six hundred miles south of Cairo, the village was the site of the largest and most technically advanced of the company’s mills. The murder occurred at night while Esnault slept in a company housing complex guarded by twenty-five members of the local police. Potential suspects included these guards and the laborers who worked at the mill. The sizable community of Europeans who lived in Naj‘ Hamadi were set on edge. Despite the active interest of French diplomats in resolving the crime, the case eventually went cold.2 Why was a French accountant killed in rural Egypt, and why could the case not be solved? To approach these questions, we must consider the region in which the murder took place and its unique history of colonial IN SEPTEMBER 1902,

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economy. For those with an eye on cotton, the region in which Esnault met his end, southern Egypt or al-Sa‘id might well have been a distant periphery. The waters of the new reservoir did not irrigate the region, nor did it produce significant quantities of Egypt’s primary commodity. And yet the areas of southern Egypt where sugarcane was cultivated were very much part of Egypt’s colonial economy and the territories of the perennial Nile. In this chapter, I explore the practice and experience of authority that dominated the areas of central and southern Egypt that cultivated sugarcane. In central Egypt, the formation, administration, and sale of the Daira Sanieh, discussed in chapter 2, were central to the experience and negotiation of authority. While much of southern Egypt remained under basin irrigation through the middle of the twentieth century, select tracts of the region were perennially irrigated through private interests associated with the colonial capitalists who built the dam and arranged for the sale of the Daira Sanieh. These capitalists were the architects of the perennial Nile in sugarcane-producing regions of Egypt’s south. The histories of these regions demonstrate that within Egypt’s colonial economy authority was an assemblage, its composition evolving, geographically variable, and rooted in the material environments that framed agricultural production.

Secondary Sugarcane The formation of Egypt’s modern sugarcane industry date to the rule of Mehmed Ali. Egypt’s south had long been a site for the production of sugar, which took the form of syrup for local consumption and crystals for export.3 During the period of Ottoman rule that preceded Mehmed Ali’s rise to power, the residents of Istanbul prized Egyptian sugar.4 The Pasha charged his son Ibrahim Pasha with the development of a modern sugar industry. In 1818, he opened a mill in the village of Rayramun, approximately three miles from the town of Mallawi in the region of Minya in central Egypt. Two other mills were subsequently built in the area.5 Between 1840 and 1845, four more mills were contracted, two in central Egypt and two in Egypt’s south at Armant and Farshut, the traditional center of Egyptian sugar production.6 Mehmed Ali chose two French firms, Pastré de Paris and Cail, to build his mills.7 The Cail firm had created the model of the usine centrale, which could process the produce of several plantations.8 Egypt’s viceroy was keen to emulate the modes through which sugar was produced in other areas of the globe. The mills in central Egypt were



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modeled after those in the Antilles, and an Englishman named Brimm directed the facility at Rayramun.9 At least two students from the missions that Mehmed Ali sent abroad studied sugar production. In 1826, ‘Umar al-Kumi, who had studied chemistry, traveled to France and the United States to learn distillery and sugar refining.10 Three years later, Ibrahim’s close friend and confidant ‘Umar Effendi went to England and Jamaica to study sugar production and recruit expertise.11 Caribbean cane also fed Egypt’s new sugar mills. ‘Umar Effendi returned from Jamaica carrying several new varieties of sugarcane, one of which came to be referred to as baladi (local) cane. Despite his efforts, the sugar produced at the new mills failed to capture the local market from French producers, and the industry floundered.12 As the inhabitants of Cairo, Alexandria, and the large towns of the Nile Delta acquired a taste for refined European sugar, that produced in Marseille and Trieste flooded the local market.13 Egypt’s sugar industry rebounded in the 1860s when Khedive Isma‘il turned once more to the commodity in an attempt to buoy the economy after the American Civil War ended and the price of cotton crashed. The khedive chose the royal Daira Sanieh estates, which encompassed the whole of the lands controlled by the viceroy and his family, as the site for his new sugarcane industry. While his predecessors, ‘Abbas and Sa‘id, had claimed land for themselves and their families, the holdings of Khedive Isma‘il were significantly larger. Isma‘il seized large parcels of land and tens of villages in one fell swoop for the property of the royal family.14 In the period of his rule, the Daira Sanieh came to include one-fifth of all cultivable land in Egypt.15 On the lands of his expansive estates, Isma‘il constructed a string of sugar mills, most of which lay in central Egypt in the regions of Minya and Asyut.16 Corvée labor built the mills, and the French engineer Jean-Baptiste Monnier, the chief engineer of the Daira Sanieh, oversaw their construction. Monnier had also worked for Mehmed Ali in his sugar mills.17 The construction of the mills came at a price.18 To finance his new industry, Khedive Isma‘il pledged the properties of the Daira Sanieh and the Daira Khassa as collateral for two loans, contracted in 1865 and 1870.19 A system of local agricultural railways to carry cane to mills crisscrossed the estates, and the Ibrahimiyya Canal was built to provide portions of the Daira Sanieh with irrigation water during the portions of the year in which the Nile was low. In 1874, Isma‘il extended Egypt’s railway south to Asyut to transport cane north.20

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Like his grandfather, Khedive Isma‘il chose the Cail firm to build the new mills.21 The founder and head of the company also discussed land tenure practices with the khedive. In 1868, Cail wrote to Draneht Pasha, an adviser to the khedive, to describe his organization of a land bank in the French colonies, the Crédit Foncier, to shield the fortunes of planters. He then advocated that the khedive adopt “a type of sharecropping” to organize cultivation on the Daira Sanieh and provided examples of other sites in the French Empire where large planters deployed this model.22 He was quick to assure Draneht that these suggestions were compatible with the existent structure of political authority and land tenure on the Daira Sanieh.23 Sugar production depended on the same combination of labor regimes that predominated in other regions of Egypt during the period. The Daira Sanieh possessed its own administration, diwan al-taftish, whose inspectors, mufattishin (sing. mufattish), were responsible for marshaling labor for harvest and work in the mills. The administration was established in 1870 to manage the Daira Sanieh and the Daira Khassa as they grew.24 The mufattishin presided over a labor force that included slaves, corvée laborers, and agricultural wage laborers.25 Peasants could fulfill their corvée obligation working on the estates.26 As indicated in the correspondence between Cail and Draneht Pasha, sharecroppers also cultivated its fields. For the mills, the khedive hired European supervisors to direct production.27 In a move reminiscent of other colonial contexts, Isma‘il also sought to safeguard the health of his laborers.28 In 1873, he sent the Italian Dr. Dacorogna to central Egypt to investigate the condition of the region’s hospitals, which Mehmed Ali had established in the 1840s.29 The bodily tax of laboring in Isma‘il’s sugar industry complemented that of military conscription for the inhabitants of the Daira Sanieh. On January 10, 1875, L. Rousseau, a supervisor in the mills of central Egypt, wrote to the khedive’s secretary to request 4,200 men to cut cane and unload agricultural railway cars.30 The state was levying soldiers for its campaigns in Sudan and the Horn of Africa, and Rousseau found himself short of workers to harvest cane in Minya and Samalut. He reported that he had already requested the largest possible number of laborers from the mufattish of Rawda and that the mufattishin at Fashn and Maghagha, in this same region, had already ordered harvest to begin, which meant more demand for labor. Work in sugarcane throughout the region had either slowed or ceased.31 The very next year would prove the beginning of the end of khedivial control on the estates. When Isma‘il’s financial woes began to catch up with



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him, his personal estates were caught up in the snare. In 1876, the director of the Armant mill, Gay-Lussac, returned after a long absence to discover that in response to new khedivial decrees the local mufattish had fired his European employees. In his letter to the khedive’s secretary Barrot Bey, GayLussac describes the wide-ranging operational difficulties that resulted from these dismissals. In closing, he tenders his own resignation.32 The decrees in question were likely issued in response to the formation of the Public Debt Commission and the budget tightening that it demanded. In the two years that followed, the khedive’s financial position did not improve. In 1877, an anemic flood caused widespread crop failure. A large flood the next year inundated agricultural land. Some regions of the south suffered famine, and returns on the Daira Sanieh, and Egyptian agriculture more widely, were decimated.33 Khedive Isma‘il was forced to forfeit his estates, and in 1877 a colonial commission, the Daira Sanieh Commission, took charge.34

The Tentacles of Colonial Authority Tasked with the repayment of the loans against which the khedive had promised his estates as collateral, the Daira Sanieh Commission had the mission of managing Isma‘il’s estates more profitably.35 The commission was made up of British, French, and Egyptian representatives who met weekly to approve, record, and oversee the numerous and varied operations of the estates. The commission leased land and collected rents. It oversaw the quantities of sugarcane delivered by cultivators to its mills, the operation of the mills, and the quantity and type of sugar that the Daira sold. When a new saccharimeter was needed to measure the concentration of the sugar solutions produced by the mills, the commission was called upon to approve the purchase. When a lost draft animal had to be replaced or trees needed cutting, the commission recorded and oversaw the execution those tasks.36 The assumption underlying the formation of the Daira Sanieh Commission was that the khedive, like the state, had mismanaged the estates and that if these were run more efficiently the profits that they produced would increase. Sugar was the most promising of the Daira Sanieh enterprises. The commission quickly sought to reorganize agricultural land to support its production. In 1880, it began a project to consolidate its holdings, selling off isolated pieces of land that the khedive and his family had acquired through his piecemeal accumulation of property. The commission had an eye toward maintaining those agricultural properties that were proximate

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to sugar mills.37 Gay-Lussac, the commission’s director general and likely the same individual who had once directed the Armant mill, advocated that it keep geographically contiguous lands in the regions of the Ibrahimiyya Canal, the Fayum oasis, Armant, and Matana.38 There is evidence that the commission was able to sell some of its outlying lands quickly. In 1878, the total agricultural lands owned by the Daira Sanieh amounted to 434,975 feddans, 328,445 feddans of which were in central and southern Egypt.39 Two years later, the estates owned 272,867 acres of land in these regions.40 Throughout the period of its administration, the sale of property to consolidate the estates and raise revenue continued.41 The commission’s takeover of the Daira Sanieh did not result in an immediate transformation of the labor regimes that supported sugar production. In 1883, when the occupation was just beginning, the British government dispatched Henry Villiers Stuart to Egypt to provide a thorough assessment of conditions in the country. In the report of his findings, Villiers Stuart expresses concern that despite a shift in its administration, the laborers that he interviewed in sugar mills reported being compelled to work: “We are taken by force to work on the sugar estates and in factories. Not one of us would go willingly. . . . Those of us who work inside the factory are kept there day and night. . . . The men off duty must sleep on the stone floor of the factory amidst the noise and heat.”42 Villiers Stuart concluded that although corvée had officially been abolished in factories, the labor that worked in the sugar mills was not quite free. While laborers were paid a paltry sum for their work, the small amounts that they earned were turned over to the shaykhs who organized their labor and who rarely, if ever, delivered the wages in question.43 The decision of the Daira Sanieh Commission to utilize interlocutors to manage work in the mills was reflective of a broader shift in policy. It also foreshadowed a similar shift at the Public Works Ministry in the short years that followed. When the commission assumed control, it declared its intention to move to a cultivation system in which it rented land to cultivators and withdrew from the administration of agricultural labor, retaining the authority to determine what was grown on the parcels of land that it let.44 It justified this approach by arguing that it would need to pay higher rates for labor than those the khedive had paid.45 In the period in which it transitioned to this new model, the commission’s efforts to direct cultivation floundered. Large swathes of agricultural land remained unplanted, including those that had grown sugarcane,



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demonstrating that an insufficient supply of irrigation water was not the only way that a piece of land might be rendered sharaqi. In 1875, sugarcane covered 65,650 feddans of agricultural land. That number dropped to 40,000 feddans by 1880. Two years later, just 20,000 feddans were planted with sugarcane.46 It was not only sugarcane that lost ground on the estates. In an 1882 letter to the Egyptian Council of Ministers, one of the commission’s officials stated that as a result of neglect large swathes of agricultural land were no longer cultivated.47 This decline in acreage threatened the profitability of the estates. Despite these challenges, the commission’s intention to move away from direct cultivation to a rental model was not universally popular. When the estates were the property of the khedive, mufattishin had been responsible for organizing cultivation and procuring labor. The commission’s plan to withdraw from the management of labor deprived these officials of one of their historical realms of influence, and some opposed the change.48 In 1884, when faced with a decline in the rental value of its properties in Fayum, the local mufattish argued that the commission should oversee the direct cultivation of these lands. The Daira’s director general resisted the suggestion, arguing that it was preferable to continue to lease these lands despite a decline in their rental value because difficulties recruiting labor had thwarted past efforts in the region to organize cultivation.49 In June of 1886, a member of the commission’s farming committee resigned on account of the Egyptian director, Khalil Pasha. The employee had worked as a mufattish in Minya, where sugarcane flourished before the Daira Sanieh Commission took charge of the estates. In his resignation, the inspector complained that because he insisted on renting the properties of the Daira rather than farming them directly, Khalil Pasha robbed the province of its “prodigious fertility.”50 While they were correct that the khedive was more successful in maintaining cultivation through the labor regimes that he employed, the objections of local mufattishin might have also stemmed from the loss of authority that they experienced with the end of the corvée labor system. One of the challenges that the commission faced was that the inhabitants of the Daira Sanieh did not always recognize its authority. In 1884, a mufattish in Gharbiyya solicited offers from peasants and village shaykhs to rent 2,417 feddans of agricultural land. When, after the contracts had been concluded, the commission decided to instead rent the land in question to two large investors, Ghazi Mustafa and Nasrallah Yusuf, who would be responsible for the collection of rent from the smaller parties, villagers and

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local shaykhs refused the arrangement, declaring that they would not pay rent to the large lessees.51 In 1890, the inhabitants of the village of Bayadiyya contested the status of forty-seven date palms that had been planted on a four-kirat piece of land located between the village’s trenches and its houses. When the commission issued a statement declaring that the aforementioned palms had been planted on the land after the organization of the Daira Sanieh, the villagers objected, arguing that the planting of the trees predated the formation of the Daira Sanieh and that they had always paid the date tax from these trees directly to the government, giving them claim to the land on which the palms were planted.52 The “owners” of the palms offered the commission a choice: they would be willing to purchase the land for a specified price even though they disagreed with the commission’s decree. Should the commission not accept their price, the villagers declared that they would continue as they had before, claiming usufruct rights to the land and paying the tax from the palms to the government.53 Egyptian state officials also read opportunity in the tenuousness of the Daira Sanieh Commission’s authority. Local officials in particular were sometimes reluctant, and at times unwilling, to obey its directives. In 1884, the commission’s director general complained of difficulties collecting rent because local officials had refused to aid in the process. In one incident, the minister of the interior distributed notices to local provincial governors, mudirin, requesting their assistance to no avail.54 In the district of Matay in Minya, a local mufattish was caught renting lands at less than half of the approved rate. The commission was upset by the low rent and by the tenants being given possession of the land without a lease.55 By the time the commission discovered the discrepancy, the tenants had already harvested a summer crop from the land and planted a winter crop. In 1886, the mufattish of Maghagha was written up for renting land to tenants who were in its debt at a rate representing a loss to the Daira Sanieh. After learning of the proposed leases, the commission ordered the local inspector to rent the land to nondebtors at a higher rate or arrange for its direct cultivation. As in the Matay case, the tenants had already assumed possession of the land and planted it. The commission ordered the seizure of the cultivated crops as a means of covering the missing taxes, complaining that the Daira Sanieh was losing money while peasants and mufattishin profited. The case from Maghagha references that from Matay to underscore the prevalence of this form of abuse among mufattishin.56 High-ranking officials of the commission also sought to turn its difficulties to their advantage: in 1886,



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a public scandal unfolded in which the Egyptian director of the Daira Sanieh Commission was caught offering land for rent at less than its value in exchange for bribes from tenants.57 In the 1890s, the management of the estates by the Daira Sanieh Commission became relatively more profitable. While it had run deficits throughout the previous decade, it ended the year for the first time with a surplus in 1891.58 The commission had also successfully transitioned to the administrative model that it outlined when it took control of the estates, renting the vast majority of its land instead of directly managing its cultivation. In 1891, it rented 95 percent of this land through contracts that ranged between three and six years, claiming that renters were mostly smallholders who could barely stand security.59 The 1892 sugarcane crop was the largest on record, and by the next year the estates were considered no longer a burden to the government but a source of profit.60 Beginning in 1896, the effects of revolution in Cuba meant increased demand for Egyptian sugar in the United States.61 When the Spanish-American War began in 1898, demand continued to rise, and in 1898–99 the surface area cultivated with sugarcane in Egypt expanded to a record high of 86,529 feddans.62 Labor conditions within its sugar mills also improved considerably. Upon his return to the region in 1895, Villiers Stuart reported that “the factory hands were paid regularly and well, and they engaged themselves voluntarily.”63 The fortunes of the Daira Sanieh Commission had finally turned a corner.

Sweet Capital When Ernest Cassel proposed that he purchase and sell off the properties of the Daira Sanieh, the proposition was a safe bet for the government, despite a relative upswing in the returns of the estates. Sugarcane was a fickle crop and its global market volatile. When its price dipped or a frost settled in, the profits that the estates produced plummeted. In his purchase of the estates, Cassel collaborated with a group of local businessmen with whom he worked closely in the years that followed. Raphael Suarès was one of these men. The Suarès family were Sephardic Jews who had come to Egypt in the early nineteenth century.64 Raphael Suarès was the leading force in the Qattawi–Suarès-de Manasce–Rolo group and Ernest Cassel’s business partner in Egypt. The origins of each family in this group were as moneychangers and lenders in Cairo’s Jewish quarter. By the late nineteenth century, each family presided over its own bank; these banks helped to direct European capital to investments in Egypt.65

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The construction of Khazan Aswan and the sell-off of the Daira Sanieh were only two pieces in a complex set of interlinking ventures that produced and profited from cash crop agriculture along the perennial Nile. In 1880, assisted by French capital, Suarès had helped to found the Crédit Foncier Égyptien; he also served as president of the institution. The bank mortgaged agricultural land to large landowners. During the sale of the Daira Sanieh properties, it was the Crédit Foncier that offered mortgage loans to wealthy buyers.66 In 1896, Suarès financed the construction of the railway line from Qina south to Aswan.67 The project began in 1896 and was slated to be completed the next year, just before the invasion of Sudan and the construction of Khazan Aswan, both of which relied heavily on this stretch of track.68 In 1898, Suarès and Cassel also founded the National Bank of Egypt. Sugarcane was similarly a venture of the Qattawi–Suarès-de Manasce– Rolo group. In 1881, the group built a refinery in Hawamdiyya, a town located in Giza, south of Cairo, to stem the flow of roughly processed, granulated Egyptian sugar to Europe for refining.69 A decade after its construction, the group began a series of corporate maneuvers that would cement its partnership with the French sugar company Raffinerie C. Say. Ernest “the sugar king” Cronier, the managing director of the Paris-based sugar company and the trustee of Henri Say’s estate, led the company’s expansion into Egypt in the hope of getting a leg up on its competitors in Marseille. Raffinerie C. Say, which specialized in the production of sugar from beets, was also looking to expand its investments in sugarcane. Cronier’s connection to the Qattawi–Suarès-de Manasce–Rolo might have dated to his education at the prestigious École des Ponts et Chaussées, the institution at which Auguste Boulé, who accompanied William Willcocks south to investigate sites for the dam, taught. Yusuf Qattawi also attended the school.70 In 1891, the Suarès group formed la Société Générale des Sucreries de la Haute-Egypte, in which Raffinerie C. Say held a third of the shares.71 The following year, it formed la Société des Sucreries-Raffinerie d’Egypte; C. Say again held a third of the shares.72 In 1897, the two aforementioned companies merged and la Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte—the Egyptian Sugar Company—was born.73 The Suarès brothers—Felix, Raphael, and Joseph—as well as Yusuf Qattawi, Moise Qattawi, Simon Rolo, and three French directors sat on the board of the new company.74 In the 1890s, the Egyptian Sugar Company built two new sugar mills. Completed in 1896, a mill at Shaykh Fadl in central Egypt replaced the old Daira Sanieh mill.75 The company built the mill at Naj‘ Hamadi in

Me dite rr ane an Se a

Nile

R iv er

Hawamdiyya Fayum

Canal

Cairo

Suez

Delta

Ni

le

Beni Suef Biba Maghagha Matay Shaykh Fadl Samalut Minya Abu Qurqas Rawda Rayramun Mallawi Asyut

Kharga Oasis

R e d

Balyana Qina Farshut Naj` Hamadi Dab`iyya Armant Luxor

Mat`ana Kum Umbu

Ni l

e

Ri

ve

r

Aswan

MAP 2.

Major towns and villages in central and southern Egypt.

Alternate transliterations include Bani Suwayf (Beni Suef) and Kom Ombo (Kum Umbu).

Se a

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1898. Prince Yusuf Kamal inaugurated the Naj‘ Hamadi mill, fittingly, as his expansive estates supplied it with much of its cane.76 To provide the regions of Naj‘ Hamadi and Farshut with perennial irrigation, Raphael Suarès founded la Société Egyptienne d’Irrigation in 1896.77 The Egyptian Sugar Company was not a large landowner in its early years, relying instead on independent cultivators to supply it with cane. Outside of Naj‘ Hamadi, smaller cultivators provided it with much of its cane.78 While the mills of the Daira Sanieh were concentrated in central Egypt, the fields and factories of the Egyptian Sugar Company stretched into Egypt’s deep south. The hallmarks of the nineteenth-century Ottoman-Egyptian state—conscription, direct taxation, and newly arduous corvée obligations— had been implemented first and most violently in this region.79 Its inhabitants rose in revolt on at least four occasions during the nineteenth century.80 Between 1820 and 1824, Ahmad al-Salah, a Sufi mystic, led forty thousand followers against the Pasha’s state.81 As punishment, the state seized land belonging to villages and added it to grain- and sugarcane-producing plantations managed by state bureaucrats.82 In the aftermath of al-Salah’s defeat, two other revolts erupted. In 1864, conflict flared once more under the leadership of Ahmad al-Salah’s son Ahmad al-Tayyib in the village of Salimiyya.83 When, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian Sugar Company began to expand its presence in southern Egypt, its peasants were among the poorest in the country. In 1883, Villiers Stuart reported: “I regret to state that the most obvious fact that met me everywhere in these southern provinces is that the population is pauperized to a serious extent, to such an extent as to deprive them of the means of developing the resources of their land; numbers are living at starvation point, their reserve funds drained away and exhausted.”84 With the abolition of corvée, many southern Egyptian peasants migrated north during the dry season of flood agriculture to work as wage laborers in the cotton-growing fields of the Nile Delta. By the late nineteenth century, wage labor gangs had emerged in which labor contractors brought southern Egyptian laborers north to work.85 Even following its turn away from corvée to clear and repair perennial canals, the Public Works Ministry continued to rely on this form of labor in the south to monitor the flood each year. Sugarcane cultivation was its own form of toil. Cultivators sowed the crop in February or March, before which soil needed to be tilled twice and each acre of land planted with 6,700 pounds of seed.86 From early summer through the middle of November, the plant was irrigated approximately



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every two weeks.87 Harvest began in the middle of December and lasted through March. Using hoes and long knives, laborers cut cane close to its root, its stems hard, tough, and thick as a broomstick. They then transported it to mills loaded on the backs of draft animals, often camels, and piled high on boats and narrow-gauge agricultural railways. As the sucrose quantity of cane degrades rapidly after cutting, mills were located in close proximity to fields. Finally, because cane, unlike cotton, remained in the ground for several years, cultivators were trapped: they could not easily shift to another crop to adjust to changes in the market, nor could they cultivate multiple crops each year on the same plot of land.88 After harvest, many sugarcane growers worked in mills. Laborer positions belonged to families rather than individuals, meaning that any individuals in a family, including children, could work in the mill.89 The labor season stretched from December to May, the mills were hot, the work was torturous.90 It is not a coincidence that in its New World context sugarcane was a crop labored over by slaves. In the mills of Egypt’s south, a racial divide marked the hierarchy of sugar production: southern Egyptian peasants performed the hard labor of processing cane while Europeans occupied clerical positions and supervisory roles. Many of the company’s European employees were French citizens, a small but significant community of whom resided in and around the company’s mills.91 Henri Esnault was one such individual. The use of violence by European employees of the Egyptian Sugar Company was neither rare nor stigmatized. In 1903, sixty Egyptian laborers attacked two engineers, one French and the other Egyptian-Armenian, at the Biba mill in central Egypt. Several different stories concerning the prelude to the attack circulated, their common theme the poor relations between the French engineer and the Egyptian laborers under his charge. Before the incident in question, other altercations had occurred, including one in which one of the engineers kicked and punched a worker who refused to complete a task in the fields.92 The record of the event refers to the rough treatment of Egyptian laborers flippantly, suggesting that although attacks of European supervisors were exceptional the circumstances that produced the animosity were quite common. Violence was part and parcel of the everyday conditions of labor in Egypt’s sugar industry. Neither were anonymous attacks rare in Egypt’s south. Three other European employees were killed the same year that Esnault was murdered, and these crimes bore a strong resemblance to attacks by groups of bandits,

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falatiyya, which began in Egypt’s south in the 1840s.93 Falatiyya attacks targeted government officials, disrupted security, and threatened the Turkish elite who had risen to prominence in the region under the rule of Mehmed Ali.94 They were also most often anonymous. There also was a history of socalled brigandage that targeted large landowners in Egypt; to address such attacks, the British formed a commission, which was operational between 1884 and 1889.95 While the historical record does not make clear whether the murders of Esnault and other company personnel were the result of general antagonism regarding the presence of Europeans in the region or specific grievances among the individuals involved, the attacks highlighted the latent and overt forms of violence that marked the territories that the Egyptian Sugar Company controlled.96

Shifting South The assassinations of company personnel did not deter the expansion of the Egyptian Sugar Company into new regions of central and southern Egypt. In the early years of the twentieth century, the company became a monopoly. In 1902, it purchased nine of the eleven aging sugar mills on the Daira Sanieh and the infrastructure that supported them from the Dania Sanieh Land Company.97 The company opted not to purchase the agricultural lands of the estates, a decision that proved fateful. Proximate to the Ibrahimiyya Canal, a portion of these lands had access to perennial irrigation, which improved following the completion of the Asyut Barrage in 1902. When landowners hungrily purchased these lands in the sell-off of the Daira Sanieh, the Egyptian Sugar Company found itself with a shortage of sugarcane as the new owners switched to cotton, which was generally more profitable. The cotton produced in central Egypt was not of the same high quality as that grown in the Nile Delta, but it was valuable nonetheless.98 The sale of the Daira Sanieh had the effect of excluding cane from much of central Egypt.99 The expansion of the Egyptian Sugar Company nearly caused it to fail. In 1905, Ernest Cronier ended his life by ingesting cyanide of potassium and then shooting himself through the heart.100 The suicide resulted from his debt, rumored to be between 50 million and 100 million francs. The company’s finances also lay in shambles as a result of its rapid expansion, its large, outstanding debt to the Cassel Group, and failed speculation on the Paris Bourse. That many of its mills in central Egypt lacked an adequate supply of cane to process contributed to the 1905 crisis.101 In the aftermath of Cronier’s suicide, Raffinerie C. Say withdrew from the world of Egyptian sugar.



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In 1906, the Egyptian Sugar Company was reorganized and the Belgian Henri Naus became its director general. Naus began his career in sugar on the Indonesian island of Java before moving to Egypt in 1902 to work at the Naj‘ Hamadi mill. The company thrived under Naus, and he was a leading figure in Egypt’s business community, even serving for a period as the president of the Egyptian Federation of Industry.102 He was the company’s director general until his death in 1938. The relationship between Cassel and Suarès also became more pronounced. Cassel’s local agent, Victor Harari, became the most important member of the company’s board. The son of Lebanese Jewish immigrants to Egypt, Harari was born in Cairo but held British citizenship. His positions included a high-level post in the Ministry of Finance, presidency of the Egyptian group of the Daira Sanieh, and directorship of the Crédit Foncier.103 Following its reorganization, the Egyptian Sugar Company concentrated production at five mills, three of which were located south of Asyut.104 It also began to consider building another mill at Kom Ombo, approximately thirty miles to the north of Aswan, its southernmost location yet. In 1903, a new land company, the Wadi Kom Ombo Society, purchased thirty thousand acres of the Kom Ombo plain. Ernest Cassel, the Suarès brothers, and Yusuf Qattawi were behind the Wadi Kom Ombo Society. Suarès had discovered the agricultural potential of the

FIGURE 7. 

Share of the Egyptian Sugar Company, signed by Raphael Suarès.

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plain during the construction of the Egyptian railroad south to Aswan. When an engineer dug wells to provide the railway workers with water, he discovered a rich layer of Nile silt under the desert land.105 While the society planted and tested a number of crops on the plain, its main financiers—Cassel, Suarès, and Qattawi—already possessed wide-ranging investments in sugarcane. The company’s proposed expansion into Kom Ombo caused concern among French government officials, who feared they were losing influence in the company. The French had grown anxious about its close alliance with Cassel and Suarès’s other commercial ventures, including the Wadi Kom Ombo Society.106 The majority of the shareholders of the Egyptian Sugar Company were French in this period, but following the withdrawal of Raffinerie C. Say from Egypt, the French no longer led the company. French officials acknowledged that cultivation and processing needed to shift south for the company to prosper, but they remained acutely concerned about the possible relationship that the construction of a new mill at Kom Ombo would cement with the Cassel group.107 When it seemed likely that a mill would be built at Kom Ombo, French officials searched for obstacles to throw in the path of its construction. On April 17, 1909, Victor Harari wrote to M. Périer, the managing director of the Egyptian Sugar Company, to brush aside rumors that a decision had already been made to build a mill at Kom Ombo. Harari claimed that it was still too early and that the results of the agricultural experiments conducted were too uncertain for a decision. Moreover, he explained, Suarès, the president of the Wadi Kom Ombo Society, was in extremely poor health, which made such a move difficult.108 By early May, however, Suarès had passed, and a deal outlining the terms of a merger of the Wadi Kom Ombo Society and the Egyptian Sugar Corporation had been proposed. Périer wrote to the French foreign minister in support of the merger, assuring him that he and his colleagues in Paris had the utmost confidence that the leadership of the company would protect the interests of French shareholders.109 Unconvinced, the French minister of finance wrote to the French foreign minister to express his concern that Cassel’s influence would weaken that of the French government, who saw itself as the guardian of French shareholder interests. Seeking to halt the construction of the new mill, French officials proposed alternatives, one of which was that the company transport cane grown at Kom Ombo to an existing factory in southern Egypt.110 The problem with the French



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proposal was that it ignored the emergent geography of sugar production: the mills that lacked a sufficient supply of cane were located not in Egypt’s south but rather in central Egypt, where the spread of cotton had drastically reduced the acreage planted in sugarcane. Furthermore, the plan to outfit the Kom Ombo mill with equipment obtained from a mill in central Egypt was difficult to object to as it cut costs. In July 1910, the Egyptian Sugar Company and the Wadi Kom Ombo Society signed the contract to build a new mill.111 The fear among French officials that the company had slipped from their control was well founded. For the next decade, the French identity of the company’s shareholders would persist but the French government would no longer exercise a decisive influence in the company.112 The Kom Ombo expansion represented an evolution in the production model of Egyptian sugar. The Egyptian Sugar Company settled the Kom Ombo plain, which was unlike the other regions of southern Egypt in which it operated. In 1903, when the Wadi Kom Ombo Society first purchased the land, only a small village dotted the plain. When the new mill went into operation in 1912, the company had built roads and villages on twenty-four thousand of the estate’s thirty-thousand acres.113 Workers from other regions of southern Egypt were settled on the plain in new ‘izab; a total of twenty thousand individuals inhabited forty villages. During harvest, temporary workers to cut cane were brought in by truck and housed with their families for the season.114 Fifty-two miles of agricultural railway traversed the estate, and the Wadi Kom Ombo Society installed pumps and dug more than ninety miles of canals to bring perennial irrigation to the plain. Fittingly, its primary irrigation canal was named the Cassel Canal. The estate’s headquarters contained a post office, police station, hotel, hospital, mosque, and school.115 Workers at Kom Ombo reportedly had the option of shopping in a wide variety of markets and were provided with free housing and access to the local hospital.116 The Egyptian Sugar Company also devoted land at Kom Ombo to sugarcane cultivation. At its other mills, the company relied on advance contracts with cultivators to provide mills with cane. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the company shifted its strategy, acquiring land in Kom Ombo, Naj‘ Hamadi, and Armant to ensure supply.117 While it had not been a large landowner during the early years of its existence, the Egyptian Sugar Company became one with the establishment of Kom Ombo. In 1931, they would purchase another forty thousand acres on the

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plain.118 Over the first half of the twentieth century, the Wadi Kom Ombo Society acquired more than half of the privately owned land in the province of Aswan.119

The World That Never Came to Be The years of World War I proved fateful for Egypt’s sugar industry. Responding to a slump in the price of cotton, some cultivators in central Egypt switched to sugarcane. The government, pressed by these growers, wanted to see production expand. In September 1914, Henri Naus, in a letter to A. Defrance, France’s diplomatic agent and plenipotentiary minister in Egypt, wrote that the Egyptian government “has finally noticed our existence.”120 War further buoyed the position of the company. Britain concentrated Egyptian commodities locally to supply the British army in Egypt and Sudan. The Egyptian Sugar Company agreed to tightly constrain exports, supply the local market, and store larger than usual reserves. As a result of high consumer prices and speculation on the Paris Bourse, they profited handsomely.121 The war also produced an environment comparatively rich in opportunity for the southern Egyptian cultivators who worked in sugar mills. British desire for additional manpower piqued their interest in the labor force of southern Egypt. The British recruited individuals from the region for the Egyptian Camel Corps and Labor Corps, which supported the British army. Men from southern Egypt dominated these bodies.122 When recruitment began, British efforts created a temporary labor shortage for the Egyptian Sugar Company because of the comparatively better wages and rations that the Camel Corps and Labor Corps offered. In May 1917, Victor Harari complained of difficulties procuring labor at the standard rate at Kom Ombo and Naj‘ Hamadi because of the new competition.123 The popularity of military service, however, was short-lived. Tables turned the following year when Egyptians from the south chose to harvest wheat locally instead of volunteering for the British war effort.124 When the war had ended and revolt erupted in the spring of 1919, symbols of colonial economy became sites of conflict. The railway lines that carried agricultural produce were one target. On March 18, 1919, local residents attacked a train traveling from Luxor to Minya, killing English officials and soldiers inside.125 As the train stopped at the various stations along its route, crowds gathered at the station and chanted nationalist slogans that included “Long live Zaghlul” and “Down with the English.” Others



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shouted for the departure of the “Ingleezi.”126 In Hawamdiyya, workers at the local refinery left their posts to join peasants and attack the local railway station. The refinery remained idle throughout the month of April.127 The factories of the Egyptian Sugar Company also became sites of protest. At Naj‘ Hamadi, local officials brought villagers to the mill to protest.128 Concerned, Henri Naus traveled south to meet with local leaders in Armant and Naj‘ Hamadi.129 There were also isolated bandit attacks throughout the south, consistent with the history of the region. Kom Ombo, the Egyptian Sugar Company’s colony par excellence, seems to have escaped this unrest. Company control over this region was such that the Wadi Kom Ombo Society issued its own currency during the revolt in order to prevent the disruption of business.130 By May, the British had crushed the agrarian insurgency in Egypt’s south. However, the landowning elite, who had become targets of peasant protest, remained anxious. In some regions of southern Egypt, landowners hired security guards and paid tributes to bands of bandits that roamed the countryside, fearful for their own security and that of their estates. The French chargé d’affaires in Egypt reported that “their villages are on fire, their crops are ravaged, and their families are at risk of being murdered.”131 Despite the unrest, Europeans associated with the Egyptian Sugar Company remained. In 1921, 181 Europeans lived within five miles of Naj‘ Hamadi.132 In the period that followed the revolt, waves of labor activism rocked different sectors of the Egyptian economy, including sugar production. Inflation, the removal of wartime protections, the decline of real wages, and shifts in the world market lay at the root these strikes.133 Workers at the Hawamdiyya refinery and the Abu Qurqas mill participated in the great strike wave of August 1919.134 In January 1920, laborers at the Naj‘ Hamadi mill walked out to protest the cost of living. These same workers went on strike again in October, this time joined by laborers at the Kom Ombo and Matana mills, demanding pay raises, vacation, access to medical treatment, and the superior benefits that the company provided to workers at the Hawamdiyya refinery.135 Unlike the mills, the refinery in Hawamdiyya operated year-round. During a 1922 strike, the refinery’s director reported that some workers hung pictures of revolvers around the refinery complex to convince other workers to join them.136 The image of the revolver was not only symbolic; supervisors at mills were often armed. In February 1923, when workers at the Armant mill went on strike, a French employee, Nestor Anache, shot and killed a worker.137

A £E 5 note (above) and a 50-piaster note (below) issued by the Wadi Kom Ombo Society during the 1919 revolution. The £E 5 note says, “I, the undersigned, in my capacity as mufattish of Kom Ombo hereby guarantee to honor this note and the payment of five Egyptian pounds upon demand.” Caption courtesy of Samir Raafat, “The Ephemeral Republic of Kom-Ombo,” Egyptian Mail, February 3, 1996. FIGURES 8A and B. 



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For cultivators and laborers in Egypt’s sugar industry, the emergence of a quasi-independent Egyptian state in 1923 did nothing to upend the social relations of sugar production. Large landowners continued to thrive under the interwar regime, and insomuch as a democracy formed in this period, it was the province of the Egyptian elite. In Kom Ombo, Yusuf Qattawi, then president of the Egyptian Sugar Company, became the first deputy to represent the region in Parliament.138 At the time of his service, he was a member of the Liberal Constitutionalist party, which was associated with the interests of Egypt’s large landowners. By World War I, the Qattawi family had become the most significant investor in the Egyptian Sugar Company, their influence eclipsing that of the Suarès family. Yusuf Qattawi served as president of the Cairo Jewish community from 1924 to 1942. He also sat on the boards of a number of important Egyptian enterprises. Qattawi became vice president of Bank Misr in 1920 and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Egyptian Chamber of Commerce with Henri Naus.139 Following his term in Parliament, Qattawi served as minister of finance. A particular approach to Egyptian nationalist history has read Qattawi’s Jewishness as foreignness, using this equation to label the Egyptian Sugar Company a colonial actor.140 Although Qattawi held an Egyptian passport, this made him unique among the members of the Qattawi–Suarèsde Manasce–Rolo group. Despite his family’s deep roots in Egypt, Raphael Suarès, for example, held an Italian passport.141 When viewed from the vantage point of the southern Egyptians who worked in its fields and mills, the Egyptian Sugar Company was indeed colonial, but not because of the religious identity of the men who directed it. Until the 1940s, Europeans held most supervisory positions and the company presided over its own colonial enclaves in Egypt’s south. Moreover, the Egyptian businessmen who led the company were not from the south, and the company’s tight control of land tenure and labor and reliance on violence demonstrated an exercise of authority resembling that of other large landowners in Egypt’s south, many of whom did not hail from the region originally. A change in the regime that ruled from Cairo did not spell the end of colonial economy. Despite developments in industry, Egypt’s economy continued to be primarily agricultural, its land consolidated in the hands of an elite who had begun to amass power during the nineteenth century. In the decades of the interwar period, life in the world of Egyptian sugar continued much as it had.

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For workers in mills and fields, the dawn of a new era of Egyptian politics brought no great change to the conditions under which they worked. By 1922, the Egyptian Sugar Company employed twenty thousand Egyptian laborers.142 A small portion of those laborers were skilled, and during a time in which opportunities for building and employing a skilled Egyptian labor force had not yet materialized, sugar mills functioned as a training ground for coppersmiths, electricians, welders, and mechanics.143 Prince Yusuf Kamal paid agricultural workers in Naj‘ Hamadi three piasters a day to work his estate, which supplied the mill at Naj‘ Hamadi; those at Kom Ombo earned six piasters.144 At the mills, most of the labor demanded was unskilled: Adult workers were paid between five and eight piasters a day and children, between two and four piasters.145 Assassinations of company personnel continued throughout the 1920s. The most notable of these was that of Gay-Lussac, who carried the same family name as the Gay-Lussac who had worked in Isma‘il’s sugar industry and for the Daira Sanieh Commission almost a half century before. On August 11, 1929, at 1:30 a.m., Gay-Lussac, the director of the company’s estates at al-Dab‘iyya, was murdered while he patrolled the fields on horseback.146 Situated approximately four hundred miles south of Cairo, the lands supplied the nearby Armant mill. Gay-Lussac was well known for his harsh treatment of the farmers and laborers under his charge, as well as his nocturnal inspections of fields. Despite strong suspicions that five guards fired by Gay-Lussac in the days before his death were responsible, no arrests were made in the case, and local police released suspects on account of insufficient evidence.147 Gay-Lussac’s treatment of laborers was not unique. Supervisors in mills, most of whom were European, continued to use physical force to discipline labor. In 1937, Henri Naus raised the case of Michel Diémer to the French government. Diémer’s rudeness toward his superiors posed a problem for the company. He also treated Egyptian laborers brutally, to the extent that the company claimed they could no longer protect his life. Diémer was transferred among several mills in an ultimately unsuccessful endeavor to locate stable employment for him. When he was finally terminated, the cause was the refusal of his European superiors to work with him, not his treatment of Egyptian workers.148 During the 1930s and 1940s, as sugarcane laborers continued to battle working conditions in mills and fields, the structure of the Egyptian Sugar Company, its relationship to the government, and the identities of



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its leaders underwent a series of important transformations. The company had struggled since the Egyptian government lifted the ban on importing sugar in 1923.149 After nearly a decade of financial difficulties, in 1931, the company signed a new agreement with the government making Egyptian sugar a protected industry. It committed itself to meeting domestic demand in exchange for its new status. The government placed two of its own representatives on the company’s board and gained the authority to regulate sugarcane acreage and to audit company accounts. The Ministry of Finance supervised the distribution of sugar.150 Always murky, the boundaries distinguishing the authority of the Egyptian Sugar Company from that of the state were further blurred. After the conclusion of its agreement with the government, the Egyptian Sugar Company no longer faced challenges guaranteeing a supply of cane for its factories.151 The identity of the company’s shareholders also evolved during this period. Beginning in the early 1920s, the influence of French shareholders waned as the Greek Cozzika family bought up a majority of shares. The family owned a distillery in Tura, outside of Cairo.152 The identity of

February 1932: left to right: Senator Ahmad Mustafa Bey with Talat Harb Pasha, Sharif Sabri Pasha, Prime Minister Ismail Sidki Pasha, future prime minister Muhammad Mahmud Pasha, sugar company director Henri Naus Bey, former prime minister Adly Yeken Pasha, and Ralph Victor Harari at Wadi Kom-Ombo Company. Photo and caption courtesy of Samir Rafaat. FIGURE 9. 

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the company’s primary shareholder changed again when in the late 1930s Muhammad Ahmad ‘Abbud, who had stepped in to fund the completion of the second heightening of the dam, quietly began to buy up company shares.153 In addition to his vast array of business interests, ‘Abbud was a large landowner in southern Egypt. His six-thousand-acre estate in the region of Armant was just a stone’s throw from the sugar mill. In 1938, ‘Abbud took control of the Egyptian Sugar Company as the company’s largest single shareholder. He was elected to the board of directors in 1942 and became company chairman in 1948. Just a year before ‘Abbud became company chairman, the state enacted Company Law 138, which “mandated a high proportion of Egyptian capital and labor in joint-stock companies.”154 In the years after the passage of the law, the company hired larger numbers of Egyptians in supervisory roles than it ever had before.155 ‘Abbud’s triumph and a turnover in the national identity of the company’s supervisors did not reduce strife among its labor force. In December 1950, on the cusp of the New Year, workers at the Hawamdiyya refinery went on strike when the company refused to pay a government-mandated cost-of-living increase. Shaykh Ahmad ‘Abd al-Salam, president of the union and the spokesman for the company’s forty-five thousand laborers, expressed despair at the company’s flouting of the law.156 Conditions in Egypt’s sugar mills and fields continued much as they had, with the labor actions proof of continuing struggle. The history of the sugar industry in central and southern Egypt exemplifies the slippages between capital and the state and the manner in which, from the vantage point of cultivators and laborers, the changing identities of the capitalists who dominated the Egyptian Sugar Company were of little importance to the social relations of the countryside in which they lived. In the first decade of the twentieth century, when the Egyptian Sugar Company concentrated its hold over swathes of southern Egypt, the company came to play a state-like role as the British colonial administration, and then the interwar-period Egyptian regime, subcontracted particular functions of the state to the company. Under its reign, violence was part of the everyday experience of authority in fields and mills. The next two chapters of this book turn to a different form of bodily violent engagement, that produced by the diseases of colonial economy suffered by cultivators of sugarcane and cotton.

4 Cruel Summer Environmental Labors and the Scales of Subject Making

and extension of perennial irrigation, when the flood determined the calendar of Nile agriculture, the Coptic month of Baramuda was marked by festival and storm.1 Beginning on April 9, Baramuda inaugurated the dry season that followed the harvest of wheat in Egypt, the ancient Egyptian holiday of Shamm al-Nisim, the celebration of harvest and the coming of spring. Egyptians picnicked on the holiday, eating boiled eggs, green onions, and a fermented and salted gray mullet called fasikh. While the name Shamm al-Nisim likely derived from “Shemu,” the final season of the ancient Egyptian agricultural calendar that began following the harvest of wheat, its rendering in Arabic, literally the “the smell of the winds,” calls forth its overlap with the khamasin, the sandstorms that began in this season. When summer arrived, fierce winds from the south and the west, nau’ and samum, blew gusts of hot and sandy air. As the season turned, so did relations among human bodies and a world of microorganisms. The dry season was a time of illness: when there were outbreaks of plague, it was during spring that its victims burned with fever, their bodies wracked with ache.2 Warm weather also invigorated the parasites that infected human bodies; those who labored to irrigate sayfi crops were most prone to infection. Finally, aggravated by the sands of the khamasin, bacterial eye infections, ramad, flared in the heat of summer.3 Eyes infected with bacteria reddened and swelled. The follicles of their inner lids, al-lahmiyya, became exaggerated, developing the look of raw meat. Abraded by eyelashes turned inward, some eyes were blinded.4 Like the crops that they tended, bodies changed with the seasons. BEFORE THE INTRODUCTION

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The introduction of perennial irrigation produced new multispecies agricultural ecologies. Part and parcel of these motional ecologies, human bodies were transformed as the prevalence of disease soared in regions with access to perennial irrigation. Rates of infection with the Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni parasites that cause schistosomiasis and the Ancylostoma duodenale parasites that produce hookworm climbed dramatically, as did the numbers of those suffering from the disease pellagra, which results from an overreliance on the consumption of maize. The first three chapters of this book explored the relationships among authority, capital, expertise in the production of a material perennial Nile River. Chapter 3 also chronicled the everyday forms of violence and contention that marked the cultivation of cash crops in Egypt’s colonial economy. This chapter, “Cruel Summer,” follows the waters of this river into the bodies of those who lived and labored on its banks, exploring how they were sickened through the practice of the perennial Nile and how newly diseased bodies came to be posited as normative within the project of colonial medicine.

The Ecologies That Labor Made This morning I am weary, my entire body is sick; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad Stiffened, like a stick, or as dry leather; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad You unceasingly exhaust me, I fear you, oh, stalk of the shaduf; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad I tremble like a leaf, looking at the stalk of the shaduf; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad My hands are bruised, on the wood of the stalk of the shaduf, I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad My hands are injured, I call out for a doctor; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad He heals my hands, and then says, pull the stalk of the shaduf; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad Give me a good doctor, a bit of respite; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad The world is quite bad, because I did not rest; I am weary, I am weary; ya awlad. —Excerpt from a folk song describing the use of the shaduf for irrigation5



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Before the introduction of perennial irrigation, the agricultural year was divided into three seasons, each marked by different forms of labor. When the flood arrived in late July or early August, Egyptian cultivators monitored the rising river, repaired breaches in its banks, and made cuts in the earthwork that bounded the Nile to allow floodwaters to soak and fertilize the large basins that lined the Nile Valley and covered the Nile Delta. During the winter season that followed the flood, cultivators tended the year’s primary crop. It was this crop that sustained rural populations and, when taxes were paid in kind, helped them to settle their debts to the state. The dry season that followed the harvest of the primary winter crop was a time of relative rest, punctuated by the labor necessary to irrigate limited stretches of summer crops. The cultivation of summer crops was taxing. They needed water when the Nile was lowest, and the work of lifting this water to thirsty crops from an anemic Nile was painful. Many cultivators irrigated during the summer with the shaduf, which consisted of a basket or bucket attached to the end of a wooden crossbar, fitted with a counterbalancing weight, and balanced on two vertical supports planted in the soil a meter apart. Work on the shaduf took a toll: men spent the length of the day in the summer sun, whipped by wind, and soaked by the water that fell as they repeatedly raised and lowered the instrument. The lever of the shaduf, al-‘ud or al-qibad, scarred their hands:6 “My wound has gangrene, it has rejected ointment, my wound from the water hardens on me.”7 A poor man’s tool, the shaduf and the bodily transformations that it wrought were dreaded, one folk song exclaiming, “The stalk of the shaduf made us wood and leather, the stalk is disgraceful, it makes the old cry.”8 Wealthier cultivators with the means to own draft animals used an animal-propelled waterwheel, the saqiya, which displaced the bodily pain of irrigation onto the backs of animals. In stark contrast to ballads about the shaduf, which bemoaned injuries and weariness, those dedicated to the saqiya celebrated the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables that the instrument watered: “Water of the saqiya, go to the right, water of the saqiya, go to the left; Water the grapes, the peaches, the pomegranates; I think that the red heifer missed the lupines; She has grazed the grass that grows on the mounds.”9 While the use of the instrument was preferable for human cultivators, draft animals were vulnerable to their own forms of biological breakdown. Alan Mikhail charts how, in the late eighteenth century, a series of outbreaks of rinderpest—cattle plague—devastated the livestock population, producing an agricultural labor crisis.10

Laborer operating a shaduf, with the Pyramids of Giza in the background. Created between 1934 and 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-matpc-00437. FIGURE 10. 



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The practice of perennial irrigation was associated with new seasons of agricultural production and forms of labor. The cultivation of cotton was labor intensive. In one typical schedule, the crop was planted in March or April. Cultivators watered the crop regularly after planting, but when the heat arrived they irrigated every eight days. There were multiple pickings, beginning in June or July and ending in December or January. Men irrigated the crop, and women and children gathered cotton bolls. After picking, cultivators dried the crop and then removed the boll from its stem, either by hand or, in later years, with a gin. They then used their feet to press cotton into large bales for transport.11 In the early twentieth century, those who grew cotton typically planted in April, irrigated every two weeks during June, July, and August, and harvested their crops in September.12 In addition to the labor of clearing and maintaining canals, the calendar of year-round agriculture that perennial irrigation enabled demanded that cultivators spend more time engaged in the act of irrigation.13 The two and sometimes three crops produced each year needed watering, which depended on the work that cultivators performed lifting water into canals and from canals to crops. These tasks were accomplished with the help of implements that included the saqiya and steam-powered irrigation pumps. However, the cheapness and availability of agricultural labor meant that much of this work was performed manually.14 The shaduf continued to be used, but as perennial irrigation spread, the tanbur (Archimedean screw), which consisted of a screw-shaped implement encased in a long cylinder that laborers turned to pump water into irrigation canals, replaced it as the most common irrigation implement.15

The Perennially Irrigated Body Just as agricultural labor helped to transform the ecologies of the agricultural landscape, so did it carve the bodies of rural Egyptians. Among its marks were the symptoms of a set of environmental diseases. When the weather warmed, parasites proliferated in the waters that filled irrigation canals and drains and in the perpetually moist soils of canals and fields. Diets also changed among agricultural communities in regions with access to perennial irrigation, in some cases sickening them. The majority of the population in regions with access to perennial irrigation suffered from a disease whose cause could be directly linked to the new agricultural landscape and the practices that structured material interactions between human beings and the environment.16 Always marked by difficult labor, summer took a turn for the cruel.

FIGURE 11. 

Two cultivators operating a tanbur. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Paired worms of Schistosoma mansoni. Davies Laboratory Uniformed Services University Bethesda, MD. FIGURE 12. 



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Among the diseases of perennially irrigated agriculture, schistosomiasis was the most prevalent. Known in Egypt as bilharzia, and during the early twentieth century as bilharziasis or bilharziosis, schistosomiasis results from infection with the parasites of the Schistosoma genus, which infect humans through the contact of unbroken skin with fresh water that contains the parasite and the species of freshwater snail that serves as its intermediate host. Schistosoma haematobium is passed through urine and infects the urinary tract, while Schistosoma mansoni exits the body in feces and targets the digestive system.17 In the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, infection with Schistosoma haematobium was the most common cause of schistosomiasis in Egypt. Until 1915, scientists debated whether Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni were different manifestations of the same organism.18 Even following their differentiation, the disease known as “schistosomiasis” could refer to an infection with either organism or with both.19 Infections with Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni became more common and more severe in regions with access to perennial irrigation. While epidemiological statistics charting the prevalence of schistosomiasis do not exist before the late nineteenth century, the available historical evidence conclusively demonstrates that the prevalence of infection and the likelihood of reinfection soared with the introduction and extension of perennial irrigation. In the early 1930s, Rockefeller Foundation scientist James Allen Scott conducted the first countrywide survey of the prevalence of schistosomiasis. Infection with the Schistosoma haematobium parasite, which was endemic to the Nile Delta and Nile Valley, averaged 60 percent in areas with access to perennial irrigation; in some towns of the Delta the rate of infection exceeded 90 percent.20 In areas of southern Egypt that continued to practice basin irrigation, infection averages hovered at around 5 percent.21 Unlike Schistosoma haematobium and its snail host, during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Schistosoma mansoni and its intermediate snail host were found predominantly in the northern Nile Delta.22 In those regions, the introduction of perennial irrigation caused the prevalence of infection to climb and infection rates with Schistosoma mansoni in areas with access to perennial irrigation resembled those of Schistosoma haematobium, averaging 60 percent.23 In regions of the Delta in which Schistosoma mansoni was not endemic, the prevalence of infection was much lower, approximately 6 percent.24 During this period, Schistosoma mansoni was not found in the Nile Valley.25

The intermediate snail hosts that facilitate schistosomiasis infection. The snail on the left is Biomphalaria alexandrina, which is the intermediate host for Schistosoma manosni. The snail on the right is Bulinus truncatus, which serves as the intermediate host for Schistosoma haematobium. Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center. FIGURE 13. 



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Irrigation canals and drains were ideal habitats for the tiny freshwater snails that serve as the parasites’ intermediate hosts.26 These snails do not fare well in large bodies of rapidly moving water, such as the Nile River, but thrive in sluggish water, like that in new irrigation canals.27 The prevalence of snails was not the only cause of increased rates of infection; new modes of environmental interaction placed agricultural populations—cultivators in particular—in frequent and intimate contact with the water in irrigation canals and drains. Among adults, those who labored in agriculture, usually men, were most vulnerable to infection with Schistosoma parasites. Male cultivators engaged in the act of irrigation faced frequent infection and reinfection with the parasites that caused schistosomiasis as they were immersed up to their knees or waist in infected water containing populations of parasites and freshwater snails.28 While use of the tanbur was not as grueling as that of the shaduf, its operators came into more intimate contact with the water that filled irrigation canals, placing them at a higher risk for infection.29 On average, the percentage of women infected with schistosomiasis in areas with access to perennial irrigation was approximately ten percentage points lower than that among men.30 The difference in recorded rates of infection raises questions concerning the populations measured for schistosomiasis. In Egypt, men were more often the subjects of biomedical intervention and experimentation, especially given the historical relationship of medical examination and military conscription. However, when he conducted his nationwide survey in the 1930s, Scott corrected for sample differences and found rates of infection to be higher among men, largely because of their exposure to disease through agricultural labor.31 The prevalence of schistosomiasis was high among children of all genders.32 With the spread of perennially irrigated agriculture, infections with Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni, and the multiple scales at which they operated, helped to structure the temporal cycles of perennially irrigated agriculture. One scale was that of the journey of parasites through the body. Schistosoma parasites begin their lives as eggs suspended in human feces or urine. When expelled into water, eggs hatch, releasing free-swimming larvae, miracidia, that penetrate the feet of tiny freshwater snails. The period during which this penetration occurs is eight to twelve hours. The organism further develops within the snail, where it multiplies, with a single miracidium producing thousands of cercariae, the organismal form that penetrates human skin. Stimulated by heat and light, snails release waves of cercariae in a circadian rhythm. Following their release, cercariae begin a frantic search

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for a human host. When they find one, they attach to the skin, locate an appropriate point of entry—often a hair follicle—and penetrate, transforming into schistosomules with their entry into the human body.33 Once inside, the organism spends several days in the skin before entering the body’s circulatory system. When they leave the skin, schistosomules travel to the lungs, a journey that lasts between five and seven days. Following their departure from the lungs, they spend more than two weeks traveling a path that cuts through the left side of the heart, before finally reaching the hepatic portal system, the network of veins that directs blood from different sections of the gastrointestinal tract to the liver. Larvae are sexed, and in the hepatic portal system they meet partners, develop into mature worms, and finally migrate in pairs, against the flow of blood, to the veins surrounding the intestine in the case of Schistosoma mansoni, or to those surrounding the bladder in the case of Schistosoma haematobium. Arrival can take more than a month; when the pair reaches its final destination, the female begins to lay eggs. The eggs of Schistosoma haematobium end up in the lumen of the bladder, and those of Schistosoma mansoni in that of the intestines. Approximately half are shed through feces or urine back into fresh water, while the other half remain in the body, where they produce an inflammatory response that damages and scars local tissues and can inhibit organ function. Worms are estimated to survive in the body on average between three and five years.34 As they migrate through the bodies that they infect, Schistosoma parasites produce a range of symptoms. Fatigue, fever, aching, cough, and diarrhea often punctuate the weeks following infection. Those suffering from Schistosoma haematobium commonly have blood in their urine, and chronic infections can contribute to cancer of the bladder. The long-term symptoms of Schistosoma mansoni include high blood pressure through the liver, an enlarged spleen, the buildup of fluid in the abdomen, and swollen areas in the esophagus and digestive tract that can rupture and bleed. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt, cultivators who spent long periods immersed in water were increasingly likely to be repeatedly infected with Schistosoma parasites. It was also not uncommon to be infected with both Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni. Repeat infections produced layered and complex temporalities of the physical body. For many, the bodily experience of schistosomiasis was not that of a single infection but rather the complex intersection of the temporal cycles of multiple infections and different forms of Schistosoma infection. Experiences of



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schistosomiasis consequently became more frequent, painful, and severe. Perennial irrigation caused the disease to evolve. An increase in the number of worms, the worm load, in the bodies of those infected made symptoms more intense and the duration of infection longer.35 New symptoms also appeared. Published in 1907, Frank Cole Madden’s Bilharziosis includes prolific images of patients suffering from complicated schistosomiasis infection, their genitalia and anuses deformed by “elephantitis” and large growths.36 The spread of perennial irrigation also encouraged the prevalence of hookworm disease to increase. In Egypt, hookworm is caused by infection with the Ancylostoma duodenale parasite.37 In the early twentieth century, the disease that it caused was often referred to as ancylostomiasis or ankylostomiasis. Passed through infected excrement, the parasite infects human beings through direct contact with the skin, often entering the human body through the feet and less commonly through ingestion.38 On the banks of canals and in fields that rarely dried, an increase in the moisture level of the soil helped hookworm to thrive. Cultivators, their feet lodged

Eggs of Schistosoma haematobium lodged in the lumen of the bladder. This photomicrograph depicts some of the histopathologic details seen in a bladder tissue specimen, in a case of schistosomiasis haematobium, also known as urinary blood fluke, caused by the parasitic flatworm Schistosoma haematobium. Note the presence of clusters of S. haematobium ova, surrounded by intense eosinophilic infiltrates and other inflammatory cells. Centers for Disease Control/Dr. Edwin P. Ewing Jr., 1973. FIGURE 14. 

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in the mud of fields and that from which irrigation canals were molded, were easily infected with Ancylostoma duodenale larvae.39 Mud itself was so central to the perennially irrigated landscape that when British officials at the Egyptian Public Works Ministry accounted for the labor necessary to clear canals, they did so in units of earth, more often than not dug out by laborers using their bare hands as tools.40 Whereas a direct relationship existed between the introduction of perennial irrigation and dramatically increased rates of schistosomiasis, that linking irrigation practice to the prevalence of hookworm infection was relatively more complex. Perennial irrigation was one of a complex array of factors encouraging infection; climate and soil composition also played a role. The prevalence of hookworm was historically higher in Egypt’s south than in its north because of the warmer climate of the region. The introduction of perennial irrigation in the Nile Delta and in central Egypt, and the subsequent rise in the moisture level of the soil, caused the prevalence of infection in those regions to rise.41 Soil composition might have also played a contributing role. The organism’s New World cousin, Necator americanus, thrives in sandier soils, like those of lands reclaimed after the completion of Khazan Aswan, which had a higher content of sand because they had not been coated annually with sediment from the flood.42 By the early twentieth century, severe infection with Ancylostoma duodenale was the most common medical condition disqualifying potential recruits for the Egyptian army.43 The first large survey of hookworm was conducted by the Public Health Department in 1914–15 in two provinces, Sharqiyya in the Nile Delta and Asyut in Upper Egypt. The choice of the two provinces was intended to produce a comparison of the prevalence of the disease in northern and southern Egypt respectively. The results of the survey revealed that infection rates were slightly higher in the perennially irrigated Nile Delta than in the mixed irrigation landscape of Asyut: 55 percent of the individuals tested in Sharqiyya were infected with Ancylostoma duodenale compared to 45.8 percent in Asyut.44 By 1934, James Allen Scott estimated that five of Egypt’s twelve million inhabitants were infected with Ancylostoma duodenale.45 As with schistosomiasis, Ancylostoma duodenale helped to gender the bodies of rural Egyptians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rates of infection were high among children generally, but among adults men faced a greater risk. A study conducted during the summer of 1927 found that while large numbers of men and women were infected, the proportion of



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men at all ages infected with Ancylostoma duodenale was consistently higher, peaking between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, before gradually declining.46 These results stood in marked contrast to those documenting infections with the parasite Ascaris lumbridcoides, a food-based parasite known as a “household” infection that was more common among women.47 As with the schistosomes that cause schistosomiasis, infection with hookworm created distinct experiences of agricultural temporality. Inside the body, a larva begins a three-day journey to the lungs. After its arrival, the organism breaks through the alveoli to travel to the trachea, where it is swallowed, passes through the esophagus, and enters the digestive system; it reaches the small intestine approximately one week after it first penetrates the skin. In the intestines, the organism matures sexually over a period of three to five weeks before mating and producing eggs that exit the human body in feces. If deposited on soil with the proper nutritional support, moisture, and warmth, larvae hatch, feed on bacteria and organic matter, and migrate to the soil. In their life in the mud, larvae transform twice, eventually into filariform larvae, which can live in the soil for up to two years, ready to infect the next human body with which they come into contact. In the bodies of Egyptian agricultural laborers, the temporality of a hookworm infection was more complex than the sum of the days of a single infection’s progression. Experiences of hookworm consequently could stretch much longer than the one- to three-year life span of the Ancylostoma duodenale organism in the human body, as dormant larvae stored in muscle tissue could replace dead worms and allow the infection to perpetuate itself.48 As hookworm parasites migrate through and settle in the human body, they produce a wide range of symptoms, including weight loss, diarrhea, fatigue, abdominal pain, and severe anemia that results from worms sucking blood from the walls of the intestines. Among children, infection stunts growth and makes concentration difficult.49 Severe hookworm infection reduces the hemoglobin levels of its victims considerably; a popular medical text in Egypt published in 1905 stated that patients continued to labor despite a reduction in their hemoglobin to 40 percent; some laborers had levels as low as 20 percent.50 Rural populations were at a heightened risk of developing chronic infections, distinguished by symptoms that included “gnawing, throbbing pain in the epigastrium,” flatulence, constipation, fatigue, impotence, and fluid retention in various regions of the body.51 Chronic cases also altered the patient’s appearance: “The tongue is extremely pale, the mucous membranes excessively white, so that it is almost difficult

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to see where the mucous membrane of the lip ends and the skin begins, the face has an unhealthy yellow pallor, very different from the ruddy brown of the patient in health, and the bloodless nails testify to the blood containing not more than half the normal number of red corpuscles.”52 While hookworm and schistosomiasis disproportionately affected men laboring in agriculture, other ailments associated with perennial irrigation knew no gender. The disease pellagra acquired its name, literally “rough skin” in Italian, from the rash that it causes. As with parasitic infections that flared when the weather warmed, the characteristic rash that marked pellagra was photosensitive and in Egypt appeared in spring, just as cultivators began to labor over summer crops.53 Other symptoms of the disease include diarrhea, vomiting, and disorders of the nervous system that cause memory loss, depression, and eventually dementia.54 Pellagra in Egypt was caused by an overreliance on maize in the diet. Maize is a New World crop, and the question of when exactly its cultivation began in Egypt is a subject of some debate. The broad category into which it falls, dhura, refers to other grain staples as well. One name for maize in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, dhura shami, suggests a relationship to the Levant, al-sham. Some claimed that the crop found its way to Egypt from Ottoman Syria after Mehmed Ali’s 1831 invasion and subsequent occupation of Syria.55 There are other reports that the crop arrived in Egypt before the nineteenth century, traveling from the Caribbean to Seville and Venice, and then from Egypt’s Nile Valley through sub-Saharan Africa.56 In Mesoamerica, maize had been treated with an alkaline and hulled in a process called nixtamalization, which increased the grain’s nutritional value and the availability of nutrients. The knowledge that rendered maize fully nutritious did not travel with the crop from New World to Old. As corn replaced other more established grain staples in Europe, Africa, and Asia, many, but especially the very poor, fell ill. Like cotton, the extension of perennial irrigation facilitated the spread of maize cultivation and increased the prevalence of pellagra. In Egypt, maize could be planted as either a summer crop or a flood crop. Cultivators usually sowed the crop in July or August and harvested it in November or December.57 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the surface area of agricultural land that it occupied expanded dramatically as it replaced barley and wheat in the diet of rural populations.58 By 1902, maize covered approximately one-fifth of the cultivable land in the Delta. The crop did not dominate Egypt’s south as it did its north, where millet was the primary grain



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crop consumed. The proportion of land planted with maize in the south amounted to only one-twentieth of cultivable land.59 Under the British, the government forbade the irrigation of maize until that of cotton had been ensured.60 Corn was eaten green and roasted, dried, or most commonly, as bread after it had been ground. When times were rich, peasants replaced flour made from maize with that made from wheat.61 While maize fed, it did so at a price. Those who relied too heavily on its consumption developed tryptophan deficiencies and ultimately suffered a shortage of niacin in their bodies. Metabolically available niacin is central to the production of nucleic acids, which are the body’s most important biomolecules, and to the release of energy from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins.62 In short, those who suffered from pellagra were missing the basic elements necessary for healthy cellular function. In 1902, a study conducted in the province of Gharbiyya in the Nile Delta revealed that among 315 Egyptian men, 36 percent exhibited symptoms of pellagra.63 In 1908, of the 561 admissions at Egypt’s mental hospital at ‘Abbasiyya, 88 cases were due to advanced pellagra.64 In April 1914, an examination of three hundred patients suffering from severe hookworm disease at the hospital of the Church Missionary Society in Old Cairo determined that 46 percent were also ill with pellagra.65 Poverty increased the severity of pellagra, and the disease further taxed the bodies of those who lived the perennially irrigated landscape.

The Perennially Irrigated Body Becomes Endemic Egyptians have undoubtedly suffered from the effects of blood flukes since ancient times. —James Allen Scott, 193766

The increased prevalence of schistosomiasis, hookworm, and pellagra coincided with a sea change in theories of disease among medical practitioners in Egypt and in Europe. Over the long nineteenth century, evolving theories about race, the etiology of disease, and the prevalence of parasitic infection in Egypt played central roles in shaping the imagination of Egyptian bodies among European medical practitioners. Just as the arrival of colonial economy in Egypt predated that of political colonialism, so would an explosion of disease refashion the normative Egyptian body in the period before colonial medicine arrived. While the multispecies ecologies of perennial irrigation remade Egyptian bodies, the institutionaliza-

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tion of medicine in Egypt aided the discovery of these bodies by European scientists, who considered parasitic disease one of their defining marks. Among agricultural populations, the notions that the environment could cause one to fall ill and that particular afflictions were seasonal were entrenched before the environmental transformations of perennial irrigation. The Hippocratic-Galenic theory of medicine, which posited a body composed of humors and shaped by environmental conditions, framed imaginations of the body among Egyptians.67 According to this approach, climate, geography, planetary alignment, and season shaped the constitution of any individual human body; disease resulted when the body’s humors were out of balance. As opposed to the four traditional humors of Hippocratic-Galenic medicine, Egyptian medicine recognized illness as the result of imbalances among three bodily humors.68 While sparse, historical evidence suggests that rural communities made note of the symptoms of the diseases of perennial irrigation, many of which were predictably seasonal and could fit into existent notions of illness. Disease was imagined not as a systemic phenomenon but rather through its individual symptoms. Egyptians referred to the rash of pellagra that bloomed in spring as qushuf, for a roughness and chafing of the skin.69 Rihaqan, a reference to saffron, was the anemia that gave a visible yellow pallor to the skin with severe hookworm infection.70 Agricultural populations in the Nile Delta understood the blood in the urine that infection with Schistosoma haematobium produces as a kind of normalized male menstruation, a sign of fertility, and the coming of age.71 The “Ba’una itch” was the intense sensation that cultivators experienced when Schistosoma parasites penetrated their skin during the morning hours of the Coptic month of Ba’una, which roughly corresponds with the month of June.72 Just as plague had long appeared in spring and eye infections had proliferated with the khamasin, new bodily habitations emerged with the practice of the agricultural seasons of perennial irrigation. It is likely, given the influence of the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition in shaping ideas about the body among rural populations, that they linked symptoms to environmental and climatic change. When the nineteenth century began, medical institutions to serve civilians in Egypt did not exist, with the exception of the historic hospital Maristan al-Mansur. During the Ottoman period, hospitals were not institutions at which the general population sought medical care but rather sites of charity for the poor and those without family support.73 A set of different local practitioners provided care. Bonesetters repaired breaks and



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midwives delivered babies. Barber surgeons opened wounds, removed teeth, and circumcised children; they also offered services that included bloodletting, cautery, and cupping.74 Pharmacists prescribed drugs that were designed to correct the humoral balance of the body. Individuals also sought relief from physical ailments with implorations to the divine. Someone who was ill might be advised to wear amulets containing folded pieces of paper onto which verses of the Qur’an had been written. Printed verses of the Qur’an were also dissolved in water and drunk to affect a cure.75 Exorcism ceremonies purged the body of zar, spirits that caused illness or discomfort.76 At the start of the nineteenth century, the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition also framed European understandings of disease. When French troops invaded Egypt, large numbers became blind in one or both eyes, the result of trachoma, a bacterial infection of the eye.77 In their 1801 campaign to defeat the French in Egypt, British troops were similarly infected when the close quarters and unsanitary conditions of military campaigns proved fertile ground for the transmission of bacteria. Europeans used the blanket term “Egyptian ophthalmia” to describe the eye infections that were common in Egypt, the most severe of which were those caused by the Chlamydia trachomatis bacterium.78 During the Napoleonic Wars, Egyptian ophthalmia migrated back to Europe with French and British troops as they spread trachoma to other European troops and to civilian populations. Europeans did not understand the physical marks of Egyptian ophthalmia as symptoms of a condition caused by an external contagion; they instead argued that the heat of the dry season and the irritant winds of the khamasin were to blame. Even when it struck populations who had never stepped a foot on Egyptian soil, many European physicians ignored evidence of trachoma’s communicability and continued to insist that Egyptian ophthalmia was the direct result of the conditions of the Egyptian environment.79 As the contagion theory of disease began to attract supporters, research performed at Egypt’s medical institutions proved central to the emergence of new theories about human bodies, specifically those that belonged to Egyptians. In 1827, under Mehmed Ali, the state established a military hospital and medical school at Abu Za‘bal outside of Cairo. A decade later, the institution moved to Qasr al-‘Ayni in Cairo. After a treaty with the British and the Ottomans forced Egypt’s demilitarization, the institution began to open to civilians.80 Qasr al-‘Ayni became a center of medical research in Egypt and the site from which physicians began to

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model Egyptian bodies and the diseases that were prevalent in the country, including the parasitic infections that became commonplace with the spread of perennial irrigation. When Qasr al-‘Ayni was first established, its director and the intellectual force behind the institution did not subscribe to contagion theories concerning the etiology of disease. French physician Antoine Clot, Clot Bey as he was known in Egypt, led Qasr al-‘Ayni during its first three decades. Clot arrived in Egypt in 1825 to serve as the chief surgeon and doctor to the Egyptian army. With the exception of a period between 1849 and 1854, he sat at the helm of Qasr al-‘Ayni from its establishment until his departure from Egypt in 1858. When cholera first landed on Egyptian shores in 1831, Clot did not believe that the disease was communicable, arguing that it resulted from miasma, or bad air and rotting organic matter.81 In a similar vein, Clot believed the appearance of plague in Egypt to be the result of “meteorological circumstances peculiar to the country.”82 In an endeavor to demonstrate—falsely—that plague was not communicable, he injected himself with blood from infected patients on several occasions. Clot staunchly opposed the imposition of quarantines to contain cholera and plague, believing that neither disease was contagious.83 During Clot’s tenure, a number of European physicians taught and performed research at Qasr al-‘Ayni. Despite Clot’s influence and his approach to illness, a series of discoveries by physicians working at the institution provided evidence for the theory that infection with microorganisms could cause illness. In 1838, Angelo Dubini identified the Ancylostoma duodenale worm in the bodies of Egyptian autopsy patients. German pathologist Franz Pruner located the same worm in his autopsy investigations nine years later.84 Neither Dubini nor Pruner attributed the symptoms of hookworm disease to infection with the worm that they identified. Between 1850 and 1852, the German pathologist Wilhelm Griesinger, who served as the director of Qasr al-‘Ayni for a brief period, argued that the worm was the cause of the severe anemia known as “Egyptian chlorosis.” In this same period, Griesinger’s former student Theodor Bilharz discovered the parasites that caused the symptoms of schistosomiasis. Bilharz followed Griesinger to Egypt in 1850 at the age of twenty-five, where he remained until his death from typhoid fever in 1862. At Qasr al-‘Ayni, Bilharz worked in a number of different positions, including as an assistant professor of surgery, a professor of clinical medicine, and chair of the Department of Descriptive



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Anatomy.85 Soon after his arrival, he identified the worms of Schistosoma parasites that he found in the bladders and recta of autopsy patients as the cause of the blood that French soldiers had noted in their urine during their occupation of Egypt.86 For Europeans working in Egypt during this period, the abundance of parasites that they discovered in the bodies of Egyptians helped to render them racially distinct. Egypt was not a colony in the period of these discoveries, but dead Egyptian bodies were their own terrain of imperial discovery. During his work, Bilharz reported: As helminths in general, and those who attack humans in particular are concerned, I think Egypt is the best country to study them. Nematodes in particular populate the intestines of the indigenous population in unimaginable quantities. . . . I found a number of long, white worms that with the naked eye appeared to be nematodes. A look in the microscope revealed a magnificent Distomum with a flat body and a twisted tail. These are a few leaves of a saga as wonderful as the best of thousand and one nights—if I succeeded in putting it all together.87

Just as Europeans began a process of scientific discovery, the Egyptian bodies that were its objects were themselves caught in a process of transformation. Many of the patients at Qasr al-‘Ayni in Cairo hailed from regions whose agricultural ecologies had been transformed by the introduction of perennial irrigation. However, as neither Bilharz nor Griesinger understood the relationship between irrigation practice and the parasites that they studied, they considered the abundance of parasites that they noted to be normative. Endemic parasitic infections marked these bodies as particular. Although acquired rather than inherited, endemic parasitic diseases became one means through which race was made and situated within the colonial environment in Egypt. In the second half of the nineteenth century, research on parasitic disease at Qasr al-‘Ayni waned even as the geography of perennial irrigation expanded. Under the rule of Khedive Isma‘il, renowned surgeon Muhammad ‘Ali al-Baqli directed the institution, and it acquired a reputation for surgical excellence.88 By the late 1870s, the bankruptcy of the OttomanEgyptian state forced Qasr al-‘Ayni, starved of state resources, into a period of decline.89 However, research on parasitic disease in Egypt would not entirely cease. Between 1873 and 1884, Prospero Sonsino, an Italian helminthologist (a specialist in parasitic worms) who was appointed to the

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Khedivial Health Laboratories, studied the transmission of schistosomiasis and attempted to locate the mollusks that might be its intermediate host.90 When the British occupied Egypt, it was cholera and not schistosomiasis about which they worried. In 1883, just months after the occupation had begun, the disease struck Egypt for the fourth time. Authorities formed a Sanitary Department whose responsibilities included the administration of quarantines and renovated the state’s public health laboratories. Fixated on the threat of cholera, British officials were little concerned with the toll that parasitic disease exacted on Egypt’s rural population. In the first decade of the British occupation, investments in medicine and public health were negligible, with the exception of those related to cholera. Occupation authorities turned their attention to Qasr al-‘Ayni in the second decade of the occupation. The number of non-Egyptian physicians at the institution, some of whom played important roles in the endeavor to model parasitic disease, began to rise. In 1890, Fleming Ment Sandwith became the first English professor of clinical medicine at Qasr al-‘Ayni. Prior to his arrival in Egypt, Sandwith had worked as an ambulance surgeon in the 1876 Ottoman-Serbian War and in the war between the Ottoman Empire and Russia in 1877–78. He arrived in Egypt in 1883 and served as the vice director of the Sanitary Department until 1885.91 Sandwith began treating patients at Qasr al-‘Ayni in 1887, only three short years before the completion of the repair of the Delta Barrage, which further extended the geography of perennial irrigation and the prevalence of disease in the Nile Delta. During the 1890s, he began to observe the marks of severe pellagra, hookworm, and schistosomiasis among his patients at the institution. The numbers of patients seeking treatment at Qasr al-‘Ayni, many sick with the diseases of perennial irrigation, climbed rapidly in the last decade of the nineteenth century—a notable increase given that Egyptians tended to view state medical institutions with suspicion.92 The patient population of Qasr al-‘Ayni skewed north; most hailed from Cairo or the towns and villages of the Nile Delta. Before seeking treatment at hospitals, many exhausted the options that local practitioners offered, among which was a solution made from the plant Pulicaria inuloides, which they boiled, concentrated, and drank to affect the passage of urinary calculi—mineral deposits—that those suffering from schistosomiasis sometimes developed.93 Treatment for hookworm became available at Qasr al-‘Ayni at the turn of the nineteenth century. That for schistosomiasis was not developed until relatively later, and



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surgeons could only remove the large growths that developed in complicated cases. In 1892, 16,848 patients were admitted to government hospitals.94 That number had risen to 27,921 by 1904.95 It is difficult to discern what prompted these rising numbers of patients, but the period of the increase correlated with the extension of perennial irrigation. At the turn of the nineteenth century, occupation authorities began the process of restructuring Qasr al-‘Ayni. In 1897, Edwin Cooper Perry, the superintendent at Guy’s Hospital in London, was invited to Cairo to assess the condition of the institution and offer suggestions for its improvement. An overhaul of the teaching faculty at the medical school followed Perry’s visit. Of the fourteen professorships in medicine, occupation authorities appointed thirteen Europeans to occupy the posts and changed the language of instruction at the school from Arabic to English.96 One of Perry’s suggestions was that the institution foster expertise in fields of medical research directly relevant to Egypt, specifically research on parasitic disease. In 1898, British occupation authorities appointed the German pathologist Arthur Looss to direct research on parasitic disease at Qasr al-‘Ayni. Arthur Looss was a professor of parasitology at the University of Leipzig and was regarded as an expert in the field. He had even spent time in Egypt in 1894 investigating the lifecycle of Schistosoma parasites.97 The Australian surgeon Frank Cole Madden also joined the institution. Originally from Melbourne, Madden began his career in Australia before moving to London in 1895 to work at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Three years later he moved to Egypt, where he spent nearly the whole of his medical career and died by his own hand in 1929.98 With Looss’s appointment and the invigoration of British interest, Qasr al-‘Ayni was once more an important site for research on the diseases of perennial irrigation. It also became a center of colonial medicine for the first time. At the start of the twentieth century, the question of how schistosomiasis was transmitted was more vexed than that of either hookworm or pellagra. In 1898, Looss discovered how Ancylostoma duodenale infects human beings—the direct contact of skin with the organism—when he accidentally infected himself with the parasite in the lab.99 Sandwith had become an important voice in the debate that surrounded the cause of pellagra. After noticing symptoms of the disease among his patients at Qasr al-‘Ayni, he traveled to Italy and the United States to meet with other scientists researching the disease. Although its etiology remained a mystery well into the twentieth century, physicians in Egypt isolated the disease to poor

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and mostly rural populations. While his stance would eventually change, in the early twentieth century Sandwith believed the consumption of bad or moldy corn to cause pellagra.100 Among the diseases of perennial irrigation, schistosomiasis represented the largest threat, as its mode of transmission, and thus the danger that it posed, remained uncertain. As colonial physicians began to observe and make notes of Egyptian bodies, the construction of Khazan Aswan further transformed these bodies. Whereas the pathologists of the mid-nineteenth century understood the bodies of Egyptians through the abundance of parasites that they possessed, colonial physicians modeled them through the modes of behavior that facilitated infection. Transmission was a study in the forms of environmental contact that constituted daily life in the countryside. Egyptian physicians were comparatively better situated than their colonial superiors to perform this work. In December 1902 at the First Egyptian Medical Congress, a handful presented research, demonstrating that Egyptian researchers and physicians at Qasr al-‘Ayni continued to have active research profiles during the colonial period.101 Some Egyptian physicians presented in Arabic, their presentations receiving booming applause from the audience. Dr. Ali Labib delivered a detailed presentation in Arabic concerning the effects of schistosomiasis on urinary passages and the prescribed treatment regimens for urinary fistulae.102 The work of Muhammad Tal‘at, who performed some of the first field studies of schistosomiasis, featured most prominently. Tal‘at observed that schistosomiasis was widespread among “those who came into contact with damp earth.”103 At the same conference, Looss noted that “the people who were attacked were mainly the fellaheen of the cultivator class who worked barefoot in fields which were always muddy and frequently under water.”104 In his 1905 medical text, The Medical Diseases of Egypt, Sandwith, citing Tal‘at, wrote, “Among those who are less poor, it is only the men that work the land, and the disease is rare among the women, while among those who are well-to-do, even the men are not engaged in agricultural labor and bilharziosis seldom occurs among them.”105 By the early twentieth century, in large part because of Tal‘at’s field studies, colonial physicians understood that human beings were infected with Schistosoma parasites through contact with either mud or water, placing populations of rural Egyptians at the highest risk. These same physicians continued to worry about the potential that schistosomiasis might threaten the urban population at large. That researchers believed schistosomiasis to be transmitted through water or mud did nothing to narrow the possible



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sources of infection. Most of Egypt’s drinking water, including in Cairo, came from the Nile, and the river’s aqueous geography, with the transformed ecologies of perennial irrigation, extended into the city. In an unsurprising twist, it was Raphael Suarès who owned the waterworks in Cairo and in the large towns of Tanta and al-Mansura in the Nile Delta.106 For colonial medical practitioners, the trick of understanding tropical disease was that of determining where the environment ended and the subject began and how the environment might strike and exceed the bounds that confined it to the bodies of colonial subjects. Writing in 1907, Madden noted the marks of schistosomiasis infection among town dwellers, especially “the scavengers, gardeners, and small children (who love to go bare-footed in the puddle and wet), who are especially subject to bilharziosis.”107 Madden’s observation cut to the crux of the issue: schistosomiasis was not absent from urban areas. The presence of the disease in the city, even if most pronounced among the very poor, reflected anxieties among colonial physicians about the latent dangers buried within an Egyptian environment that extended into urban spaces. In 1908, Bonté Elgood published a study of the prevalence of schistosomiasis among populations of girls and women in Cairo. The only prominent practicing European female physician in Egypt in this period, Elgood did not teach at Qasr al-‘Ayni but rather held a series of government medical posts and saw patients at her own private practice. She spoke Arabic and spent long stretches of her childhood in Egypt, leaving only to attend the London School of Medicine for Women. Elgood returned following graduation to work as a medical officer at the Quarantine Board in Port Sa‘id; she later became a medical officer at the Egyptian Ministry of Education. In 1911, Elgood established a midwifery school in Egypt, which eventually became a hospital with an attached school to train nurses and midwives.108 Uniquely positioned in her access to populations outside of the hospital through her clinic, her work in Egyptian schools, and her ability to speak Arabic, Elgood was an important voice in the debate surrounding schistosomiasis transmission. With the exception of Tal‘at’s field studies, there was very little work establishing the prevalence of the disease in populations other than hospital patients, especially among girls and women.109 Elgood’s study focused on two middle-class Cairo schools and a subset of female patients at the hospital at Qasr al-‘Ayni. She collected urine samples and interviewed subjects about the source of water that they drank, where they bathed, and where their mothers washed vegetables. At

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the more economically disadvantaged of the two schools, Elgood found schistosomiasis eggs in 27.5 percent of the urine samples that she collected. In the other school, the prevalence of infection was 20.5 percent and 27.5 percent among boarders and day students respectively. She noted the relative absence of the disease in adult urban women of similar class backgrounds. Elgood concluded that the infection was likely passed through unclean drinking water stored in houses or by the washing of fruit and vegetables with unclean water.110 Elgood’s work met a vigorous rebuttal from Arthur Looss. Among the criticisms that he leveled, Looss argued that Elgood’s ideas about transmission disregarded what scientists already knew about schistosomiasis, namely that peasant populations were particularly susceptible to infection. If the infection were transmitted through drinking infected water, Looss argued, severe infections would not be concentrated in peasant populations and almost nonexistent among adults of higher social classes who resided in towns.111 Looss again referenced Tal‘at’s work, which demonstrated that among Egyptian women infection rates were highest in poor, rural populations. He also criticized Elgood for failing to account for the transmission of the parasite through urine and/or fecal matter.112 Since his discovery of the direct means by which hookworm infected human beings, Arthur Looss insisted that the transmission of schistosomiasis did not rely on an intermediate host but rather occurred through direct contact with the organism. Looss’s prominence in the field meant that most researchers in Egypt did not contest his position and theories of schistosomiasis transmission did not progress. While both Looss and Elgood were ultimately proved incorrect, Elgood’s conclusions illustrated the fear among colonial physicians that although schistosomiasis seemed to be concentrated among rural, Egyptian populations, it might be more prevalent than they thought, placing urban populations of all nationalities and classes at risk. One of the challenges of figuring schistosomiasis transmission was the primacy of the hospital as a site of observation and research and its detachment from the temporalities and seasons of agricultural life. Not only did European physicians have very little opportunity to observe the specific ways that Egyptians in rural communities came into contact with the material environments of agriculture; their ability to observe temporal variations in the appearance of the symptoms of disease was limited. Despite the constraints of the hospital as a research site, in the first decade of the twentieth century physicians working at Qasr al-‘Ayni noted that there was a geography to



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schistosomiasis infection within Egypt and in the bodies they examined.113 When construction on Khazan Aswan began, neither physicians nor irrigation engineers were aware that the practices that facilitated the cultivation of cotton were also sickening the bodies of the cultivators who labored over the crop. However, in the short years following the completion of the dam, physicians observed that the vast majority of severe and complicated cases seen at Qasr al-‘Ayni were agricultural laborers. In 1910, Madden wrote: The cause of the severity of the symptoms and the mortality is the repeated reinfection to which the fellaheen (peasants) are particularly liable. A single infection may be, and often is, entirely recovered from, especially in females (Elgood), but it is difficult to see how such a happy result can be expected in the agricultural labourer, whose very work and habits render him all too liable to a long series of infections. It is not uncommon to find very old bilharzial lesions in the bladder and rectum, and at the same time quite young worms in the portal vein, with intermediate stages in the chronological sequence of bilharzial pathological changes scattered throughout various parts of the body.114

While Madden was one of the first observers to link infection to the act of labor, physicians had begun to hypothesize that perennial irrigation and the near-constant presence of water in the agricultural landscape was linked to severe schistosomiasis infection.115 Uncertainty prevailed among colonial officials concerning just how common schistosomiasis was and whether its symptoms were normative. In the same article in which Madden linked the disease to agricultural labor, he referenced the work of pathologist Dr. A. R. Ferguson: “So convinced is he that bilharziosis is really the scourge I would have you believe that, from his experience in the post-mortem room, he would venture to affirm that about one-half of the agricultural population of Egypt are shedding their blood and bilharzia ova, in urine and faeces, daily into the fields a very serious drain on themselves and a constant menace to their neighbors as a source of infection and reinfection.”116 Ferguson’s description links the disease not to labor but to a lack of hygiene among rural populations, describing the infection as ubiquitous. But the images included in Madden’s 1907 text Bilharziosis tell a different story. The graphic images of the deformed vaginas, anuses, recta, and penises of vulnerable patients are imbued with multiple forms of violence, one of them stemming from the manner in which they served as material evidence of the painful ecologies of colonial economy. Physicians

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vacillated between characterizations of schistosomiasis that portrayed the disease as a stable feature of the Egyptian body and those that associated it with a change in the agricultural landscape. In 1910, Marc Ruffer, president of the Sanitary, Maritime, and Quarantine Council of Egypt, identified the eggs of Schistosoma haematobium in the kidneys of two mummies from the twentieth dynasty (1250–1000 BC), demonstrating that schistosomiasis had afflicted Egyptians for thousands of years.117 In the period that followed Ruffer’s discovery, colonial physicians almost never referenced schistosomiasis without also mentioning its ancient roots, eliding the significance of colonial economy and its attendant environmental transformations in transforming the bodies of those who populated the perennial Nile. Colonial physicians were not yet certain of the relationship between perennial irrigation and schistosomiasis, but they were convinced that agricultural laborers were the victims of its worst ravages. And yet, among colonial officials always primed to compare contemporary Egypt to its ancient past, Ruffer’s discovery not only enabled the portrayal of schistosomiasis as endemic but rendered this endemicity

Transmission cycle of Schistosoma haematobium. Courtesy of Countway Medical Library at Harvard University. FIGURE 15. 



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ahistorical, flattening the recent history of the disease and its relationship with the ecological practices that facilitated colonial economy. The outbreak of World War I pushed the quest to map schistosomiasis’s life cycle to its conclusion. War heightened awareness among British authorities of the relationship between questions of finance and the health of soldiers. British concern regarding schistosomiasis had first been piqued when 625 British soldiers became infected with the disease during the Boer War in South Africa and 359 of them remained “conditionally pensioned,” continuing to cost the British government.118 In 1914, concerned that British soldiers would interact with the Egyptian environment in ways uncommon among British subjects, the British War Office sent a medical mission to Egypt to compile a report on schistosomiasis and investigate the threat that it posed.119 Robert Leiper headed the 1914–15 mission to Egypt. At the time, Leiper was a lecturer in the field of helminthology, the study of parasitic worms, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Patrick Manson, the father of tropical medicine and one of the forces behind the 1899 establishment of the institution, appointed Leiper to his post in 1905 as its first lecturer in helminthology. In the period before he assumed his teaching duties, Leiper traveled to different sites to educate himself. Beginning in the British Gold Coast—Ghana—he eventually landed in Egypt and in 1906–7 spent eighteen months in Cairo working under Arthur Looss. Leiper also visited Japan in 1913 after two Japanese scientists, Miyairi Keinosuke and Suzuki Minoru, identified the freshwater snail, Oncomelania nosophora, that is the intermediate host for Schistosoma japonica, the organism that caused schistosomiasis in Japan. Leiper’s mission to Egypt proved pivotal. He identified the species of snails that serve as the intermediate hosts for the Schistosoma parasites in Egypt and linked perennial irrigation to the prevalence of disease.120 Leiper’s identification of the intermediate snail hosts for schistosomiasis brought one avenue of research to a close. Physicians had come to understand that those populations who were most at risk for schistosomiasis infection were those who lived on the perennial Nile, in regions where the irrigation canal was a central facet of daily life. These discoveries raised new questions about transmission. This chapter has argued that the labor and modes of environmental intimacy that helped to constitute the practice of the river produced new normative bodies, scarred by the ecologies of colonial economy. The bodies of Egyptian cultivators served as situated archives of the transformations under way in the countryside, whose authors

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included the parasites that proliferated in the agricultural landscapes of colonial economy and the nutritional deficiencies rooted within them. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the diseases of perennial irrigation marked Egyptian bodies as distinct, helping to racialize these bodies for European medical practitioners, who did not yet understand the relationship between the diseases they observed and the ecologies of colonial economy in Egypt. In the chapter that follows, I explore the treatment of those infected with parasitic disease by the Egyptian government during the interwar period and the efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation to link disease to questions of hygiene and the notions of race that animated these types of investigation.

5 Treated Subjects Irrigating the Veins of the Nation It was the nearness of the required fecal matter to the openings of these marvelous toilets that made possible the brilliant idea that grew in the mind of that genius of a student. It was enough to suggest this to the worried brethren to relieve their anxiety, and it was only minutes before all of the containers were full and delivered to the doctors with profound confidence. Then the children were given the rest of the day off and returned to their homes, barely able to believe their luck. —Sayyid Qutb1

legendary Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb recounts an early childhood encounter—perhaps his first—with public health. Qutb recalls being summoned to the residence of the village ‘umda with a group of other schoolboys. It was a rare occasion to be summoned to the ‘umda’s house, and the march through the village was laced with anticipation. Upon arrival, the boys found themselves face to face with the region’s hakim basha, a state-appointed doctor whom they encountered only rarely and usually in the event of an unfortunate turn.2 Under the eyes of the armed village watchmen, the boys filed toward the doctor, who pricked their fingers and gave them each a small bottle and a box. They were instructed to return, the bottle filled with their urine, the box with their feces, after half an hour.3 After departing the ‘umda’s house, the boys puzzled over their next steps, unsure of how they might perform the required bodily functions in such a short period of time. They decided to fill the containers that they had been given for their own evacuations with those of one another. They also mined the piles of feces that filled the latrines attached to the local mosque. Containers full, they returned to the house of the ‘umda and delivered what had been asked of them.4 IN HIS MEMOIRS,

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Born in 1906, Qutb grew up in the village of Musha in the province of Asyut in central Egypt. His childhood memory recalls the 1914–15 government survey to measure the prevalence of hookworm infection in Egypt, the first of its kind. In a telling revelation concerning the state’s public health interventions of period, Qutb reported that the subjects of the study were never informed what the state intended to do with their bodily specimens.5 This chapter explores the efforts of the Egyptian state and the Rockefeller Foundation to treat schistosomiasis and hookworm during the interwar period. The practices and imaginaries of Egyptian bodies that I described in the previous chapter were central to this project. In this chapter, I trace the significance of the environments of colonial economy in shaping medical expertise in Egypt and the ways in which the physical subjectivities of rural populations were produced anew through treatment and public health interventions. Under the interwar-period Egyptian regime, rural populations and their relational bodies lay at the heart of the project to produce a national public.

Colonial Economy’s Lagging Laborer The project of state medicine in Egypt began during the period of Mehmed Ali’s rule. In addition to the military hospital at Qasr al-‘Ayni, Mehmed Ali established a hospital specifically for civilians in the Cairo neighborhood of al-Azbakiyya. Three ophthalmological clinics were also set up in Cairo, and the state began to vaccinate civilians against smallpox. In 1846, Mehmed Ali established a network of provincial hospitals throughout Egypt.6 He also appointed doctors to each province who were charged with overseeing the health of the villages over which they presided.7 It was one of these doctors, the hakim basha, whom Qutb encountered at the house of the ‘umda. While Khaled Fahmy and Liat Kozma have demonstrated that at least in Cairo Egyptians deployed medical procedures to their advantage in legal cases, there is plentiful evidence to suggest that especially in the provinces they gave hospitals a wide berth, fearful that they were linked to military conscription and corvée recruitment.8 In 1847–48, the Russian government sent physician Artemy Rafalowitch to Egypt’s provinces to inspect public health conditions and assess the quarantine administration. Rafalowitch testified to the quality of the system but reported that, because of the wariness with which Egyptians viewed the state, beds in community hospitals remained empty and local communities refused to carry out public health dictates.9



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Under the rule of Mehmed Ali’s successors ‘Abbas and Sa‘id, the state’s involvement in medicine languished. Urban clinics disappeared and provincial hospitals were neglected, becoming sites at which to deposit sick soldiers, prisoners, and the destitute.10 When, in 1873, Khedive Isma‘il sent Dr. Dacorogna to examine the hospitals proximate to the Daira Sanieh, he reported that they were in a state of decay.11 The vast majority of Egyptians relied on local medical practitioners to heal their ills, and only a tiny number of doctors existed to serve the population. When the British occupation began, a mere sixty-two doctors were estimated to serve a population of more than three million in the Nile Delta.12 During the early years of the occupation, investments in medicine were negligible. In 1892, just two students began the course of instruction at Qasr al-‘Ayni. Not a single student entered the following year, probably because of an announcement that the government would not be hiring graduates of institutions of higher education.13 Colonial officials complained that responsibility for public health fell to the state and that indigenous elites did not provide for it through their charity.14 As was the case at the Muhandiskhanah, the number of students admitted to Qasr al-‘Ayni began to climb at the turn of the century.15 So did that of patients seeking treatment at Qasr al-‘Ayni, as discussed in the previous chapter. In 1902, the colonial regime made its first foray into public health, with the assistance of private funding. Ernest Cassel announced the establishment of a trust of £E 40,000 to train Egyptians to treat eye disease.16 Somewhat ironically, the one common disease that Cassel chose to combat was one of the few that his investments in perennially irrigated agriculture had not helped fuel. In July 1903, Lord Cromer tasked Dr. A. F. MacAllan, an English ophthalmic surgeon and trachoma specialist, with the organization of a treatment program. MacAllan hired an Egyptian assistant and a medical staff and during the fall of 1903 established a traveling hospital in the Nile Delta near the town of Minuf.17 When Cassel’s donation had been exhausted, the government decided to provide the funds necessary to maintain two traveling hospitals to treat diseases of the eye.18 These institutions saw a staggering number of patients despite having a staff of only four. In 1906, patients visited them on ninetyfour thousand occasions and doctors performed 5,800 operations.19 The government planned permanent ophthalmic hospitals for each province, the first of which opened in 1907 in the town of Tanta in the Nile Delta. In Asyut and al-Mansura, local elites built private ophthalmic hospitals.20

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In 1913, British officials finally turned their attention to schistosomiasis and hookworm. In his annual report, Lord Kitchner, who had become British agent and consul general in 1911, announced the formation of a new board of health that would “enable the Public Health Department to take up the investigation of the more prevalent diseases such as ancylostomiasis and bilharziasis, which are so widely disseminated throughout the Delta, and cripple so large a percentage of the population, thus seriously affecting the economic condition of an agricultural country like Egypt.”21 Questions of economic productivity lay at the root of Kitchner’s concern, specifically the toll that parasitic infections exacted on agricultural labor. In his framing of the epidemic, Kitchner did not reference the environmental transformations that had resulted from colonial economy. He rather fell back on the “ancient” presence of schistosomiasis and the discovery of ova in ancient Egyptian mummies.22 The government turned its attention first to hookworm. It formed an advisory committee, the Ankylostomiasis Consultative Committee, chaired by Arthur Looss, to recommend a course of treatment, devise metrics to assess the prevalence of infection, and offer advice on prophylactic measures. The committee did not include a single Egyptian member.23 Aided by the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, the campaign began in the two northern provinces of Qalyubiyya and Sharqiyya. MacAllan, who had directed the state’s campaign to treat ophthalmia, was appointed to head the effort. The Public Health Department established tent hospitals modeled after the traveling ophthalmic hospitals of the previous decade that provided treatment free of charge.24 For most patients, the treatment regimen consisted of three doses of thymol.25 F. M. Sandwith had begun to use the compound against the infection at Qasr al-‘Ayni in 1887.26 As with the state campaign to combat diseases of the eye, local elites joined the effort.27 Between the middle of December 1914 and the end of the following March when World War I cut short the campaign, government hospitals examined 28,281 individuals for infection, admitting 11,280 patients for treatment.28 Coercion was central to motivating attendance at the hospitals. MacAllan described incidents in which individuals were beaten to compel them to submit to treatment.29 Unsurprisingly, less than 20 percent of patients returned for examination as instructed after completing the treatment regimen.30 The Public Health Department also conducted a survey of the prevalence of hookworm infection in Sharqiyya and Asyut, the results of which



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are included in the previous chapter. The team that conducted the survey was composed of a staff of five physicians, a lab attendant, and a night watchman. As described in Qutb’s memoir, to gather subjects they relied on village headmen whom they would phone one day prior to their arrival in a village to request that subjects be present at his residence at a specified time.31 Just as villagers had resisted treatment, many did not relish participation in the survey. In Asyut specifically, the sample population consisted exclusively of boys—children—because grown men refused to submit themselves for examination.32 Public health had arrived in the countryside, but Egyptians remained deeply skeptical of its objectives and methods.

Endemic Opportunities War meant a pause in the public health interventions of the state. When the Ankylostomiasis Consultative Committee reconvened in 1920, this time without Looss, who had been forced to leave Egypt during the war, only one of its seven members was possibly Egyptian.33 As at the Public Works Ministry, a change in Egypt’s political status in the years that followed meant the rise of Egyptian physicians and scientists to positions of prominence at Qasr al-‘Ayni and within the Public Health Department. In November 1922, the Ankylostoma and Bilharzia Consultative Committee appointed Muhammad Khalil ‘Abd al-Khaliq—Muhammad Khalil, as he referred to himself in English-language scientific literature—to lead the new Bilharzia Research Section. Khalil was also appointed a professor of parasitology at King Fu’ad University (which would later become Cairo University).34 He had graduated at the top of his medical school class at Qasr al-‘Ayni before moving to London to complete a diploma at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he worked as Robert Leiper’s assistant. Despite Khalil’s qualifications, the government approached him only after they had offered the position to Leiper, who, occupied with his work in London, turned the position down and recommended Khalil.35 When Khalil began his work at the Public Health Department, colonial hierarchies continued to define the field of tropical medicine globally. Research on endemic disease created opportunities for Egyptian physicians to showcase their expertise and positional advantage. In their access to rural communities, they had a leg up on their colonial predecessors, no small matter in the wake of a colonial order that sought to contain and sideline Egyptian scientific expertise. In 1924, the Public Health Department published a volume authored by Khalil entitled Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis

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in Egypt, which established him as the leading expert on parasitic disease in the country. While colonial physicians had mostly limited their observations to hospital patients, Khalil’s volume included two field studies.36 One objective of the research performed by the Bilharzia Research Section was to definitively establish the link between the prevalence of schistosomiasis infection and the practice of perennial irrigation. In the early 1920s, the irrigation landscape in the south of Egypt allowed for comparisons of infection rates in similar regions. Much of the south remained under basin irrigation, while the regions in which sugarcane production was concentrated, the subject of chapter 3, were perennially irrigated. In 1923 and 1926, respectively, teams from the Public Health Department conducted studies at Idfu and Kom Ombo. The surveys confirmed what the scientists had suspected, that infection was rare in Idfu, which continued to practice basin irrigation, while the prevalence of those infected with Schistosoma haematobium topped 70 percent in perennially irrigated Kom Ombo because of the presence of the Egyptian Sugar Company.37 The disease was also common in Naj‘ Hamadi, the site of the Egyptian Sugar Company’s other flagship mill. Sometime, between 1922 and 1924, a pupil at the Provincial Council Technical School in the town lodged a complaint with the Public Health Department concerning the prevalence of schistosomiasis at his school. The school trained boys from poor rural families to be skilled laborers at the mill. In response to the student’s complaint, the Public Health Department sent a team to take samples from students at several schools in the town. Rates of infection at all the schools were high, even at the Government Primary School, which was attended by children of more prosperous families, a group that included government officials. They were sky high at the Technical School, where more than 80 percent of the student population tested positive for infection with Schistosoma haematobium.38 Khalil also directed a set of studies mapping the geographies of infection with Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni. Surveys performed by the Public Health Laboratories in the 1920s revealed that while the prevalence of infection with Schistosoma haematobium was well over half of the population in areas with access to perennial irrigation, Schistosoma mansoni was present only in particular regions of the Nile Delta. In these regions, the spread of perennial irrigation was marked by an increase in infection with both species of the parasite. However, in other regions of the Delta and in the Nile Valley, Schistosoma mansoni was not present,



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and thus a transformation in irrigation practice produced an increase in rates of infection only with Schistosoma haematobium.39 Despite the continuing significance of race in structuring medical expertise, access to rural communities offered Egyptian scientists opportunities to make important contributions. In addition to its research, the Bilharzia Research Section oversaw an extensive network of treatment facilities. In December 1919, the Public Health Department had resumed treatment for hookworm. It also began to treat schistosomiasis the next year with regimens developed by physicians in the years leading up to and during World War I.40 Between December 1919 and July 1921, the government attached treatment annexes to hospitals in Qalyub, al-Mansura, Banha, and Tanta in the Nile Delta, and to Qasr al-‘Ayni in Cairo. Annexes were later completed in Port Said on the Suez Canal and in the town of Damanhur, also in the Delta.41 The design of each facility was the same. Situated on a plot of land approximately half an acre in size and enclosed by a fence, two clusters of tents stood on the site, one for men and the other for women. One tent served as a waiting area, and the others contained stretcher beds for patients to recover after treatment. The annexes also contained wooden huts. In some, physicians examined patients and administered treatment. Medical teams collected and examined urine and stool specimens, patient records were maintained, drugs were stored, and doctors were headquartered in other huts.42 Patients also sought treatment in private hospitals and clinics. In June 1919, the Church Missionary Society hospital in Old Cairo began to treat schistosomiasis.43 Private physicians also treated the disease, with Rameses Girges being among the most notable. Girges worked in the town of Tanta in the Nile Delta. He would add his own contributions to research when in 1934 he published Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), which described in extensive detail the history of research and treatment in Egypt. The standard treatment for schistosomiasis was a series of injections with tartar emetic. The regimen extended for a period of four weeks, with three treatment sessions scheduled each week. Medical officers administered the injections with glass syringes, which were boiled between patients. They sometimes administered more than four hundred injections each day, and “the medical officers . . . became so expert that 150 patients could be injected in an hour without difficulty.”44 By 1927, treatment for hookworm had been reduced from a regimen that lasted several weeks to “a single dose of low cost.”45

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Throughout the 1920s, the number of treatment centers and that of the patients who attended them continued to increase. By 1926, eight permanent hospitals, nineteen ambulatory hospitals, and five public school units were devoted to the treatment of schistosomiasis and hookworm.46 In the ambulatory hospitals alone, 357,370 cases of schistosomiasis were treated between 1924 and 1927. This figure did not include those who sought care in state hospitals and other facilities established by provincial councils, missionary groups, and private individuals.47 By 1927, the number of treatment centers had increased to thirty.48 Despite the rapid expansion of the network of treatment facilities, reports from scientists working in the Egyptian countryside suggest that knowledge of the new treatment programs among rural populations remained uneven. In 1927, Dr. D. L. Augustine, a pathologist at the Harvard Medical School, conducted a survey of the prevalence of Ancylostoma duodenale and Ascaris lumbricoides in twelve Egyptian villages. Augustine observed that he needed to travel only a short distance from towns in which treatment centers were located to find populations who had no knowledge of the facilities.49

Treatment clinic in the town of Qalyub in the Nile Delta. In Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 1924. Courtesy of Countway Medical Library at Harvard University. FIGURE 16. 

Patients being injected with tartar emetic as treatment for schistosomiasis. In Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 1924. Courtesy of Countway Medical Library at Harvard University. FIGURES 17A and B. 

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The Public Health Department organized a public education campaign to complement treatment programs. In an endeavor to educate agricultural communities, the department distributed leaflets that detailed the symptoms of hookworm and schistosomiasis.50 One described hookworm infection: “You will be pale and feeble and feel your heart throbbing. You will breathe fast on the slightest exercise. You will not be strong for your marital duties. The worms eat all your blood inside of you.”51 In reference to schistosomiasis, the leaflet explained that if one possessed “any or all of the above symptoms or also pain on micturition or you will pass blood in your urine,” infection was likely.52 As the vast majority of Egypt’s rural population was illiterate, the department also distributed posters to rural communities.53 One depicted a laborer resting in seated position, exhausted by his work in the field; another showed a man collapsed on the bank of an irrigation canal, a woman wailing above him; a third, the face of a man, tongue extended and eyelids exposed (the eyelids and tongues of those infected with hookworm could be noticeably pale).54 Officials at the Public Health Department were well aware that men who labored in agriculture were especially vulnerable to infection, so on each of these posters the diseased subject is depicted as a rural man.55 In 1928, the Public Health Department established a new section dedicated to endemic disease, the “Endemic Disease Section.” With Khalil at its helm, the section administered field studies, sponsored research, and oversaw treatment programs related to a set of endemic diseases that included schistosomiasis, hookworm, malaria, filariasis, amoebic dysentery, and pellagra.56 On April 9, 1932, King Fu’ad inaugurated its headquarters in Cairo, the Endemic Disease Hospital and Research Institute. The section’s establishment coincided with the project to raise Khazan Aswan a second time. While government officials understood that the extension of perennial irrigation would worsen the epidemic of parasitic disease, they clung to a vision in which Egyptian experts could lay claim to the waters of the perennial Nile while rescuing the health of rural subjects. In 1934, Bayer IG Farben introduced a new treatment for schistosomiasis, named “Fouadin” after Egypt’s king. Khalil and M. H. Betache of the Bilharzia Research Section had collaborated with a German scientist in the chemical section at Bayer to develop Fouadin, another avenue in which Egyptian experts demonstrated their unique expertise.57 Treatment

Public health posters depicting the symptoms of hookworm and schistosomiasis, distributed to rural communities. In Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 1924. Courtesy of Countway Medical Library at Harvard University. FIGURES 18A and B. 

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with the compound consisted of a mere nine injections as opposed to tartar emetic’s suggested fifteen, reducing the length of regimen from twenty-nine to nineteen days. The administration of the drug also required less skill, as the compound could be injected intramuscularly rather than intravenously like tartar emetic.58 Following its launch, the clinics of the Endemic Disease Section began to use both Fouadin and tartar emetic.59 The development of Fouadin highlights the significance of treatment annexes as laboratories. Khalil and Betache first tested the compound in 1929 at Qasr al-‘Ayni and in the clinics in Qalyub, Damietta, and Cairo, relying on experimental subjects for whom refusal was not an option, namely primary school students, prisoners, and orphans.60 The use of annexes as sites of experimentation was not particular to the development of Fouadin. It was only as physicians administered drugs to patients that the efficacy of treatment, the interactions of different compounds, and the side effects of particular drugs became apparent. In the early years of treatment, physicians, for example, discovered that patients who were infected with both hookworm and schistosomiasis should undergo treatment for the former first, as “it was found that such patients do not recover well from Ankylostoma [hookworm] anæmia if a depressant drug (antimony) is given at the same time.”61 While it was inevitable that physicians would acquire a more robust knowledge through the accumulation of evidence and experience, the rapid expansion of the project to treat parasitic disease had the effect of rendering the bodies of several million Egyptians objects of experimentation.

The Ins and Outs of Treatment During the 1930s and 1940s, the number of treatment centers administered by the Endemic Disease Section and the patients who visited them continued to multiply.62 By 1947, each of Egypt’s ninety-seven districts contained a treatment facility. These facilities dealt with nearly four hundred thousand cases of schistosomiasis each year.63 How millions of Egyptians ended up at these clinics is an open question. In the early years of the program, the numbers of patients treated at the new annexes climbed steadily.64 Khalil argued that they were genuinely popular among rural communities: “An Annexe established for free treatment needs no advertising. From the beginning it is crowded with patients, from the surrounding districts. Some patients have sometimes to remain two or three days waiting their turn, to be examined and treated.”65 While Khalil’s reflections were optimistic, social, if not physical, coercion almost certainly motivated attendance at

Public health poster on symptoms of hookworm, distributed to rural communities. In Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 1924. Courtesy of Countway Medical Library at Harvard University. FIGURE 19. 

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clinics. Throughout the decades of the interwar period, public health projects continued to depend on village officials to compel participation. Large landowners and agricultural industrialists demonstrated a keen interest in the impact of parasitic disease on worker productivity.66 In 1941, the state passed Law 58, which made treatment for schistosomiasis compulsory, the necessity of the law suggesting that public health officials continued to confront resistance to treatment.67 For Egyptians wary of the state’s public health interventions, nothing about the process of treatment would have assuaged their fears. Upon arrival, officials recorded their name, address, age, and sex and assigned them a serial number, a process that was reminiscent of that associated with military conscription. The length of the treatment regimen for schistosomiasis was also a cause of economic hardship. Attendance at clinics was seasonably variable, correlating with the demand for agricultural labor. In Banha, for example, the number of patients requesting treatment in 1922 dwindled during the sowing and gathering of cotton and the reaping of corn.68 The pain of treatment for schistosomiasis acted as a further deterrent. The administration of tartar emetic was more painful than the disease itself. Patients commonly suffered “attacks of cough which may be severe, vomiting, and fainting.”69 Possible side effects included “severe muscular pain or tooth-ache, ear-ache, back-ache, pain in the eyes and nose.”70 On occasion, patients died.71 While the treatment period with Fouadin was shorter, increasing the possibility that more patients would complete treatment, Fouadin was less effective than tartar emetic, and the number of accidental deaths that it caused was higher.72 If the experience of treatment was not enough of a deterrent, many of those infected did not link their physical symptoms to infection with a parasite. Rural Egyptians were not ignorant of the presence of parasites in their systems; infection with the worms of Ascaris lumbricoides, which can grow to up to fourteen centimeters in length and are often visible in stool and vomit, was also common in Egypt.73 The organisms that cause schistosomiasis and hookworm were not easily visible. There is also no evidence to suggest that public health officials made systematic attempts to explain the logic of treatment to patients. Finally, as discussed in chapter 4, infection with hookworm and Schistosoma parasites had become so common that some symptoms of disease were considered normative habitations of the body among rural communities. Despite the multiple forms of authority that rural populations encountered, patients found means of creating voice through action. Among



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those who attended clinics, a small percentage consistently refused treatment and left.74 Refusing treatment after arrival might have functioned as a means of thwarting the attempts of large landowners and local officials to compel their participation. Among those who began the regimen, the vast majority abandoned it before it was complete. Reports of treatment nearly always include patient averages for each successive injection, the cumulative average less than the complete course of treatment. That patients abandoned treatment before it was complete presented a paradox to public health officials, as the surest way to guarantee a cure for schistosomiasis was to complete the regimen. Physicians at the Public Health Department claimed that 96 percent of those treated with tartar emetic were cured after a full course of treatment.75 However, most chose to abort the painful process when the symptoms of disease disappeared but the infection possibly remained. Even if achieved, a cure for infection was at best short-lived, while the pain and handicap that further injections produced were all too real. Most patients were infected again following their return to rural life and the forms of environmental intimacy that had made them sick. Among those who were examined several years after completing the treatment regimen, only 8 percent remained free of disease.76 This did not come as a surprise to Egyptian physicians, who acknowledged the near certainty of reinfection from the earliest days of the state program.77 However, the objectives underlying the implementation of nationwide treatment programs were never as simple as ridding the population of illness. Endemic diseases provided a unique opportunity for Egyptian scientists to demonstrate their expertise, staking a claim in a global scientific discourse that continued to be defined by racial hierarchies. For Egyptian public health officials, the diseased, rural, lower-class Egyptian body was the raw material for the rescue and performance of their own expertise, and treatment programs were as much about the expert as the patient.

Sanitizing the Village In addition to treatment, public health programs included measures focused on hygiene and environmental behavior. Most rural communities lacked sanitation facilities, and without latrines Egyptians were left with no other choice than to urinate and defecate in the open. In 1925, Khalil observed of the Public Health Department’s propaganda campaign that “it seems unfair to preach the gospel of not polluting the earth and the water

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whilst no latrines exist.”78 In 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation, on the invitation of the Egyptian Public Health Department, turned their attention once more to Egypt, their focus being the relationship between the presence of latrines and the prevalence of parasitic disease.79 Fresh from the battle against hookworm in the American South, the foundation believed that the problem of parasitic disease was one of “soil pollution.” The work of the foundation in Egypt would be premised on many of the same assumptions that animated colonial approaches to health in the British Empire, namely that disease was the result of the filth that they saw in rural villages. The Public Health Department supported the aims of the Rockefeller Foundation project, having previously encouraged provincial councils and local elites to fund the construction of latrines.80 Despite their support of the foundation’s objectives, Egyptian scientists and officials were fearful that Rockefeller scientists might behave like the British colonial officials who had only recently begun to depart Egypt. Just a year before the project began, the conduct of Harvard pathologist D. L. Augustine, whose research in Egypt had been funded by the foundation, caused friction. The undersecretary of state for public health Shahin Pasha wrote to the foundation to complain that “Dr. Augustine however has left Egypt long ago without sending any report of the results of the work attained in Egypt.”81 Shahin was particularly aggrieved because Augustine’s work had been facilitated by the Egyptian Public Health Department and he had collaborated with Dr. M. Namzi of the medical school at Qasr al‘Ayni and Dr. M. Helmi of the Public Health Department.82 His concern was not without merit. The previous February, Augustine had written to the foundation to announce his intention to publish one of the articles that resulted from his research in Egypt as the sole author, claiming that “the Egyptian associates did not have an active part in this particular investigation.”83 While the foundation responded to Shahin’s complaint, explaining that reports had been sent to Augustine’s coauthors and to Khalil for edits, its approach to the matter did not allay Egyptian fears that the behavior of its scientists would be reminiscent of a colonial dynamic that was not quite past.84 The Public Health Department was eager to receive Rockefeller funds and expertise, but its officials did not wish to see American scientists use Egypt as a field site and Egyptian scientists as their assistants. The first Rockefeller scientist to arrive in Egypt and begin work was J. C. Carter, a sanitation engineer who had worked for the foundation in Palestine.85 Claude H. Barlow and James Allen Scott, both parasitologists,



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followed Carter. Scott was a hookworm researcher at the School of Hygiene and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University.86 Barlow headed the mission and would end up spending more than two decades in Egypt. He had attended Northwestern University for medical school and earned a ScD at the School of Hygiene and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University. He was a Baptist like John D. Rockefeller and a medical missionary in China at the time of his appointment to Egypt.87 The manner in which Claude Barlow prepared for his new mission did not portend favorable relations with Egyptian scientists at the Public Health Department. On the eve of his departure, Victor Heiser, the foundation’s “director of the East,” reported, “Barlow states that he does his best work when he does not previously read the literature.”88 This willful lack of exposure to research was remarkable, as, despite his distinguished career as a researcher of parasitic disease, he had not in fact been a specialist in schistosomiasis or hookworm before he arrived in Egypt. His work in China and the topic of his degree at Johns Hopkins concerned the giant intestinal fluke fasciolopsis.89 Prominent hookworm specialist William Walter Cort, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and the principal investigator of the lab that employed Scott, gave both men a crash course in schistosomiasis before their departure.90 Barlow’s avoidance of the scientific literature also meant that he was not likely familiar with the work of Khalil, who by 1929 had authored numerous articles in scientific journals in English and Arabic and had earned an international reputation. In Egypt, Carter, Barlow, and Scott designed and administered an experiment that studied whether the construction of latrines affected “the incidence of hookworm, Schistosoma, typhoid, and intestinal-borne diseases generally.”91 The scientists planned to survey the inhabitants of two ‘izab in the Nile Delta for rates of infection, treat those who were infected at clinics administered by the Endemic Disease Section, and then construct latrines in one of the ‘izab, Bahtim, while using the other, Musturud, as a control. They then planned to measure rates of infection among the residents of both villages over a period of years.92 As with previous public health interventions, the orchestration of the Rockefeller Foundation experiment depended on local elites and village officials to organize, and sometimes compel, community participation. One characteristic determining the choice of the villages for inclusion in the study was the presence of a “co-operative Omda [sic].”93 The foundation also relied on village censuses to keep track of who lived in the village, and when a census was unavailable a village guard accompanied the study team to ensure that all

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residents were accounted for. The hospitals of the Endemic Disease Section provided treatment to the subjects included in the survey.94 When the foundation had first imagined its intervention in Egypt, its work was intended to supplement the existent infrastructure of the Public Health Department and to aid in the development of prophylactic measures.95 However, from the early days of the sanitation experiment, there is little indication that the foundation’s scientists viewed their research as complementary to that of the department. Barlow and Scott began by repeating surveys that Khalil and his team had completed just prior to their arrival in the villages chosen for the study. In October, just a month after his arrival, Barlow wrote disparagingly: “We found the medical survey of the villages made under Dr. Khalil’s direction completed. It is hard to say just how much there is of value in it.”96 Scott echoed Barlow’s sentiment in his own report.97 By January, the two Rockefeller scientists began new surveys, Barlow arguing that he and Scott could not use the surveys conducted by the Public Health Department because “subsequent surveys would be carried out by different methods and so could not be compared with the first survey.”98 Despite his dismissive approach to Khalil’s expertise, the sanitation experiment continued to depend on the resources of the Public Health Department. Throughout the two decades that he spent in Egypt, Barlow disregarded the expertise of Egyptian scientists, Khalil in particular.99 The survey conducted by Barlow and Scott got off to a rocky start. The foundation requested urine and stool samples from the participants. They responded by delivering a selection of different samples, including those belonging to buffaloes, camels, and other family members, a move reminiscent of the schoolboys who featured prominently in Qutb’s memory of the government’s first hookworm survey.100 Villagers also returned cans empty or filled with water from irrigation canals. In Musturud, the village intended to serve as the control, residents refused to undergo treatment unless they were also provided with latrines. The foundation responded by omitting the village from the study.101 While Barlow and Scott attempted to conduct surveys, Carter was charged with latrine construction in Bahtim. There were early challenges locating proper ground on which to build. By 1930, the latrines had been successfully installed, but in the year that followed, residents rarely used them, filling them instead with trash.102 A group sent a petition to the Public Health Department, complaining that flies and mosquitoes were breeding



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in the refuse-filled repositories.103 Despite these initial difficulties, latrines eventually proved popular.104 In his 1930 annual report, Barlow reported that when the residents of Basyun, a village near Tanta, witnessed the installation of latrines in a school, they petitioned Shahin Pasha “asking that we sanitate their village.”105 Other villages made similar demands.106 Public education also eased the foundation’s work. The historical record suggests that villagers were often not aware of the objectives of public health campaigns and that when officials took the time to engage them they responded positively. Barlow reported: “In the previous studies the people had been surveyed without preparatory propaganda and they resented being treated like experiment animals without being given any volitionary considerations. In el Khassa . . . we held lectures, with microscope demonstrations, for separate groups of men only and women only which were largely attended and intelligently considered.”107 Barlow’s assessment echoed that of other public health practitioners who found that with engagement those surveyed and treated became more willing to participate in public health interventions. Muhammad Khalil had made a similar observation: “Microscopical demonstration of living specimens always appealed to them [the villagers]. In spite of their lack of education, these people were very sensible and inquisitive, discussing what they see when they are treated in a gentle manner.”108 Whereas those made the subjects of experimentation often resisted, local elites were supportive of the Rockefeller Foundation’s endeavors and curious about the results. In February 1931, the foundation set up a booth at the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition held on the grounds of the Royal Agricultural Society in Cairo. The exhibit featured two models of villages, one sanitized and the other with “dirty streets, a dirty pond, deposits of feces along bye streets, and a fat graveyard.”109 A full-size latrine was also constructed. Carter’s assistant Kamal Effendi managed the exhibition and gave lectures to the attendees. Barlow described the exhibit as “thronged all day” and reported that “many land-owners want to have them [latrines] put in on their holdings and ask how it can be managed.”110 The popularity of the exhibit among large landholders was no surprise. As parasitic infections reduced the productivity of their laborers, large landowners were enthusiastic supporters of efforts to combat disease. They were also central to the orchestration of public health projects, offering their ‘izab as sites for experiments. The Royal Agricultural Society had an ‘izba that was a popular study site, and members of the royal family,

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including the king, were keen for the villages that populated their land to be included in studies.111 In its interventions, the foundation sought to understand the personal habits of Egyptian villagers in order to better plan the construction of latrines. During October, November, and December of 1931 and May and June of 1932, Rockefeller scientist William Headlee conducted a study that mapped where residents defecated in order to locate likely sites of hookworm infestation. At daybreak and throughout the night, Headlee stalked the residents of the Rushdi ‘izba as they sought places to relieve themselves in the village and in its surrounding fields. After they had defecated, Headlee marked the location of individual stools to chart their concentration and movement over time. He also conducted interviews in which he interrogated individuals regarding their defecation habits.112 Headlee’s attempts to identify sites at which the soil was especially infested with hookworm came to naught. In some regions where the foundation had worked, defecation was concentrated at specific sites, usually those that provided some form of shelter. The personal habits of the Egyptians that Headlee watched did not accord with those of other populations. In Egypt, its agricultural landscape largely flat and treeless, defecation was spread about. The stools that littered villages, deposited on dry soil and hardened by the sun, were not a primary source of infection.113 There was thus no particular location in villages at which to situate latrines that would be more effective in preventing the spread of infection. While the foundation’s sanitation experiment was in progress, Scott began his national survey to measure and map the prevalence of schistosomiasis that was referenced in the previous chapter. The Public Health Department and the foundation had previously measured rates of infection within individual communities, but nothing on the scale of Scott’s survey had been compiled.114 It would prove the foundation’s most lasting contribution in Egypt; another nationwide survey of this scope in Egypt was not performed until 1955.115 Scott’s survey was possible only through the cooperation of hospitals, village officials, and the Public Health Department. He began in southern Egypt where his team examined twenty thousand specimens from more than ten thousand people in twenty-two villages for schistosomiasis.116 The following year, they completed a survey of the Delta of a similar scope. The results of Scott’s nationwide survey were remarkably consistent with rates of infection among patients at hospitals and treatment centers.117



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In 1938, Barlow and Scott published the findings of the sanitation experiment. After seven years of observation and evaluation, the two scientists concluded that the project to construct latrines made for cleaner villages but had zero effect on the prevalence of parasitic disease. Of the four worm parasites studied in the survey, Schistosoma haematobium, Schistosoma mansoni, Ancylostoma duodenale, and Ascaris lumbricoides, the presence of latrines did not result in a decrease in infection with any single parasite. One of their findings was that the effects of treatment were erased after three years when the prevalence of infection returned to that of populations who had not been treated, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the problem of reinfection.118 Assumptions about hygiene had overwhelmed what scientists working in Egypt had recognized since the first decade of the twentieth century: rates of infection with hookworm and schistosomiasis were highest among laborers who toiled in fields and irrigation canals and who had very little opportunity to use village latrines.119 While shoes might be worn to prevent the transmission of hookworm, the experience of schistosomiasis was that of labor itself.

Chasing Snails Treatment, propaganda, and hygiene efforts were matched by those targeting the tiny snails that served as the intermediate hosts for Schistosoma parasites. In the period in which treatment programs began, A. C. Chandler discovered that the compound copper sulfate killed these snails. In 1921, Muhammad Khalil traveled to British Guiana, where schistosomiasis was also endemic, to test the compound’s efficacy.120 In Egypt, a 1926 outbreak of Schistosoma haematobium in the town of Rashda in the Dakhla oasis provided an opportunity for the Egyptian Public Health Department to test the efficacy of copper sulfate against snails. Scientists were curious about the relationship between the annual Nile flood and snail populations.121 In Rashda, there was an opportunity to try and eradicate snails at a site whose water supply did not originate from the Nile. Situated deep in the western desert due west of Luxor, the oasis drew its water from three local artesian wells. A team from the Public Health Department first treated the local population with tartar emetic and then applied copper sulfate to the canal that was the source of infection. The compound failed to eradicate the snail population in the canal. Despite multiple treatments of copper sulfate, the snails continued to revive. Frustrated by their failure, in 1928, the government brought Robert Leiper to Egypt to demonstrate the proper application of copper sulfate but to no avail. The Public Health Department eventually gave up and filled in the canal.122

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Just as scientists at the Public Health Department thought the elimination of snails promising, so too did Claude Barlow. During the 1930s, while the sanitation experiment was ongoing, Barlow pursued his own wide-ranging research agenda, much of which concerned these snails. He investigated the seasonality of their reproductive cycles, the intricacies of their relationship with schistosomes, and the aqueous landscape that served as their habitat.123 Of greatest interest to Barlow was the absurd hardiness of the mollusks and their stubborn resistance to death. Recording the results of an experiment Barlow observed: “In order to test snails, I removed them from a canal, put them in the laboratory to dry and they promptly died. I then dried the canal and collected dried snails (after a month’s drying naturally) took them to the laboratory and tried reviving them. They recovered in a few minutes when given water. Keeping the remainder completely dry I tried reviving a few each month. I found they would survive for TWELVE WHOLE MONTHS! ”124 While most snails did not survive a full year dry, Barlow’s findings cast doubt on the efficacy of the measures undertaken by the Public Health Department in killing snails. Khalil argued that these populations could be killed when canals dried each year when, in the winter, they were closed for clearing and maintenance.125 Barlow’s findings suggested that this technique might not be effective, as snails could remain alive on dry earth for far longer than perennial canals could be closed.126 Barlow was firmly convinced that new methods to target snails were necessary. He questioned the efficacy of copper sulfate and thought it too expensive to use on a wide scale.127 As an alternative, Barlow developed a device, a specially designed wire net with a handle, to clear canals of snails and the vegetation in which they thrived.128 Between 1933 and 1936, Barlow tested the new tool in a field experiment that he conducted on the royal ‘izba. Use of the net was dependent on a population of laborers who were already infected with schistosomiasis, as it was these individuals who waded in canals to remove snails. Barlow claimed his experiments a success and began to insist that his methods could produce a significant reduction in the prevalence of schistosomiasis.129 In 1940, after the sanitation experiment had come to a close, the Egyptian government formed a new department specifically focused on the elimination of snail populations, the Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section. The Rockefeller Foundation had ended their program in Egypt and Barlow was faced with mandatory retirement from the foundation because of his age. Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Azim directed the new department, and Barlow took a position as its



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resident “expert.” After the failure of the sanitation experiment and that of treatment programs to affect long-term cures, Barlow was thoroughly convinced that the elimination of the parasites’ intermediate hosts was the only way to defeat schistosomiasis. In pursuit of this aim, the Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section implemented a multipronged approach that included the techniques and tools for canal clearance that Barlow honed in the 1930s as well as those approaches that Khalil advocated, specifically drying canals during winter closure and chemically treating them with copper sulfate.130 The establishment of the new section was controversial. Despite a common mission, it reported, not to the Endemic Disease Section, but rather directly to the undersecretary of state and the minister of public health, which Khalil read as an attack on his authority.131 While this alone was affront enough, Khalil’s relationship with Barlow was antagonistic. It was not simply differences in approach that set Khalil and Barlow at odds; it was Barlow’s failure to acknowledge Khalil’s extensive knowledge and expertise. Barlow was a solitary worker, but he did solicit the advice of other scientists on occasion. During his tenure in Egypt, he rarely, if ever, approached Egyptian scientists

Laborers clearing an irrigation canal during one of Claude Barlow’s field studies. Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center. FIGURE 20. 

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as collaborators or peers. Despite Khalil’s opposition, the section survived. In 1943, it began a large field experiment in the oasis of Fayum. The first step of the study was to treat those who would be included for schistosomiasis.132 The field experiment was the first occasion on which the government had applied Law 58, which made treatment for schistosomiasis compulsory.133 The streams in the oasis were similarly surveyed to assess whether they were infested with infected snails.134 The section also surveyed streams and treated populations in other areas of the country, including Kom Ombo, a popular site for state public health interventions.135

He Who Drinks from the Nile Will Return In 1944, the US Middle East Command informed Claude Barlow that thousands of American soldiers were to be sent to Camp Huckstep, located between the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis and the village of al-Marg. A number of these soldiers would be stationed on the banks of the al-Marg Canal, a known site of schistosomiasis infection. As it investigated the calamities that might befall its soldiers in Egypt, the American government began to fear that they might contract schistosomiasis, echoing the concerns of the British government during World War I. Barlow personally worried that infected soldiers might spread the parasite to North America, highlighting the still present fear that the disease could spread beyond regions in which it was endemic.136 On May 31, 1944, Barlow infected himself with the Schistosoma haematobium parasite. Researchers in the United States wanted samples of the parasite, and Barlow intended to provide them. Self-infection was not the first idea that Barlow happened upon to transport Schistosoma haematobium to the United States. In the early 1940s, a baboon named “Billie” had been infected with the parasite in Cairo and then moved to the United States. The problem with Billie was that she was not human, and scientists worried that the samples she provided would differ from those from a human being. As a solution, Barlow suggested that an Egyptian infected with the parasite be exported to the United States to replace Billie, a suggestion made only slightly less absurd by the fact that Egyptians infected with Schistosoma haematobium were central to the design and execution of several of Barlow’s experiments in Egypt.137 It was only after American immigration authorities were reportedly unwilling to cooperate that Barlow offered up his own body.138 When Barlow infected himself, he began to keep a diary, recording the daily experience of his illness. In his infection, he attempted to replicate



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some of the conditions under which Egyptians acquired the disease. Barlow chose the month of June for his infection, the same month that Egyptian cultivators experienced the sensation of parasites penetrating their skin while they labored in irrigation canals. He also infected himself on multiple occasions to mimic the repeat infections to which these cultivators were exposed. On the first day of his self-infection, Barlow applied cercariae—the form of the parasite that infects human beings—to his left forearm. The next day, he repeated the exercise, applying them instead to his umbilical region. On June 14, Barlow again applied cercariae to his abdomen. The next day, Mrs. Annie Gismann, an assistant of Barlow’s at the Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section, counted 147 red and irritated spots of entry on his body. He infected himself once more after a week had passed and began to wait.139 Barlow did not fall ill for some time. On August 29, he experienced a slight rise in temperature that quickly dropped. Two days later, he discovered eggs in his stool sample. Eggs did not appear in Barlow’s urine for another month. While it was possible for the eggs of Schistosoma haematobium to exit the body in stool, it was not common and raises the question of whether Barlow infected himself with Schistosoma mansoni as well as Schistosoma haematobium. Throughout the months of October and November, he carefully charted the quantity of eggs and miracidia—the free-swimming larval form of the parasite—in his urine and stool. In late November, Barlow noted a change in the appearance of the eggs that his body expelled; these eggs appeared “much more free of blood than before” and were not encased in bladder epithelium.140 Several weeks later, more than six months after he first infected himself, Barlow awoke in the early hours of the morning with a fever. He had finally taken ill. In the month that followed, Barlow experienced what he referred to as the “acute” phase of his illness. He suffered fever, fatigue, frequent and painful urination, and “tenesmus,” a cramping rectal pain accompanied by the urge to defecate. In the daytime, he lacked the energy and physical capacity to accomplish any task that required the slightest exertion. At night, he awoke with fever and chills. After a month had passed, Barlow began to recover, and a kind of chronic condition began whose symptoms were less severe. Barlow’s experience of schistosomiasis challenged many of the assumptions that had informed the Rockefeller sanitation experiment,

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especially those related to matters of hygiene. While ill, he felt the frequent need to urinate and defecate. He found it difficult to control these impulses, troubling the idea that Egyptian cultivators engaged in labor “chose” when and where to relieve themselves. When he began to secrete eggs in his urine and stool, Barlow noticed a red nodule on his scrotum that itched intensely. The nodule eventually burst, releasing eggs, active miracidia, and new ideas concerning the pathways through which Schistosoma haematobium was released from human bodies: “This development has a serious bearing on the Public Health problem of the control of Schistosomiasis because it makes possible the infection of water without pollution from either urine or stools. I have often seen water-workers in Egypt scratching their groins as they sat lifting the tambour [sic] for lifting water but I know of no instance in which the escape of eggs through the groin skin was suspected or proven.”141 The discovery of the nodule provided additional evidence that challenged the hypothesis that the problem of schistosomiasis was one of hygiene. By identifying his own body as the unit of study, Barlow described an experience of disease absent the environmental relationships and labor regimes that framed infection and treatment for most Egyptians. A vast gulf separated Barlow’s daily routine from those of the Egyptians who suffered the worst ravages of schistosomiasis. Since Barlow was a laboratory scientist, his life was relatively sedentary. During the acute stage of his illness, his days consisted of rest, a bit of socializing, and on occasion, a trip to the kitchen to make candy.142 Unlike infected cultivators, Barlow did not dig canals, lift irrigation water, plow, or harvest. These differences in routine raise important questions: for example, did Egyptian cultivators who faced the constant threat of infection experience the differentiated “acute” and “chronic” stages of infection described by Barlow? Infection with Schistosoma haematobium might have done similar things to a range of different bodies in isolation, but the experience of its symptoms in the world and their intersections with other practices that constituted the body likely differed quite dramatically. The revelations of illness led to those of treatment. After suffering his “chronic” condition for three months, Barlow sought relief. He opted first for treatment with Fouadin, which he chose because its administration required less skill and the length of treatment was shorter. After the compound failed to rid his body of the parasite, Barlow waited to return to Egypt before beginning a second round of treatment with tartar emetic in



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November 1945.143 His notes concerning his own treatment describe days wrought by constant nausea, frequent and painful urination, weakness, and headaches.144 The compound also damaged his teeth and caused a red, raised rash to erupt on his thighs and around his mouth, which left his lips protruding: “While taking treatment of Potassium antimony tartrate I had ample opportunity of observing the patients as they came and went. But I looked at them with a different eye from what I had done previous to my own treatment. Then it seemed to look like a simple injection for the treatment of schistosomiasis. Along with my own injection of P.A.T. a deeper and more sympathetic understanding of the treatment was injected into my veins.”145 Just a year before his own infection, Barlow had spearheaded the first large-scale application of compulsory treatment, a decision made more questionable by his own experience, which caused him to reevaluate his once cavalier approach and the wisdom of mass treatment programs. His skepticism was also an argument for the necessity of eliminating snail populations and the importance of the new government department that employed him. On first glance, Barlow’s self-infection, and its assertion of comparable bodies, might read as potentially radical in that it denied a determinative physiological racial difference, an assumption that continued to thrive in tropical medical research in this period. It was also an act that only an American or a European physician would have undertaken. During the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, at least three foreign physicians working in Egypt infected themselves. Looss’s discovery of the transmission pathway of hookworm was attached to a self-infection; Clot Bey similarly injected himself with blood from plague patients. Egyptian physicians, ever vigilant to distinguish their own bodies from those that they treated, could not have engaged in these acts. Already under fire, these physicians sought ways of setting their own bodies and capabilities apart. Barlow’s self-infection was also a dangerous means of comparison. Unlike so many of the rural Egyptians who suffered from schistosomiasis, Barlow chose and timed his infection and his treatment. He also understood the causality of his disease and the mechanisms through which it would be eliminated from his body in the same terms as the public health apparatus that treated him. The centrality of choice to his infection was important. Egyptian cultivators could not opt in or out of infection, nor could they avoid the frequent reinfections that made the disease manifest as more severe. While Barlow’s self-infection was no doubt an experience in sympathy,

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it also performed the expertise and social position of an American scientist. The record of the self-infection collapsed the categories of disease and infection. This elided the power differentials through which most Egyptians became infected and arrived at treatment clinics. It also failed to account for the significance of labor, overall health, and poverty.

Persistence When Barlow returned to Egypt, his work at the Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section and his conflict with Khalil resumed. Always a staunch advocate for his own position, Barlow’s self-infection only strengthened his belief that the disease would meet its end only through the eradication

An Egyptian man who was deliberately infected with schistosomiasis in one of Barlow’s experiments, recounted in his article “Is There Dermatitis in Egyptian Schistosomiasis?” Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center. FIGURE 21. 



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of its intermediate mollusk hosts. Barlow and Khalil continued at loggerheads. In 1948, the government passed Law 29, which required landowners to pay the laborers of the Bilharzia Snail Eradication Section to clear canals and drains on their property. Writing in the Journal of the Egyptian Medical Association, Khalil lambasted the work of the department, arguing that its 1943 field experiment in al-Fayum had unequivocally failed to reduce the prevalence of schistosomiasis.146 For Khalil, the problem with Claude Barlow and the work of the Rockefeller Foundation more broadly was the manner in which their conduct in Egypt continued to reflect a colonial order. Khalil was concerned with his own legacy and reputation. He also sought to promote the contributions of Egyptian scientists more broadly: The Egyptian Parasitologists of whom I am proud to be the senior member, . . . , have—by their work during a quarter of a century—established most of the fundamentals about the role of the Nile, the canals, and methods of irrigation in the Bilharzia problem, the role of aquatic plants, the methods of examination and treatment of bilharziasis and the fundamental principles of Bilharzia control and Bilharzia eradication. Their discoveries are recognized internationally and all textbooks on parasitology in all languages refer to them as the world authorities on this subject.147

Khalil’s battle against Barlow was only one piece of a broader struggle against a global framework for scientific research that played to the advantage of researchers in the United States and in Europe. In 1950, Muhammad Khalil passed away. Barlow departed Egypt the following year. When the Free Officers seized power in 1952, schistosomiasis continued to plague Egypt, and both the Egyptian state and global public health institutions focused on its erasure. In the decades of the interwar period, the bodies of many Egyptian patients had been doubly ravaged, first by disease and again by difficult and largely ineffective treatment regimes. By the 1940s, Egyptian physicians understood the futility of treatment in ridding the population of schistosomiasis but argued that even if patients were ultimately reinfected, treatment reduced the scale of infection in the body and the prevalence of the more severe symptoms of infection that were so prominent during the early years of the twentieth century.148 As they struggled against a global scientific practice of tropical medicine that sought to contain their expertise, Egyptian physicians took advantage of

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the opportunities that endemic disease created for them to perform their roles as experts. Treatment became an imperative, and not simply because of the sick bodies to which it was administered. In the decades that followed the 1952 coup by the Free Officers, the materialities of the perennial Nile would persist and continue to shape the bodies of those who labored and lived in the Egyptian countryside.

CO N C L U S I O N

The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject In spite of all research efforts related to bilharziasis in the UAR or elsewhere, no definite hope can be seen even in the far horizon of an effective means of getting rid of the parasite or the converging snails, nor is there an effective means of preventing infection by this disease. —Dr. Salah al-Din Hidayat, minister of scientific research1

THE LIVED NILE has argued that during the century of Egypt’s colonial economy the environment in which it was rooted, that of the perennial Nile, played a central role in the production of subjectivity, with human bodies being one site of its formation. The motions that made up daily life in the fields and villages of the perennial Nile, especially labor, resulted in the increased prevalence of disease. Hookworm thrived in moist soil, and freshwater snails proliferated in drains and irrigation canals. The symptoms of infection with the parasites Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni helped to define normative habitations of the body in rural communities. As populations in the Nile Delta increasingly turned to maize for sustenance, large numbers fell ill with pellagra, their bodies suffering from the absence of basic nutrients that resulted from a lack of diversity in the diet. The symptoms of these diseases helped to structure normative bodily experiences of colonial economy among rural populations, especially the laborers who built and practiced the river through the daily work of agriculture. In the interwar period, the persistence of colonial economy continued to define the material terms of the nation. Millions of Egyptians passed through clinics to eliminate hookworm and schistosomiasis from their bodies. For many, this treatment was futile because of its limited efficacy and

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because they were reinfected following their return to rural life. The pain of treatment for schistosomiasis and its effects on the body constituted one trajectory through which a (physical) national subject emerged. Another material pathway of national modernity was through the territories that the perennial Nile created and erased. Those who were progressively displaced by the expansion of the river south of Khazan Aswan lived another manifestation of an environmentally material national project. The argument that Egypt continued to be a colonial space during the interwar period was perhaps never truer than in relation to questions of environmental subjectivity in Egypt’s countryside. The experience of perennial subjectivity was also the product of the assemblage of authority in rural Egypt and the role of capital within it. Capitalists helped construct the dam that cemented the built form of the perennial Nile. They also reaped the profits of cash crop agriculture and its attendant social relations. That the sale of the Daira Sanieh was linked to the completion of Khazan Aswan meant the extension of cotton cultivation into central Egypt as well as the dominance of large landowners in the region. Portions of Egypt’s south were the terrain of the Egyptian Sugar Company. While the identities of the capitalists who controlled this company evolved, the modes through which they governed the territories under their charge remained consistent. During the British occupation and under the interwarperiod Egyptian regime, the practice of the state in Egypt was intertwined with the power of colonial capital in the countryside, with this being only one example of the manner in which authority was a geographically and temporally variable assemblage. Just as capital was fundamental to the production and practice of the perennial Nile, so were experts formed in relation to this river. As its geographies grew, the construction and practice of this river helped to frame those of expertise in the fields of engineering and medicine. Beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, a new class of Ottoman-Egyptian engineers began to build and administer the Nile. From the 1860s, its construction was bound to questions of political economy, specifically Egypt’s incorporation in the British-dominated imperial world economy as a site for the production of cotton. For the British irrigation engineers of the occupation, the extension of perennial irrigation and its centralization were a priority. The construction of Khazan Aswan gave permanent form to the perennial Nile and produced a new material site of expertise. In the interwar period, the geographies of colonial economy continued to shape technocratic expertise.



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When Egyptian engineers took control of the Public Works Ministry, they appropriated the built form, practice, and imagination of the river for the nationalist project. The perennial Nile and its relationship to an increase in the prevalence of environmental disease also shaped the public health interventions that Egyptian physicians orchestrated. Throughout, the conditions of possibility for the production of knowledge were materially linked to the environmental legacies and practices of colonial economy. Acts of performance also produced the perennial Nile and the expertise with which it was associated. A rich body of literature described the river, these acts of description central to the creation of different historical Niles. Ali Mubarak’s Nile was not that of Amin Sami. Neither was William Willcocks’s river that of Husayn Sirri. Texts gave the river a range of different forms and meanings; they also facilitated the performance of knowledge by their authors. The materialities of the perennial Nile were their own site of performance. The extensive treatment programs of the interwar period were evidence of the abilities of Egyptian technocrats. Physicians and engineers vacillated between distinguishing themselves and their bodies from the environments (and bodies) they sought to mold and implicating themselves within these particular ecologies. Experts became authorities through material acts of performance. The histories that make up The Lived Nile demonstrate that the materiality of the environment was central to the production of a range of subjectivities within Egypt’s colonial economy. In many ways, the multifaceted approach that I chose to write this book and the centrality of questions of materiality to my analysis defy the possibility of an end. The historical formations that constituted colonial economy in Egypt did not come to a crashing halt with the 1952 Free Officers coup. Some of these formations ceased to exist in fits and starts throughout the 1950s and 1960s. One such formation was the practice of colonial capitalism. A scant six weeks after they seized power, the Free Officers announced Egypt’s first land reform. Two more followed in 1961 and 1969. The Egyptian state also assumed a newly prominent role in agriculture, in part through the expansion of a system of agricultural cooperatives, which provided farmers with seeds, fertilizer, livestock, machinery, and expertise.2 Egypt’s land reform was limited in its transformation. Some members of the long-standing rural elite found means to maintain their position in the countryside. Land reform also allowed for the consolidation of power by a new class of owners whose holdings fell within the legal limit.

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Nonetheless, the policies of the populist authoritarian Egyptian state in the countryside in conjunction with its approach to capital and economic production spelled the end of colonial capitalism as it had existed during the previous century. In 1955, the state seized the Egyptian Sugar Company from ‘Abbud. They nationalized the company the following year. The nationalization of the Egyptian Sugar Company paved the way for the state seizure of other business ventures. During the 1956 Suez Crisis, Nasser took for the state the assets of British and French nationals and those belonging to some Egyptian Jews. Within the economy, agriculture continued to be important but industry came to occupy a more prominent position under the new regime. In the years that followed the war, Egypt’s economy developed through a process of state-led industrialization, and by the middle of the 1960s the state had developed a sizable industrial sector. Despite its move away from the patterns that characterized the colonial capitalism of an earlier era, the centrality of the perennial Nile in the production of Egyptian subjects persisted. In 1962, leading scientists specializing in schistosomiasis gathered in Cairo to present their research at the First International Symposium on Bilharziasis. The conference commemorated the centenary of Theodor Bilharz’s death in Cairo and the establishment of a new institute, the Theodor Bilharz Research Institute, dedicated to the research and treatment of schistosomiasis. Sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry for Scientific Research and attended by the German Minister of Health, the program included a handful of foreign scientists, but the majority of the presenters were Egyptian, and the conference was a showcase of their varied research agendas. The ghost of Muhammad Khalil ‘Abd al-Khaliq was also in attendance. Not only did multiple speakers reference his contributions, but the treatment program that he had helped build only expanded during the decade that followed the 1952 Free Officers coup and the ascendance of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser to the office of the presidency. Nasser professed his own belief in the transformative potential of science when he declared, “I have unlimited confidence that our United Arab Republic recognizes the role of science in the future as it has recognized this role in its past history—as a means of thinking, expression and ultimately of revolution.”3 Did science help produce a revolution in Nasser’s Egypt? I would argue that rather than revolutionize, science brought to a head a set of historical developments that began in the period explored in this book. One of the first projects adopted by the Free Officers was the construction of a new and larger dam on the Nile River to provide electricity to Egyptian industry and



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161

Stamp issued by the Egyptian government to commemorate the centenary of Theodor Bilharz’s death. FIGURES 22. 

complete the transformation of Egyptian agriculture to perennial irrigation. In 1946, when the reservoir formed by Khazan Aswan nearly overflowed, the plan to build a bigger dam began to gather steam.4 In 1955, the American and British governments offered Nasser a $270 million loan to help defray the cost of building this dam. When Nasser concluded a deal with Czechoslovakia for the purchase of Soviet arms, the British withdrew their funding for the loan. Nasser countered by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company on July 26, 1956, with the stated intention of using the revenues from the canal to fund the construction of the dam. The following October, the British, the French, and the Israelis launched a military campaign to reclaim the canal and unseat Nasser. The campaign accomplished neither aim. Nasser was cast as a hero for his strong stance in the face of imperialist aggression, and his political capital skyrocketed within Egypt and throughout the global South.

162 Conclusion

He moved closer to the Soviet Union, and in 1960 construction began on the new dam with support from Soviet engineers and capital. In 1964, the Aswan High Dam was sealed and the Nile River flooded for the last time in Egypt. Construction on the dam was complete in 1967, and three years later all of its turbines were operational. The completion of the dam enabled the conversion of all of Egypt’s agricultural land to year-round agriculture. Its turbines produced energy to fuel Egypt’s growing industrial sector. When the last Nile flood waned, the seasons that had demarcated the agricultural year in Egypt for thousands of years came to an end and the extension of the perennial Nile was made complete. The High Dam was experienced through a different, and differently nationalist, imaginary from that which undergirded the construction of the river during the first half of the twentieth century. While it was being constructed, the populist authoritarian state offered up its completion as the solution to a wide range of Egypt’s ills. Building the High Dam was not about cotton but rather about populist politics.5 If one turns one’s gaze away from Egypt’s political history and back to the material geographies of the perennial Nile, locating the end of the encounters that helped to constitute its subjectivities becomes significantly more complex. For many Egyptians, experiences of the High Dam bore strong echoes of the past. The dam and the formation of Lake Nasser to its south drowned the territories of historical Nubia in Egypt, completing a process of displacement that had begun in 1902. The Egyptian state resettled large numbers of Nubians in Kom Ombo. On May 16, 1964, J. D. Maitland of the British Embassy in Cairo wrote to the British Foreign Office concerning the relocation, which the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs coordinated. Maitland reported that despite what he believed was an honest effort from the government, the resettlement project was rife with problems: Our latest information, however, (from one head of family who has returned from moving to the new village) indicates that the Nubians most recently resettled on the uncultivated and somewhat forbidding hillsides on the perimeter of the Kom Ombo area are far from contented with their lot in the new homeland. Indeed, life must be even more difficult for the peripheral villages than for those adjacent to existent cultivation. In particular, the houses are unfinished; animals have had to be slaughtered for lack of fodder; there is no water for irrigation of any kind; and drinking water is distributed only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.6



The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject

163

While the Egyptian state played a more active role in resettlement than they had following the second heightening of Khazan Aswan, among Nubians the experience of the perennial Nile continued to be riddled with suffering and loss. Neither would the spread of schistosomiasis associated with perennial irrigation cease. That the First International Symposium on Bilharziasis overlapped with the construction of the dam was not a coincidence. Some scientists anticipated that the schistosomiasis epidemic would intensify following the dam’s completion, meaning that Egypt’s rural, laboring populations would once again sacrifice the health of their own bodies to the project of national economy.7 By the 1960s, schistosomiasis and perennial irrigation were both fundamental—and uncontested—components of Egypt’s national geography. The completion of the dam brought into sharp focus the ecological complexity of the perennial Nile and the multiple scales at which the Nile was encountered. By the late 1970s, it became clear that the nature of Egypt’s schistosomiasis problem had changed. Following the completion of the High Dam, infection with Schistosoma haematobium predictably increased in areas that gained access to perennial irrigation. However, in the Nile Delta, which had long been perennially irrigated, infection with Schistosoma haematobium and Schistosoma mansoni had declined because of state treatment, propaganda, and efforts to reduce snail populations. In perennially irrigated regions of southern Egypt, the prevalence of infection with Schistosoma haematobium also decreased.8 Decline was not the only piece of the puzzle. Schistosoma mansoni had moved beyond the areas in which it was endemic in the northern Nile Delta, and the parasite replaced Schistosoma haematobium as the most common cause of schistosomiasis. The shift in the relative patterns of infection carved new landscapes of the body. One of the symptoms of Schistosoma mansoni, which targets the intestinal system rather than the urinary tract, is hepatic fibrosis. The mature female adult worms of Schistosoma mansoni live in the hepatic portal system, the venous system responsible for directing blood from specific portions of the gastrointestinal system to the liver. When worms lay eggs, some are deposited in the liver, prompting the formation of granulomas, collections of immune cells that are produced when the human immune system attempts to eliminate a foreign substance but fails. The higher the worm load in the body of one infected, the greater the likelihood that scar tissue, fibrosis, accumulates in the liver, which can eventually cause liver failure.

164 Conclusion

The rising prevalence of Schistosoma mansoni, and its role in causing hepatic fibrosis, helped to fuel the study of the liver in Egypt. Since at least the 1960s, Egyptian physicians observed unusually high rates of liver disease. Hepatology became an important field of study, and in 1986 prominent physician Yassin ‘Abd al-Ghafar established the National Liver Institute in the town of Shibin al-Kum in the province of Minufiyya in the Nile Delta. In the period following the completion of the High Dam, some scientists attributed high rates of liver disease to infection with Schistosoma mansoni. The identification of hepatitis C in 1989, and the subsequent discovery that large numbers of Egyptians were infected with the virus, expanded the number of possible causes that lay at the root of liver failure. Many Egyptians had been infected with hepatitis C through state treatment campaigns for schistosomiasis, which began in the interwar period.9 The identification of hepatitis C and the spread of Schistosoma mansoni highlight another trajectory of the perennial Nile, the path of the river through the livers of so many who lived and labored along its banks. The perennial Nile continued to turn, its relations molded by new interactions among ecology, authority, expertise, and human encounters with the material worlds in which they lived.

Notes

Abbreviations DWQ

Egyptian National Archives, Cairo (Dar al-Kutub wa al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya al-Misriyya)

FO

Foreign Office

MAE

NantesFrance, Archives Diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Nantes

MAE

ParisFrance, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris

NS

EgypteNouvelle série (1897–1914), Correspondance politique et commerciale (1897–1918), in MAE Paris

RAC

Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

TNA

British National Archives, London

WHO

World Health Organization

Introduction: A River, Remade 1.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 85; British Embassy, Cairo, to R. S. Scrivner, North and East African Department, Foreign Office, London, May 16, 1964, FO 371178650, TNA. 2.  In addition to the village of Shallal, lands were seized by the government in the villages of Dabud, Dahmit, Anbarakab, Kalabsha, and Abu Hur, and in thirteen hamlets belonging to the village of Marwaw in the mudiriyya of Aswan that would be submerged by the storage of waters, which are under the general designation of “El Gorouf ” or “Hod-El-Guezireh.” “Expropriation du Hod-El-Guezireh, etc. (Assouan),” Natharat al-Rayy, Majlis al-Wuzara’, record group 2/4/b, DWQ. The decree itself is undated. Later correspondence lists the date as both June 17, 1902, and June 27, 1902.

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3.  Ibid. 4.  See, for example, ‘Abbas, Al-Nizam al-Ijtima‘i fi Misr; Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class; Barakat, Tatawwur al-Milkiyya al-Zira‘iyya fi Misr; Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants; Owen, Cotton; al-Dasuqi, Kibar Mullak al-Aradi; Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development; Rivlin, Agricultural Policy. 5.  For a rich discussion of Egyptian wheat production and its significance within trade networks within the Ottoman Empire, see Mikhail, Nature and Empire. 6.  High dikes ran parallel to the river and protected against direct inundation, while transverse dikes allowed for the regulated, gradual inundation of basins. Basins ranged between five thousand and fifteen thousand acres in surface area. Peel, “British Administration and Irrigation,” 517. 7.  Owen, Cotton, 9–10. 8.  Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 115. 9.  Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 1, 368–69. 10.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented March 1896], 10. 11.  Richards, “Technical and Social Change,” 726–29. 12.  Ibid., 728. 13.  Owen, Cotton, 135. 14.  See Jakes, “Boom, Bugs, Bust,” 1035–59. 15.  While malaria had long existed in Egypt, a form of the parasite less lethal than Plasmodium falciparum had caused the disease. T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 24. 16.  See, for example, Mitman, Breathing Space; Nash, Inescapable Ecologies; Sellers, “Thoreau’s Body”; Tilley, Africa and “Ecologies of Complexity”; W. Anderson, “Natural Histories”; Valencius, “Gender and the Economy.” 17.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 63. 18.  See, for example, Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile; Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor and Trade, Reputation; N. Brown, “Who Abolished Corvée Labour”; Chalcraft, “Engaging the State” and Striking Cabbies of Cairo. 19.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 353. 20.  See, for example, Baron, Egypt as a Woman; Pollard, Nurturing the Nation; R. Mitchell, Society; Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam. 21.  On the question of slow violence, see Nixon, Slow Violence. 22.  See T. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, and Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men. 23.  Baer, History of Landownership, 32–33. 24.  See also Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 39. 25.  See Baer, Studies, and Jakes, “State of the Field,” 141–223. 26.  Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, 30. 27.  See Shokr, Hydropolitics, Economy. 28.  See El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory; Johnson, Reconstructing Rural Egypt; Gasper, Power of Representation; Gallagher, Egypt’s Other Wars. 29.  T. Mitchell, “Limits of the State,” 90. 30.  Goswami, Producing India, 8.



Notes to Chapter 1 167

Chapter 1: Nile Articulations 1.  Scott-Moncrieff, “Irrigation,” 577. 2.  For the details of Scott-Moncrieff’s trajectory, see Hollings, Life. 3.  Tignor, Modernization, “British Agricultural and Hydraulic Policy” and “‘Indianization’”; Tvedt, River Nile. 4.  Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 11. 5.  Ibid., 8. 6.  Ibid., 39. 7.  See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, and Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires. 8.  Owen, Cotton, 29. 9.  Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 33. Helen Rivlin estimates that the depth of these canals was between four and eight meters. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy, 213. 10.  Barrages included those built at Khatatba, Sirsawiyya, Bajuriyya, Bahr Shibin, alSharqawiyya, Bahr Muways, al-Buhiya, and al-Mansuriyya. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy, 213. 11.  While he would eventually be dissuaded, Mehmed Ali famously ordered that the pyramids at Giza be disassembled and used as building materials for the barrages. H. Brown, History of the Barrage, 4. 12.  Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 21. 13.  Ibid. 14.  Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 175. 15.  Alan Mikhail dates the beginning of a change in agricultural labor regimes to the second half of the eighteenth century. Ibid., 184. 16.  Ibid., 281. 17.  Rivlin, Agricultural Policy, 233, 243–44. 18.  Ibid., 138–39, 241–42. 19.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 47. 20.  In addition to Civil Affairs, the other departments created in 1837 were Finance, Foreign Affairs, War, Marine, and Industry. Ibid., 21. 21.  Kurz and Linant de Bellefonds, “Linant de Bellefonds,” 61–62. 22.  Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 66. 23.  Between 1809 and 1849, the new educational institutions that Mehmed Ali established to train the bureaucracy educated nearly eleven thousand individuals, among them engineers. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 113. 24.  Mikhail, Nature and Empire, 260–61. 25.  Ibid., 77–84. 26.  While several sources date the establishment of this school to 1834, James HeyworthDunne cites several decrees from Mehmed Ali concerning the school, dating its establishment to between 1820 and 1834. He argues that 1834 marked the reorganization of the school. Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 143; Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 113. 27.  Before the French Revolution, the French state’s engineering system revolved around its military corps, the armes savantes. As early as 1697, members of the French Academy of Sciences examined all applicants to the armes savantes in mathematics. The first branch of

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the armes to adopt a curriculum based on science was the army engineering corps, corps du genie. Belhoste and Chatzis, “From Technical Corps,” 212. 28.  Applicants were required to pass through the secondary educational system, the lycées, and complete a special one-year course in the sciences, les mathématiques spéciales, before beginning their studies at the Polytechnique. Ibid., 214. 29.  Ibid., 214. 30.  Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 199–200. 31.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 113. 32.  Ibid., 90–91. 33.  Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 159, 161. 34.  H. Brown, History of the Barrage, 17; Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 161. 35.  Muhammad Mazhar and Bahgat Pasha are the names of prominent streets in Zamalek. Al-Falaki, presumably named for Isma‘il al-Falaki, another prominent Egyptian engineer who ended his career as the director of the Muhandiskhanah, marks a prominent street in downtown Cairo near the first location of the American University in Cairo. 36.  Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim first imported the pumps to Egypt. Owen argues that during the 1850s wealthier land proprietors imported steam pumps to irrigate their land and that the importance of these pumps was magnified by the state’s failure to maintain summer canals. By the middle of the 1850s, the surface area of land watered by summer canals had shrunk to three hundred thousand feddans. Owen, Cotton, 64, 71. 37.  H. Brown, History of the Barrage, 15, 21. 38.  Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 33; Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 30. 39.  Mustafa Mahramji ascended the ranks of the government’s engineering divisions, becoming an engineering inspector under ‘Abbas, a surveyor for Sa‘id, and an inspector once more under Isma‘il. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 89; Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 159–61. 40.  Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 33. 41.  Ibid., 33–34. 42.  In 1813, when the Ottoman-Egyptian state began to consolidate its control over agricultural production, there were 3,218,715 feddans of cultivable land in Egypt. E. de Regny, Statistique de l’Egypte, année 1873–1290 de l’Hégire (Cairo: n.p., 1873), ix, cited in Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 34. 43.  Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 298–89, 316. 44.  Ibid., 350, 353. 45.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 47. 46.  Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 382; Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 46–47. 47.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 45. 48.  Ibid. 49.  Ibid., 48.



Notes to Chapter 1 169

50.  Russell, “Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas,” 50. 51.  Abu-Lughod, “Tale of Two Cities,” 439–43. 52.  Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 143. 53.  Mubarak was removed from and reinstalled in his position on at least two different occasions. He served in this position until either 1871 or 1872, when Prince Husayn Kamil assumed the post. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 131–32. 54.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 83–84. 55.  Other Egyptian engineers also rose to positions of prominence within the state bureaucracy. In addition to those cited in the text, ‘Abbas Pasha appointed Hammad ‘Abd al-Ati head of the office of engineering in 1850, the same year that Ali Mubarak was made director of schools. Ibid., 88. 56.  Black, “Military Influence,” 212, 217–18. Also see Cookson-Hills, “Engineering the Nile,” 69–71, 81. 57.  Black, “Military Influence,” 218. 58.  Buchanan, “Diaspora of British Engineering,” 504, 507. 59.  Ibid., 516–17. 60.  Cuddy and Mansell, “Engineers for India,” 107. 61.  K. V. Mital, History of the Thomason College of Engineering, 1847–1949 (Roorkee: University of Roorkee, 1986), quoted in Gilmartin, “Water and Waste,” 5058. 62.  Black, “Military Influence,” 212. 63.  Gilmartin, “Imperial Rivers,” 80. 64.  Cuddy and Mansell, “Engineers for India,” 108. 65.  Sangwan, “Science Education in India,” 90. 66.  Arun Kumar, “Colonial Requirements and Engineering Education: The Public Works Department,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947, ed. Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995), 216–32, cited in Gilmartin, “Imperial Rivers,” 80. 67.  Cuddy and Mansell, “Engineers for India,” 108. 68.  Tignor, “British Agricultural and Hydraulic Policy,” 64. 69.  Tignor, “‘Indianization,’” 654. 70.  Hollings, Life, 78. 71.  I have Anne Clement to thank for pointing me to these folk songs. Legrain, Louqsor sans les Pharaons, 156. 72.  Tignor, “‘Indianization,’” 637. 73.  The other £8 million was used to pay off past debts. Tignor, Modernization, 113; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, 161. While Scott-Moncrieff does not use the term irrigation million to refer to the budget that he proposes, he states, “As I have said before, (para. 3) this table must not be looked on as a close estimate, but as a forecast. I have been told to frame it to an approximate total of one million sterling. It amounts, therefore, to £ 1,083,500.” Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 16. 74.  Tignor, “British Agricultural and Hydraulic Policy,” 65. 75.  Unlike other British appointees to the ministries of the Egyptian state, the

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undersecretary of state for public works not only attended the meetings of the Council of Ministers but was permitted to remain for the entire meeting. Tvedt, River Nile, 30. 76.  Johnston, Egyptian Irrigation, 64. 77.  Ibid. 78.  See Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1889, pub. 1890], 4–5. 79.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 33; Elizabeth Baigent, “Sir William Edmund Garstin”; Cookson-Hills, “Engineering the Nile,” 137. 80.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 89. 81.  Jakes, “Scales of Public Utility,” 60. 82.  Hollings, Life, 178. 83.  H. Brown, “Irrigation in Egypt,” 417. 84.  See, for example, Bell, “Oldest Records,” 569; Raymond, Cairo, 48. 85.  The 1889 report from the Public Works Ministry states that the Nilometer at Aswan had come back into use in May of 1869, after which measurements were recorded daily. Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1889, pub. 1890], 8. 86.  In 1892, al-salib was on September 26. Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Nile Flood 1892, 11. 87.  Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 4. 88.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1887, pub. 1888], 2. 89.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1891, pub. 1892], 1. 90.  The consumption of dirt, geophagia, has been common throughout many regions of the world including the American South. Scientists have most recently posited that it might function as a means of combatting intestinal illness, especially among vulnerable populations. In 1905, F. M. Sandwith, a physician at Qasr al-‘Aini hospital in Cairo, reported that 26 percent of the patients that he questioned reported consuming mud. Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 254. 91.  Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1891, pub. 1892], 1. 92.  Ibid., 20. A decade later, colonial engineers had concluded that these waters were likely not dangerous, even if their smell and taste were unpleasant. Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 75. 93.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 75. 94.  Willcocks, Report on Perennial Irrigation, 104; British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1902, presented April 1903], 70. 95.  Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 1, 304. 96.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1889, pub. 1890], 45. 97.  Ibid., 7. 98.  Ibid., 6. 99.  Ammar, Growing Up, 25. 100.  This is a common form of date identification in the records of the Daira Sanieh, located in the Egyptian National Archives [DWQ]). 101.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1888, pub. 1889], 55–56.



Notes to Chapter 1 171

102.  See Jakes, “Scales of Public Utility,” 61–62. 103.  See Gilmartin, “Scientific Empire,” 1127–49. 104.  Hollings, Life, 58. 105.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Nile Flood 1892, 51. 106.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1887, pub. 1888], 9. 107.  Ibid., 29. 108.  Hollings, Life, 153. 109.  Berque, Egypt, 177. 110.  Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya. 111.  The third and final edition appeared in 1913. 112.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 106. 113.  D. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary. 114.  See for example, Blackman, Fellahin of Upper Egypt. 115.  Derr, “Drafting a Map,” 141–42. 116.  Willcocks, From the Garden, 54. 117.  Derr, “Drafting a Map,” 144–45. 118.  Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 17. 119.  Tvedt, River Nile, 29. 120.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 92. 121.  Baring, “Copy of a Despatch,” 6. 122.  Tignor, Modernization, 80. 123.  Between 1889 and 1897, Willcocks used to lecture at the institution in irrigation and applied mathematics. He also presided over its exams. Willcocks, Sixty Years, 142. 124.  Hollings, Life, 178. 125.  Crouchley, Economic Development, 145. 126.  Tignor, “‘Indianization,’” 636, 654. 127.  Jakes, “Scales of Public Utility,” 60. 128.  Ibid., 65. Jakes also quotes Jacques Berque on the legacy of technical innovation in nineteenth-century Egypt. Berque, Egypt, 148. 129.  This repair was complete in 1892. Tvedt, River Nile, 30. 130.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented April 1894], 30. 131.  Tignor, “‘Indianization,’” 654. 132.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1890, pub. 1891], 74; Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1888, pub. 1889], 49–57. 133.  Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 6. 134.  Ibid., 14. 135.  Gilmartin, “Imperial Rivers,” 78–79. 136.  Cookson-Hills, “Engineering the Nile,” 83–84; Gilmartin, “Imperial Rivers,” 81–82. 137.  Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 9.

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138.  See N. Brown, “Who Abolished Corvée Labour,” 116–37, and Clement, “Rethinking ‘Peasant Consciousness,’” 73–100. 139.  See Jakes, “State of the Field,” 92–100. 140.  See also Jakes, “Scales of Public Utility,” 61. 141.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 89. 142.  Tignor, “British Agricultural and Hydraulic Policy,” 71–72. 143.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 98. 144.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented February 1897], 13; British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1902, presented April 1903], 31; N. Brown, “Who Abolished Corvee Labour,” 135; Jakes, “State of the Field,” 93. 145.  Scott-Moncrieff, Note on the Irrigation Works, 4, 6, 9. When they considered the repair of the Delta Barrage, the Egyptian Public Works Ministry contacted a private pumping company to negotiate the possibility of irrigating the delta with pumps but determined the cost to be far too great. Tignor, “British Agricultural and Hydraulic Policy,” 67. 146.  In 1891, Mr. E. W. P. Foster, director of the third circle of irrigation, described the state of the flood in the province of Bahira: “For reasons given under ‘Sefi irrigation,’ this season began badly.” Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1891, pub. 1892], 4. 147.  Gilmartin, “Water and Waste,” 5058. 148.  Crouchley, Economic Development, 152; Tvedt, River Nile, 23; H. Brown, History of the Barrage, vii. 149.  In his introductory note to Willcocks’s 1894 report, William Garstin states that Willcocks submitted his first report on the subject of constructing a reservoir in 1891. “Note on Mr. Willcocks’ Project for ‘Perennial Irrigation and Flood Protection,’ by W. E. Garstin, Under-Secretary of State, Public Works Department, Egypt,” in Willcocks, Report on Perennial Irrigation, 7–53. 150.  Ibid., 30. 151.  Willcocks, Report on Perennial Irrigation, 69, 71, and 72. 152.  Ibid., 69. 153.  Ibid. 154.  Ibid., 70–73. 155.  Ibid., 7–8. 156.  Buchanan, “Diaspora of British Engineering,” 513–14. 157.  In the report of the Egyptian Public Works Ministry, he is listed as a professor of irrigation and agriculture at Naples University. Both the Po and Nile Rivers frequently flooded, and thus the comparison between northern Italy and Egypt drew British and Italian engineers closer to one another. Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Reports of the Technical Commission, 4. In 1897, he would begin a post as a lecturer in fluvial hydraulics at the Scuola d’Ingegneria of Padova. Hager, Hydraulicians in Europe, 1293. 158.  He received his education at the École Polytechnique and the École des Ponts et Chaussées. Ibid., 911. 159.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Reports of the Technical Commission, x–xi.



Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 173

160.  Ibid., vii, xiv. 161.  Tvedt, River Nile, 25.

Chapter 2: The Dammed Nile 1.  Maspero, Chanson populaires, 254. 2.  Ibid., 77. 3.  Ibid., 84. 4.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 89. 5.  Willcocks, Assuan Reservoir, 7–8; MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 261. 6.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented April 1894], 4, Report on the Finances [presented March 1896], 2, and Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1900, presented April 1901], 27. 7.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 109. 8.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1900, presented April 1901], 12. 9.  These reductions in taxation were specifically targeted at owners of land that was classified as kharajiyya. In 1891, the government reduced taxes for kharajiyya land by £14,914 in Nubia and by £103,282 in Qina. In 1892, the government reduced kharajiyya taxes in the province of Girga by £81,651. Finally, in 1894, kharajiyya taxes in Asyut, with the exception of lands irrigated by the Ibrahimiyya Canal, were reduced by £67,667 and by £19,832 in the Minya province. Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 798. 10.  Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented May 1895], 2. 11.  Owen, Cotton, 246. 12.  Lyons, Cadastral Survey of Egypt, 113–23. 13.  Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 803. 14.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented May 1898], 21. 15.  Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, 226. 16.  Thane, “Financiers,” 86. 17.  Ibid., 87; “Obituary—Sir Ernest Cassel,” Economic Journal 31 (December 1921): 558. 18.  In 1870, a year before Cassel began work at Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt, the firm loaned Khedive Isma‘il £7,143,000 for the development of a sugar infrastructure on the Daira Sanieh. Crouchley, Economic Development, 120. 19.  Thane, “Financiers,” 83. 20.  Ibid., 90. By 1898, Cromer reported that the amount of British capital invested in Egypt had increased substantially. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1898, presented April 1899], 13–14. 21.  This recounting of the manner in which the dam was funded dates to the 1940s, when the British were discussing the possibility of a hydroelectric scheme at Aswan. J. I. Craig to E. F. W. Besley, January 4, 1945, FO 141-1022, TNA. 22.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 77; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, 226. 23.  It also supplied it with two locomotives. Buchanan, “Diaspora of British Engineering,” 518.

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24.  The Egyptian government began repayments on these pay warrants on July 1, 1903, in twice-yearly installments of £E 78,648 that would continue for thirty years, amounting to a total of £E 4,598,880, more than twice the value of the original certificates. Cromer blamed the Egyptian government’s poor credit for the steep price of the loan from Cassel. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 21; Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 77. 25.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 21. At the end of construction, the total cost for the construction of the dam and the Asyut barrage was £E 3,439,864. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 21. 26.  The General Fund, the Special Reserve Fund, and certificates that were paid to Messrs. John Aird and Company funded the dam’s construction. Of the total, £E 1,346,699 came from the General Fund and £E 143,165 from the Special Reserve fund, and £E 1,950,000 was issued in certificates. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 21. A tremendous amount of gratitude goes to Aaron Jakes, who generously shared his research from the archives at the Bank of England and his time to put together the details of how the dam’s construction was funded and who profited. 27.  Ibid., 77. 28.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 74. 29.  A similar total number of laborers were employed to construct the barrage at Asyut. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1899, presented April 1900], 19; Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 77. 30.  Fitzmaurice noted that “all workmen, with the exception of a few boatmen, had to be imported; the natives from Lower and Middle Egypt, and the Europeans principally from England and Italy.” Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 84. 31.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1899, presented April 1900], 19. 32.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 125. 33.  Khuri-Makdisi, Eastern Mediterranean, 3–6. 34.  Tignor, “Economic Activities of Foreigners,” 421. 35.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 85. 36.  Ibid., 85–86. 37.  Seventy-five thousand tons of cement to make the mortar for the dam and twentyeight thousand tons of coal had been shipped from England to Alexandria. Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 86. By the end of the World War II, Egypt had developed its own cement industry and with respect to cement was self-sufficient. The companies that manufactured cement were Helwan Portland Cement Company and the Société Égyptienne de Ciment Portland Tourah, le Caire. Tignor, “Economic Activities of Foreigners,” 436. 38.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 86–88. 39.  Ibid., 85. 40.  Ibid., 125, 135–36.



Notes to Chapter 2 175

41.  When all was said and done, 630,000 meters of material was removed from the site. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1899, presented April 1900], 19; Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 96–101, 104. 42.  The finished dam was composed of 538,000 cubic meters of masonry. Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 104. 43.  While these temperatures seem implausible, they are what Fitzmaurice includes in his report. Ibid., 98. 44.  Ibid., 105. 45.  Lockman, “‘Worker’ and ‘Working Class,’” 89. 46.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 77. 47.  Maspero, Chanson populaires, 255–56. 48.  The duke, who was the third son of Queen Victoria, had laid the foundation stone on February 12, 1899. MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 252. 49.  Fitzmaurice, “Nile Reservoir, Assuan,” 80–83. 50.  MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 252; British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 8. In the years that followed, it was typical to close the dam’s sluices later in the fall. In 1907, for example, engineers dropped the sluices on November 26. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1907, presented April 1908], 18. 51.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 9. 52.  MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 250–52; Norman Smith, Centenary, 33–34. 53.  MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 252. 54.  Ibid., 253. 55.  Ibid., 253–56. 56.  Ibid., 256–59. 57.  The numbers of students increased from ten in 1894 to forty-five in 1899. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1899, presented April 1900], 36. 58.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 62. 59.  Cromer reported that by 1903 the inspectors of irrigation eagerly hired all successful graduates in civil engineering. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 62. 60.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1904, presented April 1905], 78. 61.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1898, presented April 1899], 45. 62.  The number of European engineers climbed to 99 and that of Egyptian engineers to 540. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented April 1907], 38. 63.  Ibid. 64.  The Zifta Barrage was completed in 1902 and raised the water level in two of the

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primary canals in the Nile Delta, the Minufiyya and Tawfiki Canals. Crouchley, Economic Development, 152. 65.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1889, pub. 1890], 6. 66.  H. Brown, “Report by Major R. H. Brown, R.E.,” in Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Nile Flood 1892, 29. 67.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1909, presented April 1910], 2. 68.  Willcocks, Assuan Reservoir, 7; emphasis added. 69.  Still, land reclamation schemes continued to face technical difficulties, such as their failure to construct adequate drainage systems, in addition to the human challenges of settling new land. The process of reclamation demanded extensive labor, and many companies did not offer cultivators adequate compensation to move and settle new land. When they did move, new cultivators sometimes came into conflict with nomadic groups. Finally, the eagerness to turn a quick profit doomed a number of these schemes as companies sold land that had been only partially reclaimed and that later reverted to its uncultivable status. Among the reasons that Willcocks and Craig cite for the failure of land reclamation schemes are “the presence of large numbers of careless, shifty Arabs in the waste lands” and the conflicts between these populations and the settled peasant or “fellahin” populations that were recruited to settle and farm the newly reclaimed land. Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 833–37. 70.  Crouchley, Economic Development, 151. 71.  Following the dam’s construction, the government began the project of conversion in the province of Asyut before moving to Minya and then the more northern provinces. At the end of 1903, the project was not yet complete, but 170,000 acres had been converted. Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report on the Administration [for 1903, pub. 1904], 22–23. 72.  Ibid., 23. 73.  Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report on the Administration [for 1903, pub. 1904], 23. Also see Jakes, “Scales of Public Utility,” 71. 74.  Egyptian Public Works Department, Report on the Administration [for 1905, pub. 1906], 48. Crouchley reported that this process of conversion was complete in 1909. Crouchley, Economic Development, 151. 75.  Robert Vitalis argues that Cassel’s purchase and sale of the Daira Sanieh estates was a “quid pro quo” for his funding of the dam. Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, 37. The French government believed that the location of the dam was chosen to best serve Cassel’s investments in agricultural land. Untitled letter, sender and recipient not identified, October 12, 1907, Le Caire, Ambassade, box 232, MAE Nantes. 76.  The value of the loans, against which the properties were pledged, was assessed in December 1897 as £6,431,500. “Note pour la Présidence du Conseil des Ministres,” December 31, 1897, record group 3/9, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. The actual contract was signed on June 21, 1898. 77.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 175. 78.  The Daira Sanieh Land Company sold the agricultural lands of the former khedivial estates, primarily situated in central Egypt in the region of Minya, to private landowners



Notes to Chapter 2 177

during two defined periods, one at the end of the nineteenth century and another between 1900 and 1906. Baer, History of Landownership, 95. 79.  Alan Richards reported that as a result of the sale of state lands, the percentage of agricultural land owned in lots of more than fifty feddans increased from 42.5 percent in 1894 to 45.1 percent in 1907. Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 58. Eric Davis argues that in the region of Minya in central Egypt the investors who would be associated with the establishment of Bank Misr in 1920 purchased many of these lands. When financial crisis struck Egypt in 1907, this group was hit hard, and their experience soured them on foreign capital, like the capital that fueled the Daira Sanieh Land Company and the Crédit Foncier. E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, 53–79. 80.  In the district of Armant in the province of Qina, Prince Ahmad Pasha Kamal purchased 129 feddans of land in 1902. Crookshank Pasha to the Minister of Finances, November 23, 1902, record group 3/9, al-Da’ira al-Saniyya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 81.  Baer, History of Landownership, 70. The members of Khedive’s Isma‘il’s family also brought a case in an attempt to claim the profits of the sale of the Daira Sanieh lands. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented April 1907], 61. 82.  E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, 61. 83.  Willcocks argued that the company adopted this model in order to increase the number of Egyptian, as opposed to European, buyers. Willcocks, Sixty Years, 175–76. 84.  The inhabitants of four villages in the region purchased 12,372 feddans in a sale subsidized by the government. Those villages were Armant, “Maris,” Rayayina, and “Rezelet.” “Note pour le Présidence du Conseil des Ministres,” June 4, 1904, record group 3/9, al-Da’ira al-Saniyya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 85.  E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, 57. 86.  Eric Davis discusses the role of the Daira Sanieh as a provider of credit for land sales. Ibid., 91. 87.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented 1907], 61. 88.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented 1907], 43. 89.  Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, 38. 90.  Ibid., 6. 91.  In 1907, Lord Cromer estimated that out of 6,387,100 acres of cultivable land, 1,047,462 acres remained uncultivated in 1906, almost one million of those acres in the Nile Delta. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented April 1907], 46. 92.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1907, presented April 1908], 19. 93.  Willcocks, Assuan Reservoir, 7. 94.  When the dam was raised for a second time between 1929 and 1933, the project was put forward for bids. The available documentation suggests that the first project was not subject to the same bidding process and that Messrs. Aird and Co was awarded the project without a competitive process. “Ministry of Public Works, Office of the Adviser to the First Secretary, The Residency, Cairo,” May 9, 1921, FO 141-550-1, TNA.

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95.  Ibid. There was a low flood the season following the completion of the Asyut Barrage. The engineer at the barrage closed its gates during the flood to help fill the basins, which was not its intended use. This proved to engineers at the Public Works Ministry that barrages could be used to improve basin irrigation, as well as to feed irrigation canals when the Nile was low. Crouchley, Economic Development, 151; Norman Smith, Centenary, 33. 96.  Norman Smith, Centenary, 34–55. 97.  Ibid., 37–40. 98.  Ibid., 39–40. 99.  Willcocks, Sixty Years, 211. 100.  Norman Smith, Centenary, 41; “Egypt and the Heightening of the Assouan Dam, 1929,” Engineering, February 8, 15, and March 8, 1929, FO 141-577-1, TNA. 101.  MacDonald, “Assuan Dam,” 263. 102.  A. L. Webb was appointed consulting engineer after Baker’s death. Ibid., 255. 103.  Ibid., 263. 104.  Its holding capacity would increase to 2,420,000,000 cubic meters of water. Ibid., 261. 105.  Of the territories that lacked access to perennial irrigation, 500,000 feddans were located in Lower Egypt and 1.2 million feddans in Upper Egypt. Tvedt, River Nile, 91. 106.  MacDonald also reported that the 560,000 feddans of agricultural land between Asyut and al-Balyana (south of Asyut) did not have access to summer water. Undersecretary of State, Ministry of Public Works, Egypt, to the British High Commissioner, February 22, 1915, FO 141-531-5, TNA. 107.  Tvedt, River Nile, 75. 108.  “Again, from the broader point of view of the general riches of Egypt, the importance of cultivation in the Delta stands far ahead of that of Upper Egypt. Cotton, and especially cotton grown in the Delta, is by far our most valuable crop and the tracts which may be reclaimed in Lower Egypt will be far more valuable, feddan for feddan, than those in the southern part of the country. The best land in the Delta is now worth L.E. 150–200 per feddan while the best land in Upper Egypt is worth, if it has perennial irrigation, L.E. 100–160 per feddan, and if basin, L.E. 50–60.” Untitled document, March 21, 1915, FO 141-550-1, TNA. 109.  Tvedt, River Nile, 93. 110.  Ibid., 94. 111.  Ibid., 95. 112.  Ibid., 96. 113.  Ibid. 114.  Willcocks, Nile Projects. 115.  T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 38. 116.  MacDonald to Molesworth, April 11, 1920, and untitled document, April 17, 1920, FO 141-745-9, TNA. 117.  The 1920 revision was entitled Nile Control: A Statement of the Necessity for Further Control of the Nile to Complete the Development of Egypt and Develop a Certain Area of the



Notes to Chapter 2 179

Sudan, with Particulars of the Physical Conditions to be Considered and a Programme of the Irrigation Works Involved. See MacDonald, Nile Control. 118.  Tvedt, River Nile, 97. 119.  Ibid., 98. 120.  M. Dowson to the British Residency, June 5 and 9, 1921, FO 141-816-33, TNA. 121.  Tvedt, River Nile, 88. 122.  The British continued to control Sudan, the defense of Egypt, the protection of foreign interests and populations in the country, and the Suez Canal zone. 123.  This was in spite of an agreement that specified that there should be four Egyptian engineers for every six British engineers. Ministry of Finance to H.E. the High Commissioner, May 13, 1917, FO 141-741-5, TNA. In 1920, the Milner Commission reported that Egyptians occupied less than one-fourth of the posts within the upper echelons of the government’s bureaucracy. Tignor, Modernization, 180. 124.  R. C. Lindsay, Acting Financial Advisor to H. E., the High Commissioner, May 13, 1917, FO 141-741-5, TNA. 125.  See Tvedt, River Nile, chap. 4, “Nile Diplomacy, Bog Barons and War,” 139–85. 126.  Ibid., 145. 127.  Ibid., 144. 128.  The commission examined the feasibility of raising the dam from R.L. 113 to R.L. 120, with the extra stored water allowing for slightly less than a 25 percent increase to the total amount of perennially irrigated land in Egypt. Lord Lloyd to Lord Cushendun, November 15, 1928, FO 141-577-1, TNA; “Egypt and the Heightening of the Assouan Dam, 1929,” reprinted from Engineering, February 8 and 15 and March 8, 1929, FO 141-577-1, TNA. 129.  I. F. Karim to M. Macdonald, December 14, 1931, FO 141-771-15, TNA. 130.  Like the Isna Barrage, it was intended to mitigate the effects of a low flood on the filling of basins. In the case of the barrage at Naj‘ Hamadi, the barrage was intended to ensure that basins in the Asyut and Girga provinces were filled. “Nag Hammadi Barrage,” undated, FO 141-550-1, TNA. 131.  Tvedt, River Nile, 145–46. The agreement also guaranteed Egypt exclusive access to the waters of the Nile during the dry season. Despite prioritizing Egypt’s irrigation needs over those of Sudan, the commission sanctioned the formation of an independent Sudanese irrigation department and the irrigation of the Gezira scheme with Nile water. 132.  Letter to Sidqi Pasha, President of the Council of Ministers, September 19, 1930, FO 141-625-10, TNA. 133.  Ibid. 134.  “The Second Heightening of the Aswan Dam: A Souvenir,” Institution of Civil Engineers, London, 37–44. 135.  British Residency to British Foreign Office, September 27, 1930, FO 141-62510, TNA. 136.  Telegram from Mr. MacDonald to “Engineer Heightening,” October 1, 1930, FO 141-625-10, TNA. 137.  Ibid.

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138.  A letter to the public works minister from October 2 references his death. October 2, 1930, FO 141-560-45, TNA. 139.  Colonel Hugh Cooper to Ibrahim Fahmy, November 27, 1930, FO 141-560-45, TNA. 140.  John Norton-Griffiths to Sidqi Pasha, September 19, 1930, FO 141-625-10, TNA; letter from the British Residency in Cairo, September 27, 1930, FO 141-625-10, TNA. 141.  MacDonald approached the British Residency about the possibility that they might intervene and prevent the termination of his contract. MacDonald to British Residency, March 5, 1931, FO 141-771-15, TNA. 142.  Special Adviser to the Egyptian Government, Ministry of Finance, to the British Residency, Cairo, November 26, 1930, FO 141560-45, TNA. The Egyptian government also relieved MacDonald of his contract for work on strengthening the Delta Barrage and the barrages at Asyut and Isna, arguing that “the plans and drawings prepared by your Firm for remodeling Assiout barrage and your proposals for Isna and Delta barrages do not serve the purpose that this Ministry desires to realize because they are based on lines differing from those the Ministry is adopting to that effect.” I.  F. Karim, Public Works Ministry, to Sir Murdoch MacDonald and Partners, December 14, 1931, FO 141-771-15, TNA; I. F. Karim to M. Macdonald, December 14, 1931, FO 141-771-15, TNA. Later correspondence suggests that MacDonald’s firing might have been political. Financial Advisor to the Egyptian Government to the British Embassy, February 27, 1937, FO 141-660-8, TNA. 143.  Somewhat ironically, the government chose the firm on the advice of Sir Murdoch MacDonald. Letter to the British Residency, Cairo, March 14, 1934, FO 141-498-12, TNA. 144.  Undated biography; other material from 1934, FO 141-498-12, TNA. 145.  Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, 30. 146.  Ibid., 55. A biography of ‘Abbud included in a set of files from 1934 states that he was the representative of twenty-seven important British firms. Undated biography, FO 141-498-12, TNA. 147.  “The Second Heightening of the Aswan Dam: A Souvenir,” 16, 27, 31. 148.  Ibid., Cartoon Appendix. 149.  Ibid., 36. 150.  Di-Capua, “Professional Worldview,” 309. 151.  Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, 82. 152.  Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary, 268. 153.  See Sirri, Al-Rayy fi Misr. I thank Omar Rayy Baghdadi for allowing me to use his grandfather’s extensive library of works concerning irrigation in Egypt. 154.  When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman army defeated the kingdom of Nubia, and officially Ottoman rule extended south along the Nile to its third cataract, located in the north of Sudan. The Nubians eventually negotiated their independence from Ottoman Cairo, sending an annual tribute of slaves and dates to the Ottoman provincial capital. 155.  Hopkins and Mehanna, Nubian Encounters, 7.



Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 181

156.  In 1903, the reservoir stretched for more than sixty miles upstream of the dam; its length extended topped ninety miles in 1912. Ibid., 5. 157.  Minister of Public Works to the Council of Ministers, July 4, 1907, 0075-016019, DWQ. 158.  Note from the Council of Ministers, March 16, 1911, 0075-022547, Majlis alWuzara’, DWQ. 159.  These population transfers were completed in 1934. 160.  Among the villages that were submerged were “Al-Shallal, Daboud and Dahmit du Markaz d’Assuan, and Al-Ambareka, Kalabcha, Abou-Hor, Merwaw, Karcha, Mariya, Garf Hussein, Kochtama, Al-Dakka, Al-Allaki, Korta, Meharraka, Sayala, Al-Madik, Wadi El Arab, Chatorma, Al-Malki, Al-Senkari, Korosko, Abou Handal, Al-Rika, Al-Diwan, Tenkala, Katta, Ebrim, Guéziret Ebrim, Tomas wa Afia, Anéba, Al-Guéneine wal Chebbak, Masmas, Tochka Gharb, Tochka Chark, Armenna, Abu Simbil, Ballana, Kestel, Adendan du Markaz du Derr.” Chambre des Députés, “Compte rendu de la séance du lundi, 13 février 1933,” February 13, 1933, FO 141-699-3, TNA. 161.  Reynolds, City Consumed; Beinin, Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry; Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam; Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism.” 162.  Chambre des Députés, “Compte rendu de la séance de lundi, 13 février 1933,” February 13, 1933, FO 141-699-3, TNA. 163.  Ibid., 3. Doss family members sat on the board of eight mixed-nationality firms. Tignor, “Economic Activities of Foreigners,” 435. 164.  Chambre des Députés, “Compte rendu de la séance de lundi, 13 février 1933,” February 13, 1933, p. 2, FO 141-699-3, TNA. 165.  Ibid., 4. 166.  Ibid., 3–4. 167.  Ibid., 4–5. 168.  Ibid., 3. 169.  Muhammad Jabr ‘Abd al-Salih to British Residency, February 16, 1933, FO 141699-3, TNA. 170.  Hopkins and Mehanna, Nubian Encounters, 5. 171.  Report enclosed in letter from D. J. D. Maitland to R. S. Scrivener, May 16, 1964, FO 371-178650, TNA. 172.  President of the Council of Ministers, Egypt, to the British High Commissioner, June 21, 1932, and September 30, 1932, FO 141-723-9, TNA.

Chapter 3: Beyond the Frontier 1.  Villiers Stuart, Egypt after the War, 237. 2.  Letter to the French Chargé des Affaires in Egypt, September 15, 1902, letter to the French Consul in Cairo, October 30, 1902, French Consulate in Cairo to Minister of France in Egypt, November 17, 1902, letter, sender and recipient unclear, November 20, 1902, and French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to General Consulate of France, December 4, 1902, all in box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes.

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3.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 23. 4.  Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires, 23. 5.  These mills were located at Saqiyat al-Musa and al-Rawda. Mazuel states that they produced different qualities of unrefined sugar, with some molasses and rum, and a more expensive “kasr” variety. Arminjon claims that a refinery was located in the vicinity of one of the mills. The reference to the refinery is attached to a footnote to Figari’s Studi sull’Egitto. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 31–32; Arminjon, Situation économique et financière, 238–39. 6.  The two mills in central Egypt were at “Nemris” and Minya. While Mazuel cites production statistics from the first three mills at Rayramun, Saqiyat al-Musa, and Rawda, it is not clear which, if any, of the four mills that were contracted between 1840 and 1845 actually went into production. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 31–32. 7.  Ibid., 32. 8.  The usine centrale was developed in the 1840s. Before its development, cane planters in the Caribbean had relied on much smaller mills and purging houses to process their cane. Bodenstein, “Sugar and Iron.” 9.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 30. 10.  Ibid., 161. 11.  Rodkey, “Colonel Campbell’s Report,” 110; Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 173. 12.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 32–33. 13.  Ibid., 37–38. 14.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 65. 15.  Ibid. 16.  Mazuel lists sixteen factories and their specific locations on the Daira Sanieh. The Daira Sanieh factories were located in Mat‘ana, Armant, Dab‘iyya (all of these in Upper Egypt) and Rawda, Fashn, Abu al-Waqf, Samalut, Shaykh Fadl, Abu Qurqas, Minya, Matay, Bani Mazar, Maghagha, and Biba (Middle Egypt) and Sinnuris and “Abouqsa” in Fayum. Arminjon tells the reader that there were eighteen factories without specifying their location. Kupferschmidt claims that twenty-two mills were open at one point but that some were forced to close so that by 1878 only ten mills remained. Crouchley states that Isma‘il built no fewer than sixty-four sugar mills. Samir Saul states that Isma‘il built seventeen new mills. The variations in these figures suggest that while a large number of mills were constructed and opened, more than half of them closed quickly because of lack of funds and an insufficient supply of cane. Owen states that Isma‘il’s sugar industry had been conceived on too large a scale and that by 1878 only ten mills were in operation. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 36; Arminjon, Situation économique et financière, 239; Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 21; Crouchley, Economic Development, 117; Saul, France et l’Egypte, 382; Owen, Cotton, 154. 17.  Bodenstein, “Sugar and Iron,” no page number. 18.  The expansion and refitting of the preexisting mill at Minya alone was estimated at 963,200 francs. J. F. Cail et Cie to Draneht Bey, February 28, 1868, Isma‘il 76, DWQ. A. E. Crouchley lists £E 6,100,000 as the total cost of constructing sixty-four sugar mills. Crouchley, Economic Development, 117.



Notes to Chapter 3 183

19.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 36. 20.  The railway line was extended south to Asyut in 1874. Owen, Cotton, 141. 21.  The Five-Lilles firm also helped with the construction of the mills. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 58. 22.  A letter describing the Daira Sanieh Commission’s strategy during its first year of operation states: “Les terres des Dairas sont divisées en terres données en location et en terres cultivées par le propriétaire.” A. Money, le President de la Commission du Domains de l’Etat, to President, Majlis al-Nithar, October 3, 1878, al-Da’ira al-Sanieh, DWQ. While sharecropping was the most widespread form of land tenure on the Daira Sanieh, other forms of labor worked its lands as well. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 34. 23.  Cail to Draneht Bey, April 1868, Isma‘il 76, DWQ. 24.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 65–66. 25.  Baer, Studies, 165. Abul-Magd, “Empire and Its Discontents,” 106–221, and Imagined Empires, 118; Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 172; Mowafi, Slavery, Slave Trade, 23; Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 361. In 1878, when the estates passed to the authority of the Daira Sanieh Commission, there was debate among the commission during the first year of cultivation concerning how labor for the estates would be procured. A letter describing the commission’s strategy during its first year of operation suggests that some wage labor was used on the Daira in addition to corvée when it belonged to the khedive. A. Money, le President de la Commission du Domains de l’Etat, to President, Majlis al-Nithar, October 3, 1878, al-Da’ira al-Sanieh, DWQ. 26.  Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 66; Owen, Cotton, 117. 27.  Labor was concentrated in two separate fifty-day periods separated by a crystallization period of forty days. Kupferschimdt, Henri Naus Bey, 18. 28.  See, for example, Packard, “Invention,” 271–92. 29.  “Rapport du Docteur Dacorogna sur l’organisation du Service Hospitalier dans les principales villes de la Haute Egypte Mission exécuté par ordre De Son Altesse le Khédive,” Cairo, June 19, 1873, Isma‘il 68, DWQ. 30.  On January 2 and 3, 1875, men harvesting cane in Minya and Samalut abandoned their work cutting cane in fields and in the mills. Throughout Middle Egypt work either slowed or ceased as labor was scarce and mills ran out of cane to process. On January 10, Rousseau requested men to compensate for lost labor and complete the work that remained at the mills, including cutting cane and unloading the agricultural railway. L. Rousseau to ‘Abd al-Jalil Bey, Secretary to the Khedive, January 2, 3, 5, and 10, 1875, Isma‘il 76, DWQ. 31.  L. Rousseau to ‘Abd al-Jalil Bey, Secretary to the Khedive, January 10, 1875, Isma‘il 76, DWQ. 32.  Gay-Lussac to S. E. Barrot Bey, Secretary of the Khedive, January 19, 1876, Isma‘il 39, 1st part, DWQ. 33.  “Report on the Famine in the Provinces of Girgeh, Kenneh, and Esneh,” by Alexander Baird, April 2, 1879, FO 633-96, TNA. 34.  The estates were forfeited by the khedive in 1876, and the commission was formed in 1877. Owen, Cotton, 268, 387.

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35.  While Abbas and El-Dessouky state that the Daira Sanieh Commission had been formed in accordance with the Public Debt Liquidation Law of 1880, there are documents from the commission from 1878. Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 38. 36.  See, for example, “Collection of the Sessions Concerning Different Topics, March 1881,” March 8 and 29, 1881, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ; “Accounts concerning Sugarcane Tenants of the Inspector in Different Provinces Specific to the Leasing of the Daira Sanieh in 1904,” al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ; “Collection of the Sessions from February 1896 concerning Different Topics,” February 1 and 10, 1896, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ. 37.  The Foreign Office’s 1894 annual report summarized this policy, stating, “The Council of the Daira continues to carry out its policy of realizing such of its lands as lie outside the range of its factories. The general well-being of the agricultural class has so increased the demand for land, that the Administration is able to obtain very satisfactory prices for these lands.” British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented April 1894], 6. 38.  Near the Ibrahimiyya Canal, the commission sought to keep the lands of the muhit, which had access to perennial irrigation and agricultural railways and which contained the mines of the Daira Sanieh. The commission’s directors requested authorization to sell the Daira’s lands in Lower Egypt, the lands bordering the Bahr Yusif Canal, those near the Ibrahimiya Canal but lying to the east of the government railway, and its properties in Cairo, Alexandria, and Tanta. Conseil Supérieur de la Daira Sanieh, “Procès verbal de la Séance du Mardi 26 Octobre 1880,” October 26, 1880, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. By 1881, the commission had begun to sell pieces of isolated property in Lower Egypt. “Collection of the Sessions Concerning Different Topics,” 3007-022504, March 1881, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ. 39.  E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, 56; Abbas and El-Dessouky, Large Landowning Class, 38. 40.  Baer, History of Land Ownership, 41. 41.  In 1897, the princes Mehemet Aly Halim and Ibrahim Halim purchased approximately 1,300 feddans of land in the district of Rawda in the province of Asyut. Although Ruda was one of the centers of Isma‘il’s sugar industry, the purchased lands were situated on the east bank of the Nile and distant from the concentration of Daira lands in this region. Hamilton Lang, Controller of the Daira Sanieh Commission, to the Minister of Finance, 1897, record group 3/3/A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 42.  Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented 1883], 44. 43.  Ibid. 44.  A. Money to Members of the Commission of State Domains, October 9, 1878, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ. 45.  A. Money, le President de la Commission du Domains de l’Etat, to President, Majlis al-Nithar, October 3, 1878, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ. 46.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 59. 47.  The Supreme Council of the Daira Sanieh to the Council of Ministers, February 26, 1882, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ; Gay-Lussac, Controller



Notes to Chapter 3 185

of the Daira Sanieh, to the Minister of Finance, November 28, 1882, record group 1A, alDa’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 48.  In an interview with Selim Shallon, a manager of the taftish for the Wadi Kom Ombo Society during the 1930s, Shallon translates the term taftish, which means an administrative district, as “plantation,” suggesting that the mufattishin had been responsible for the administration of what were in essence, sugar plantations. Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 285. 49.  Director General Khalil to the President, July 14, 1884, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 50.  “Statement from a Member of the Farming Section,” June 7, 1886, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 51.  A statement signed by the head of the division, the representatives of the Daira, and the police inspector testified to their opposition. The Daira’s director general characterized the actions of the local peasants as insubordination, asserting that the commission was free to rent its lands as it saw fit. Director General Khalil to the President, August 5, 1884, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 52.  For a description of the date palm tax, see Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented 1883], 14. 53.  Gay-Lussac to Hamilton Lang, December 20, 1890, record group 3/3/A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, DWQ. 54.  Director General Khalil to the President, July 14, 1884, record group 1A, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 55.  While this document was not dated, one of the commission members, Lt. Col. Money, states that the first notice of this incident was sent to the Daira on April 3, 1886. “Opinion Issued by the Daira Sanieh Commission,” undated, al-Da’ira al-Saniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 56.  G. H. Money, April 15, 1886, Taftish Maghagha, record group 1A, al-Da’ira alSaniya, Majlis al-Wuzara’, DWQ. 57.  Although the commission formed a committee to investigate the charges, the Egyptian director promptly dismissed the committee following his discovery of the investigation. The archival trail suggests that the committee was re-formed, since such a committee documented a number of cases during this period concerning the same general area of abuse. The article also states that, in addition to the French and British directors, there was an Italian director. This is the only source that I read suggesting that the commission possessed more than two European directors. “A Public Scandal in Egypt,” Cairo Dispatch to the London Times, New York Times, March 19, 1886. 58.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented March 1892], 13. 59.  Ibid. 60.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented March 1893], 9. 61.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances, [presented March 1896], 11. 62.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 62. 63.  Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented May 1895], 7. 64.  Beinin, Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 256.

186

Notes to Chapter 3

65.  Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 39. 66.  E. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, 57. 67.  Suarès and his partners operated the Cairo-Helwan portion of Egypt’s railway, in addition to building the length that stretched from Qina to Aswan. Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 41; Consulate of France in Egypt to the French Foreign Minister, April 26, 1898, Dossier général, 1896–1907, NS Egypte 57, MAE Paris. The group also won the concession to build light railways in the provinces of Sharqiyya, Daqahliyya, and Qalubiyya. Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, 35. 68.  British Foreign Office, Report on the Finances [presented February 1897], 10. 69.  The refinery at Hawamdiyya dissolved the roughly, processed, granulated sugar produced at Egypt’s mills and reboiled it, resulting in a whiter, more refined sugar. Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 18, 22. 70.  Ibid., 23. 71.  Ibid., 22–23. 72.  Suarès contributed two-thirds of the capital to this venture. Consulate of France in Egypt to the French Foreign Minister, April 26, 1898, Dossier général, 1896–1907, NS Egypte 57, MAE Paris; Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 22–23. 73.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 24–25. 74.  Ibid., 23. 75.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 40. 76.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 22. Yusuf Kamal is probably best known for founding the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, al-Fanun al-Jamila, in 1923. Talaat, “Egypt’s Institutes of Knowledge.” 77.  The company used pumps and dug approximately 125 miles of irrigation canals. In 1900, the Egyptian Sugar Company purchased the company. The company was sold following the 1906 reorganization of the Egyptian Sugar Company. Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 27, 46; Le Consul de France au Caire à Monsieur le Vicompte Dejean, Chargé des Affaires de France en Egypte, August 10, 1908, Dossier général, 1908–1914, NS Egypte 58, MAE Paris. 78.  During the first two decades of the twentieth century, two patterns of property ownership predominated in areas of Egypt’s south in which sugarcane was grown. In the areas of Girga, Qina, Luxor, Isna, Idfu, and Aswan, sugarcane was cultivated as a monoculture and small holdings were the dominant form of property ownership. In Naj‘ Hamadi, Dishna, Qus, and al-Dirr, land was concentrated in large estates. Schulze, “Colonization and Resistance,” 176. 79.  Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented 1883], 9. 80.  Baer reports that peasant revolts became much more common during the rule of Mehmed Ali: “Such revolts broke out in 1807–8, 1812, 1816, in every year between 1820 and 1826, and again in 1838 and 1846.” Baer, Fellah and Townsman, 77. 81.  Initially successful, al-Salah seized the state’s storehouses and treasury and replaced state bureaucrats with his own appointees. The revolt was crushed and its leader executed



Notes to Chapter 3 187

when, after several months, Mehmed Ali dispatched a military force to the south. AbulMagd, Imagined Empires, 78–81. 82.  Abul-Magd, “Empire and Its Discontents,” 140, and Imagined Empires, 109–14. 83.  Like that of his father, al-Tayyib’s revolt was violently crushed by the state. Lucie Duff Gordon, a British traveler in the region, was in the south at the time of the revolt and records the events of the revolts and the government’s response in letters home to her family. Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, 215–35. 84.  Villiers Stuart, Reports by Mr. Villiers Stuart [presented 1883], 8. 85.  N. Brown, ““Who Abolished Corvée Labour,” 133. 86.  Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, 96. 87.  Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 776. 88.  Henri Naus, quoted in ibid., vol. 2, 776. Walter Tieman in his 1897 study of sugarcane cultivation in Egypt asserts that the cane was kept in the ground for one to two years. Tieman, Sugar Cane in Egypt, 1. Mazuel states that sugarcane was grown for two to three years and followed by a year of another cropping cycle. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 75. 89.  Between 1917 and 1947, nearly 14 percent of the enumerated Egyptian male workforce was between the ages of five and fourteen years. According to the 1933 child labor law, children between nine and fourteen years of age were permitted to labor in particular industrial sectors, among them sugar mills. Goldberg, Trade, Reputation, 158. 90.  Hani al-Zayni, interview by author, June 12, 2008. 91.  A list compiled between 1897 and 1905 reveals that forty-three of the company’s employees at Naj‘ Hamadi were French. Accompanying this list are lists of the French employees at Shaykh Fadl and C. Say in Cairo. The list was likely compiled between the time of the construction of the Naj‘ Hamadi factory in 1897 and the insolvency of the Sugar Company under C. Say director Cronier’s leadership. Employee lists, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 92.  Le Consul de France au Caire à Monsieur de Chargé d’Affaires de France en Egypte, September 10 and 12, 1903, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 93.  Letter to the French Chargé des Affaires in Egypt, September 15, 1902, letter to the French Consul in Cairo, October 30, 1902, letter to the Minister of France in Egypt from the French Consulate in Cairo, November 17, 1902, letter, sender and recipient unclear, November 20, 1902, and letter from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the General Consulate of France, December 4, 1902, Le Consul de France au Caire to Monsieur Le Chargé des Affaires de France en Egypte, September 10, 1903, letter, author and recipient unclear, September 12, 1903, and letter from Ministère des Affaires Étrangères to Monsieur Lecompte, October 29, 1903, all in box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 94.  Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires, 89–94. 95.  Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 56. 96.  Alan Richards notes that in 1902 the police broke up a gang charged with attacking landlords and estates in the sugarcane-producing region of al-Sa‘id. Ibid., 57. 97.  The company purchased the mills at Matay, Maghagha, Biba, Minya, Abu Qurqas, Rawda, Dab‘iyya, Armant, and Matana, and the infrastructure that supported them,

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including the agricultural railways, for £944,000. The mills not sold to the company were closed. At the time of the sale, there were eleven operational sugar mills, a one-hundredmile length of sugarcane fields, and three hundred miles of agricultural railway on the Daira Sanieh. Arminjon, Situation économique et financière, 241. 98.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented April 1907], 13. 99.  In 1902, sugarcane covered 72,679 feddans of the Daira Sanieh. That number fell precipitously in the short years that followed; by 1907–8, the total surface area cultivated with the crop was 38,563 feddans. Artaud, Industrie Sucrière, 208. 100.  “Downfall of the Paris ‘Sugar King,’” New York Times, September 24, 1905. 101.  Among the causes that Mazuel lists for the company’s insolvency were a lower than predicted sugar yield, large construction and refitting costs, considerable losses, the closure of several mills as a result of the ebbing of cane cultivation, the location of their properties, attempts to introduce beet cultivation, an exaggerated desire to intensify production and conquer foreign markets, continuous changes in directing employees and an absence of responsibility, and considerable financial burdens stemming from their contract with the Sugar Company. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 44–46. 102.  For a detailed discussion of Naus himself and his role within the Egyptian business realm, see Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey. 103.  M. Caillaux, ministre des finances, à M. Stephen Pichon, ministre des affaires étrangères, May 21, 1909, 232, MAE Nantes; Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 45. 104.  Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 46. 105.  Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 286. 106.  This transition meant that the French state lost a degree of influence in company affairs despite the fact that the great majority of the company’s shareholders were French and would remain so until the nationalization of the company in 1956. While I have not been able to locate the number of shares held by French citizens in 1905, in 1908 it was estimated that more than three-quarters of the company’s shares were in French hands. Kupferschmidt argues that by the late 1930s, fewer than 30 percent of company shares were held by French shareholders. However, in 1956, when La Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte was liquidated by the Egyptian government, the French reported that at least 80,000 out of 103,334 shares were in the hands of French shareholders. Le Consul de France au Caire à Monsieur le Vicompte Dejean, Chargé des Affaires de France en Egypte, August 10, 1908, Le Caire, Dossier général, 1908–1914, NS Egypte 58, MAE Paris; Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 73. Ministre Plenipotentiaire au Vietnam à Monsieur A. du Chayla, Ambassadeur de France en Egypte, May 21, 1956, box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 107.  In a letter from the French finance minister to the foreign minister, the finance minister referred to the Kom Ombo project as “dangereux pour notre épargne.” M. Caillaux, ministre des finances, à M. Stephen Pichon, ministre des affaires étrangères, May 21, 1909, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. See also Le Président du Conseil Chargé de L’Intérim du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères to Monsieur Chevandier de



Notes to Chapter 3 189

Valdrome Chargé de l’Agence et Consulat Général de France au Caire, January 8, 1908, and Le Consul de France au Caire à M. Chevandier de Valdrome, Chargé d’Affaires de France en Egypte, January 28, 1908, both in box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 108.  Gudrun Krämer lists the date of Suarès’s death as 1902, which differs from the date included in the French diplomatic record concerning the controversy over the construction of the Naj‘ Hamadi mill. Suarès died on April 19, 1909. Harari Pasha à M. Périer, administrateur délégué de la Société et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte, April 17, 1909, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes; Réponse à la lettre du Ministère des Finances au sujet des sucreries d’Egypte, May 10, 1909, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes; Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 39. 109.  M. Périer à M. Stephen Pichon, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, May 10, 1909, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 110.  M. Caillaux, Ministre des Finances, à M. Stephen Pichon, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, May 21, 1909, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 111.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 48. 112.  French anxiety concerning the company’s non-French leadership continued to flare. In 1910, French representation again arose as an issue of concern when the French consul in Alexandria wrote to the French minister of foreign affairs to relay his conversation with one of two French administrators of the Egyptian Sugar Company. While this conversation praised the new company leadership, the consul’s language underscored the position that only French citizens serving in positions of corporate leadership could truly safeguard the interests of French shareholders. Le Consul de France à Alexandrie à M. Pichon, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères, March 17, 1910, box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 113.  It was capable of disposing of one hundred thousand tons of sugar each season; the mill processed 4,500 acres of cultivated sugarcane in 1912–13. Yusuf Qattawi quoted in Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 857–58. 114.  Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 286. 115.  Yusuf Qattawi quoted in Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 2, 857–58. Liliane S. Dammond also mentions a French missionary school in the town. Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 14. 116.  At Naj‘ Hamadi, workers purchased goods from overpriced company stores. Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 287. 117.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 52; Near the Armant mill, cane was grown on a large estate in Mat‘ana, which it purchased in 1917 and sold in 1933, and lands that it rented in “Moeris” and Dab‘iyya. Mazuel, Sucre en Egypte, 147. 118.  Baer, History of Land Ownership, 92. 119.  Ibid. 120.  H. Naus to A. Defrance, Agent Diplomatique et Ministre Plénipotentiaire de France en Egypte, September 22, 1914, box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 121.  Between 1911 and 1917, sugar production doubled, the company paid its

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shareholders dividends of 42.5 percent, and profits rose thirty-four-fold. Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, 51. 122.  For a discussion concerning the tension between “recruitment” and “conscription” during the war and the problems produced by this binary, see K. Anderson, “Egyptian Labor Corps,” 5–24. 123.  James Haines, British Advisor, Egyptian Ministry of Interior, to the British Residency, May 13, 1917, May 26, 1917, TNA. 124.  James Haines, British Advisor, Egyptian Ministry of Interior, to the British Residency, July 2, 1918, TNA. 125.  “Tawwuf,” Egypt 1919, 77; Judge Percival to the High Commissioner, March 26, 1919, FO 141-753-3, TNA; R. G. Gayer-Anderson, “Inquiry along the Line from Minya to Assiut into the Murder of 9 British Officers and N.C.O.’s at Deirut and Deir Moeis on the Morning of March 18, 1919,” April 2, 1919, FO 141-753-3, TNA; “Schedule of Convictions in the Deirut and Deir Moeris Cases,” undated, FO 141-753-3, TNA. 126.  “Inquiry along the Line from Minia to Assiut into the Murder of 9 British Officers and N.C.O.s at Deirut and Deir Moeis on the Morning of March 18, 1919,” April 2, 1919, and telegram from the High Commissioner for Egypt to the British Foreign Office, April 4, 1919, both in FO 141-753-3, TNA. 127.  Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 98–99. 128.  Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, 97. 129.  Ibid., 98–99. 130.  The company issued the currency during April and May of 1919 as a result of the revolution sweeping Egypt and the breakdown of transport and communication as a meaning of paying the local labor force. Raafat, “Ephemeral Republic.” 131.  Charge d’Affaires de France to Son Excellence Monsieur Le Président de Conseil, Ministre des Affaires Etrangères à Paris, September 2, 1922, 41, Situation intérieure en Egypte, notes et documents divers 1922–23, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 132.  Employee lists, box 232, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 133.  Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 123. 134.  Ibid., 111. 135.  “Petition from the Workers of Naj‘ Hamadi,” January 15 and 19, 1920, box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 136.  Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 126; Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, 101. 137.  A French court in Aix-en-Provence acquitted Anache after he argued that during the strike the workers had begun to push and hit him and that, fearing for his life, he had fired his gun. Telegram from Diplomatie to Gaillard, November 20, and telegram from Gaillard to Diplomatie, November 21, 1923, both in box 233, Le Caire, Ambassade, MAE Nantes. 138.  Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 94. 139.  Beinin, Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, 257–58. 140.  Ahmad, Al-Nashat al-Iqtisadi, 196–98; ‘Ali, Malaff al-Yahud, 98; Kamil, “AlRa’smaliyya al-Yahudiyya,” 30.



Notes to Chapter 3 191

141.  Within the group, the Menesces were Austro-Hungarian, the Hararis and the Rolos were British, and the Mosseris were Italian like the Suarèses. Tignor, “Economic Activities of Foreigners,” 421. 142.  “Note to His Excellency the President of the Council of Ministers on the Sugar Question,” May 28, 1922, FO 141-485-3, TNA. A portion of these laborers worked at the company’s refinery in Hawamdiyya, but the rest labored in the company’s mills in Upper Egypt. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the refinery at Hawamdiyya employed about four thousand laborers. Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, 274. 143.  By 1910, the company had employed nearly 15,000 laborers, 390 Egyptian skilled craftsmen, and 267 European employees. Artaud, “Industrie sucrière,” 222. 144.  Dammond and Raby, Lost World, 287. 145.  Skilled and semiskilled workers in the industry earned comparatively more: “Wages for skilled and semi-skilled workers ranged from 300 to 600 piasters (3 to 6 Egyptian pounds) per month for cookers and drivers, to 450 to 900 piasters (4.5 to 9 pounds) for craftsmen and other semi-skilled occupations, to 750 to 1,050 piasters (7.5 to 10.5 pounds) per month for electricians and mechanics.” Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, 96. 146.  This Gay-Lussac carries the same family name as the individual referenced in the discussion concerning problems at the end of Isma‘il’s rule in the Daira Sanieh sugar industry. First names are not provided for either individual, but they share a last name and were employed at the same Armant mill in Upper Egypt. However, the date of the reference to the first Gay-Lussac is 1876, and this Gay-Lussac was assassinated in 1929. With the available documentation, it is not possible to ascertain whether these two men are the same man. However, in light of the fact that fifty-five years separate the two references, it seems unlikely, though not impossible. 147.  Letter to the French Minister, August 14, 1929, Le Consul de France au Caire to the Monsieur le Ministre de France en Egypte, August 15, 1929, Agence Consulaire France in Luxor to le Consul de France, October 26, 1929, letter to Ministre de France au Caire, November 1, 1929, note from Le Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, November 6, 1929, Le Consul de France au Caire to Monsieur le Ministre de France en Egypte, November 7, 1929, note from Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, December 14, 1929, and letter to le Ministre de France en Egypte, December 21, 1929, all in box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 148.  H. Naus to Monsieur de Witasse, April 29, 1937, box 233, Ambassade, Le Caire, MAE Nantes. 149.  “Note to His Excellency President of the Council of Ministers on the Sugar Question,” May 28, 1922, FO 141-485-3, TNA; Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 68. 150.  Kupferschmidt, Henri Naus Bey, 70. 151.  Hani al-Zayni, interview by author, June 12, 2008. Al-Zayni stated that from the period in which he began working in the Sugar Company in the early 1940s, locating a sufficient supply of cane was not a problem. Also, see T. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 24. 152.  Ibid. 153.  Ibid., 74. 154.  Reynolds, City Consumed, 151.

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155.  Hani al-Zayni, interview by author, June 12, 2008. 156.  “Les ouvriers des sucreries de Hawamdieh sont en greve,” Journal d’Egypte, December 18, 1950, box 233, MAE Nantes.

Chapter 4: Cruel Summer 1.  The month usually began on April 9 and ended on May 8. 2.  Beginning in the fourteenth century and stretching through the late nineteenth century, an outbreak of plague struck Egypt every nine years on average. Dols, “Second Plague Pandemic,” 169, 176, cited in Mikhail, “Nature of Plague,” 251. 3.  One of these bacterial eye infections was trachoma, caused by infection with Chlamydia trachomatis. Even today, the association of trachoma with a broader material world remains a puzzle but not in doubt. Contemporary medical literature describing the infection notes its seasonality but cannot definitively explain the seasonal nature of infection. Populations of eye-seeking flies, heat, dust, and wind have all been associated with an increased prevalence of trachoma, but no single factor explains its clear seasonal association in Egypt. See, for example, Ramesh et al., “Impact,” 1–8; Emerson et al., “Effect of Fly Control,” 1401–3, and “Roles of Flies,” 1093–98. 4.  Millar and Lane argue that even in the late twentieth century villagers in the Nile Delta understood the different symptoms of trachoma as discrete conditions of the eye. Millar and Lane, “Ethno-Ophthalmology,” 654. 5.  Legrain, Louqsor sans les Pharaons, 172–73. 6.  Ibid., 171; Ammar, Growing Up, 29; Maspero, Chansons populaires, 186. 7.  Maspero, Chansons populaires, 189. 8.  Ibid.; Derr, “Labor-Time,” 198. 9.  Legrain, Louqsor sans les Pharaons, 176; see also Derr, “Labor-Time,” 198. 10.  See Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, the chapter “Unleashing the Beast,” 38–66. 11.  This description of cotton labor is applicable to the period of its cultivation under Mehmed Ali. Owen, Cotton, 30–33. 12.  Ibid., 206. 13.  For a differently oriented description of the practice of Nile temporality, see Barak, On Time, 193–200. 14.  During an outbreak of Schistosoma mansoni in the village of Saft al-‘Inab in the Nile Delta, Khalil foolishly suggested that cultivators should opt for the use of the saqiya over that of the tanbur, paying no mind to the need for capital to purchase the draft animals necessary to propel the saqiya, and the well-known fact that debt-ridden Egyptian peasant-cultivators in this period lacked capital. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 181. 15.  Ammar, Growing Up, 25. 16.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 228, 301, 310; Madden, Bilharziosis, 44. 17.  The two species differ in the morphology of their eggs, the snail species that serve as their intermediate hosts, and their pathways of infection inside the body. Bulinus truncatus is the intermediate host for Schistosoma haematobium and Biomphalaraia alexandrina the intermediate host for Schistosoma mansoni.



Notes to Chapter 4 193

18.  Farley, Bilharzia, 70. 19.  Derr, “Labor-Time,” 201. 20.  James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 578, 610. 21.  Ibid., 610. 22.  Ibid., 592. 23.  Ibid., 610. 24.  Ibid. 25.  In the decade following the 1970 completion of the Aswan High Dam, Schistosoma mansoni replaced Schistosoma haematobium as the most common cause of schistosomiasis in Egypt. When exactly it began to migrate beyond the territories in which it had once been confined is an open question, but in the 1930s James Allen Scott had already begun to wonder whether the distribution of the snails that served as intermediate vectors for the two species of the parasite might be shifting: “Explanations for the restrictions of Planorbis [Biomphalaria] snails to the north of Cairo have all been based on the assumption that some environmental factor makes the district to the south of this point unsuitable to them. The alternative is that they can live and may be slowly spreading southward.” Ibid., 611. 26.  Snail reproduction rates in Egypt are highest in March. Hairston, and Dawood, “Ecology of Bulinus truncatus,” 339. 27.  Bulinus truncatus, the intermediate host for S. haematobium, fares relatively better in moving water than does Biomphalaria alexandrina, the host of Schistosoma mansoni in Egypt. Ibid., 339–56. 28.  As early as the early 1920s, Khalil argued persuasively that there was nothing that agricultural laborers could feasibly do to protect themselves from infection. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 98–99; see also his “Schistosomiasis Work in Egypt,” pp. 3–4, folder 19, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 29.  M. Farooq, “Schistosomiasis in Egypt,” schisto1-emro-egypt 1966, Archives of the Parasitology Collection, WHO. 30.  James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 602. 31.  Women sometimes worked in agriculture, and among those populations of women, infection rates with hookworm and schistosomiasis approached those among men. Scott, 602–5. The 1922 study of the Schistosoma mansoni outbreak in the village of Saft al-‘Inab showed similar results as the percentage of men infected with Schistosoma mansoni, 37 percent, was 9 percent higher than the 28 percent of women infected. Most of those assessed, both men and women, were field laborers and thus likely to be exposed to infection. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 165. 32.  James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 602. 33.  See Bustinduy and King, “Schistosomiasis,” 689–725. 34.  Ibid. Also see Derr, “Labor-Time,” 203. 35.  Bustinduy and King, “Schistomiasis,” 706. 36.  See Madden, Bilharziosis.

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37.  Hookworm was also common in the American South, in South America, and among populations of mine workers in Europe. In North America, the Necator americanus organism was the cause of the disease. 38.  The larva of Ancylostoma duodenale develops between 20 and 30 degrees C. Brooker and Bundy, “Soil-Transmitted Helminths,” 779. 39.  “The Egyptian peasant works all day with his naked feet, legs, and hands exposed to a coating of mud, mixed with water containing ankylostoma embryos which have sprung from the eggs contained in the fæcies of infected natives.” Sandwith, “Note on the Entrance,” 691. 40.  See, for example, Egyptian Public Works Ministry, Report of the Administration [for 1887, pub. 1888], 7–9. 41.  Egyptian researcher Muhammad Khalil argued that the infection was worst in perennially irrigated regions of central Egypt, in which warmer climate and moist soil produced the highest prevalence of infection. “These two factors are practically antagonistic in Egypt, the northern Provinces enjoy perennial irrigation but are colder than the Southern Provinces which are under basin irrigation. The result is that the middle provinces around Cairo are the most intensely affected if they are under perennial irrigation.” Later work echoed this theory. Khalil, “Pail Closet,” 44; Abdallah, “Ancylostomiasis,” 4–5. 42.  Necator americanus is relatively more prevalent in sandy soils, and the prevalence of infection is higher in populations living in areas with sandier soils. Mabaso et al., “Hookworm (Necator americanus) Transmission,” 471–76. 43.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 245. 44.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 10. 45.  James Allen Scott, “Prevalence and Distribution,” 455–505. 46.  When Augustine, Helmi, and Nazmi tested women for infection with Ancylostoma duodenale, the prevalence of the disease among women was consistently lower than it was among men, mapping to patterns of environmental behavior. Augustine, Helmi, and Nazmi, “Ancylostomiasis and Ascariasis,” 136–48, and Augustine, Helmi, and Nazmi, “Ova-Parasite Ratio,” 138–43. 47.  Augustine, Helmi, and Nazmi, “Ancylostomiasis and Ascariasis,” 144–45. 48.  Brooker and Bundy, “Soil-Transmitted Helminths,” 779–80. Also see Derr, “LaborTime,” 205–6. 49.  Abdallah, “Ancylostomiasis,” 2. 50.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 263. 51.  Sandwith states that because the disease caused pain in the epigastrium, the disease was sometimes referred to as “mal de coeur.” Ibid., 241, 257–63. 52.  Ibid., 259. 53.  Ibid., 292. 54.  Ibid., 290–91. 55.  Maize was also called dhura nili, a reference to the schedule of its cultivation. Historically, the category al-dhura also referred to other types of grain, often millet, which could be referred to as dhura baladi, dhura hiwagi, dhura sayfi, dhura shitawi, and dhura nabari. Ibid., 288.



Notes to Chapter 4 195

56.  Among the corn varietals, it was Spanish flint maize that made its way via this pathway to Africa. In multiple West Africa languages including Hausa and Fulani, this maize is referred to as masa(r), the Arabic place name for Egypt, and makka, for the city of Mecca. McCann, Maize and Grace, 27–28. 57.  Willcocks and Craig, Egyptian Irrigation, vol. 1, 368–69. 58.  “The area under maize increased from 600,000 feddans in 1879, to 1,850,000 in 1913.” Crouchley, Economic Development, 166. 59.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 288–89. 60.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1908, presented April 1909], 22; Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 83. 61.  Owen, Cotton, 107. 62.  Prinzo, Pellagra and Its Prevention, 11. 63.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 284–85. 64.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1908, presented April 1909], 31. 65.  Sandwith, “Pellagra,” 10. 66.  James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 566. 67.  Laverne Kuhnke argues that in the early nineteenth century three different bodies of medical thought likely influenced local medical practice in Egypt: Pharaonic medicine, Prophetic medicine or Tibb al-Nabi, and the classical Galenic tradition. Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 26–27. 68.  Ibid., 28. 69.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 281. 70.  Ibid., 241. 71.  Girges, Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), 498; Madden, “Incidence of Bilharziosis,” 966; Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 96, 164. 72.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1931,” pp. 26–27, folder 82, box 6, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. Khalil also reported that cultivators felt the itch in summer after exiting the water. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 163. 73.  Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 27; Ragab, Medieval Islamic Hospital, xiii. 74.  Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 27; Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 297; Derr, “LaborTime,” 200. 75.  Klunzinger, Upper Egypt, 390. 76.  Ibid., 396. 77.  Larrey, Memoirs of Military Surgery, 110–26. 78.  Cases of “Egyptian ophthalmia” included infections caused by Chlamydia trachomatis (trachoma), Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Haemophilus aegyptius (Koch-Weeks), and Moraxela-lacunata (Morax-Axenfeld) bacteria. Some of those infections—those caused by Haemophilus aegyptius for example—are relatively harmless, their symptoms limited to excessive tearing and pus. Gonococcal infections and those caused by Chlamydia trachomatis are more sinister, commonly causing blindness. See for example, Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Ninth Annual Report of the Ophthalmic Section, 14–15.

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79.  The return of British troops to England, and their transmission of infection to civilian populations, prompted John Vetch to argue that either the environment or a contagion could cause the disease. Feibel, “John Vetch,” 131. 80.  Kunhke, Lives at Risk, 139–41. 81.  Ibid., 64. 82.  Ibid., 70. 83.  Ibid., 64. 84.  Abdallah, “Ancylostomiasis,” 2. 85.  Girges, Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), 3. 86.  Bilharz, “Further Observations,” 72; Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 4. 87.  Bilharz to von Siebold, quoted in Bergquist, Kloos, and Adugna, “Schistosomiasis,” 16. 88.  Mahfouz, History of Medical Education, 43–44; Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History, 180. 89.  Mahfouz, History of Medical Education, 44–48. 90.  Sonsino, “Research,” 512–13; Girges, Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), 5. 91.  In 1884, the government created a Department of Public Health to replace the Sanitary Department. The department was directed by Hassan Mahmud and Sandwith. Mahfouz, History of Medical Education, 44. 92.  In 1892, 16,848 patients were admitted to government hospitals. That number had risen to 27,921 by 1904. British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented March 1893], 23–24; British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1904, presented April 1905], 68. 93.  Girges, Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), 220. 94.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented March 1892], 23–24. 95.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1904, presented April 1905], 68. 96.  British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [for 1898, presented April 1899], 44–45. 97.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 243. 98.  Mahfouz, History of Medical Education, 61. 99.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 250. 100.  Ibid., 243, 255, 288. By 1915, Sandwith’s idea about the cause of pellagra had changed; he began to think that the cause of the disease was insufficient nutrition rather than an infective agent. Sandwith, “Pellagra,” 3–5. 101.  “The First Egyptian Medical Congress,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 2196 (January 31, 1903): 262. 102.  Ibid. 103.  Ibid. 104.  Ibid. 105.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 218. 106.  Krämer, Jews in Modern Egypt, 41.



Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 197

107.  Madden, Bilharziosis, 15. 108.  Macfarlane, “Bonté Elgood.” 109.  Only a small number of studies had been conducted outside of hospitals; they included a survey of the prevalence of pellagra in Zaqaziq conducted by Sandwith and Talaat in September 1901 and a study of the prevalence of schistosomiasis that Kautsky performed in a school. Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 284. 110.  Elgood, “Schistosomiasis,” 1355–57. 111.  Looss, “Bilharziosis of Women,” 773; Madden, Bilharziosis, 16. 112.  Looss, “Bilharziosis of Women,” 774. 113.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 215. 114.  Madden, “Incidence of Bilharziosis,” 966. The possibility that a single infection might be recovered from, especially if acquired in childhood, remains an open question among schistosomiasis researchers. Dr. Shona Wilson, e-mail to author, October 25, 2015. 115.  Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 215, 222, 244; Madden, Bilharziosis, 16. 116.  Madden, “Incidence of Bilharziosis,” 966. 117.  Ruffer, “Note on the Presence,” 16. Some Egyptologists argue that ancient Egyptian medical manuscripts describe one of the primary symptoms of infection with Schistosoma haematobium as being hematuria, or blood in the urine. Abou-el-Naga, “Biomphalaria alexandrina in Egypt,” 666. 118.  The 359 “conditionally pensioned” men did not include those “permanently pensioned” as a result of the disease. The cost of 359 “conditionally pensioned” men for the British government was approximately £6,400 annually. Leiper, Researches on Egyptian Bilharziosis, 3; Derr, “Dirty Subject,” 781–83. 119.  Leiper, Researches on Egyptian Bilharziosis, 3. 120.  Bullinus contortus and Bullinus dybowski for Schistosoma haemaetobium and Planorbis boissyi for Schistosoma mansoni. What Leiper called Planorbis boissyi was subsequently renamed Biomphalaria alexandrina, and “Bullinus contortus” and “Bullinus dybowski” were renamed as the single species Bulinus truncatus. Leiper, Researches on Egyptian Bilharziosis, 3.

Chapter 5: Treated Subjects 1.  Qutb, Child from the Village, 42. 2.  Ibid., 34–35. 3.  Ibid., 38. 4.  Ibid., 38–41. 5.  Ibid., 42. 6.  Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 113–16, 139, 144. 7.  Ibid., 146–47. 8.  Fahmy, “Women, Medicine,” 61, “Police and the People,” 366–67, and “Anatomy of Justice,” 1–48; Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women and “Negotiating Virginity,” 57–69. 9.  Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 150–51. 10.  “Rapport du Docteur Dacorogna sur l’organisation du Service Hospitalier dans les

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principales villes de la Haute Egypte, mission exécuté par ordre de Son Altesse le Khédive,” June 19, 1873, Isma‘il 68, DWQ; Klunzinger, Upper Egypt, 80. 11.  “Rapport du Docteur Dacorogna.” 12.  This figure included both doctors in the employ of the government and those who maintained private practices. British Foreign Office, Reports on the State [presented June 1885], 76. 13.  “History of the Qasr El Aini Medical School taken from the Final Report of the University Commission,” p. 4, “Medical Education in Egypt,” folder 1, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 14.  In 1891, Rogers Pasha, director of the Sanitary Department, complained: “In no other country do the care and treatment of the sick devolve entirely on the State, and it is much to be desired in the larger towns at least the cost of hospitals should be partially defrayed by some local rates, or that the Wakf Administration should devote an annual sum to this purpose.” British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented March 1892], 31–32. 15.  While only four students were admitted in 1894, that number had climbed to twenty-one by 1898. “History of the Qasr El Aini Medical School taken from the Final Report of the University Commission,” 3–4; British Foreign Office, Reports by Her Majesty’s Agent [presented May 1898], 45. 16.  The interest of Cassel’s fund was devoted to “the training, maintenance, and remuneration of young Egyptians in order that they may, when duly qualified for the treatment of ophthalmia and maladies of the sight and eye, give their services gratuitously to the necessitous inhabitants of Egypt.” Lord Cromer was made the sole trustee of the trust. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1902, presented April 1903], 51–52. 17.  As the prevalence of eye infections was relatively higher among children, the hospital showed a preference for treating children, who accounted for one-third of its patients. Among adults, more women than men attended the facility, which was of note, as the patient population at Qasr al-‘Ayni was predominantly male. British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1903, presented April 1904], 56–57. 18.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1905, presented April 1906], 73. 19.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1906, presented April 1907], 82. 20.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1908, presented April 1909], 32. 21.  British Foreign Office, Reports by His Majesty’s Agent [for 1913, presented May 1914], 8. 22.  Ibid. 23.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 5. 24.  The foundation agreed to contribute $30,000 to the effort on the condition that the government match its contribution. It set up hospitals in Qalyubiyya, in the towns of Qalyub, Qalama, and al-Dayr, and in Sharqiyya, at Bilbays and Minyat al-Qamh. Ibid., 5–7.



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25.  Ibid., 8. 26.  Ibid., 3; Sandwith, Medical Diseases of Egypt, 243. 27.  In Qalubiyya, local landowner Ibrahim Murad Pasha established his own hospital, which was open between 1914 and 1916. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 58–59. 28.  The statistics listed in the government report are incorrect. The report states, “The number of persons microscopically examined for Ankylostoma from December 13, 1914 to March 31, 1915, was 29,281. Of these, 10,876 (60.8 per cent) were found infected. The number of persons admitted to the hospitals was 11,280 (89.2 per cent) of those found infected.” However, 60.8 percent of 29,281 is 17,803, and 89.2 percent of 12,646 is 11,280, not 10,876. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 6. 29.  Farley, Bilharzia, 78. 30.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 5–9. 31.  This was consistent with the British suspicion during World War I that local officials used force to obtain recruits for the Egyptian Camel Corps and Labor Corps. K. Anderson, “Egyptian Labor Corps,” 12. 32.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 9–11. 33.  Ibid., 14; Farley, Bilharzia, 68. 34.  Farley, Bilharzia, 68. 35.  Ibid., 188. 36.  The two studies are entitled “Parasitic Diseases at Saft El Enab Village” and “Incidence of Bilharziasis and Ankylostomiasis among the Inhabitants of Nag’ Hammadi District.” Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 159–86. 37.  Khalil, “Bearing of Agricultural Schemes,” 472–77. 38.  Rates of infection were highest at the Coptic Elementary School (87.5 percent), but the author of the report, Muhammad Khalil, reported that the principal sent to be tested only those students who showed signs of illness, thus skewing the measurement of rates of infection in the student population at large. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 184. 39.  Ibid., 163–65. 40.  British physician J. E. R. MacDonagh first discovered the efficacy of the compound tartar emetic in killing Schistosoma haematobium when he used it to treat infected British soldiers in the Boer War (1899–1902). In 1918, Dr. G. P. Christopherson replicated MacDonagh’s results at the Church Missionary Society Hospital in Khartoum. R. T. Leiper, “Report to the Undersecretary of Public Health on the Problem of Bilharzia Control in Egypt,” 1928, p. 2, folder 93, box 7, series 4, 5, Claude Barlow Papers, RAC. Dr. Diamantis discovered emetine’s efficacy against Schistosoma haematobium through research he conducted in Cairo in 1916. There are also reports that doctors at Qasr al-‘Ayni had been administering emetine to infected patients before World War I. Girges, Schistosomiasis (Bilharziasis), 467. 41.  The Port Said annex was open for only five months before closing as a result of insufficient numbers of infected patients. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 16–17. 42.  Ibid., 15. 43.  The Church Missionary Society also established three treatment annexes before the war in Hamul, Ashmun, and Minuf. As with the government campaign, the treatment

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annexes run by the CMS were closed during the war. When the annexes reopened in 1920, they opened at Minuf, Ashmun, and Bir al-‘Arab. In addition to these annexes, the CMS erected treatment camps for hookworm at Minyat al-Qamh and Mit Ghamr in 1923. Ibid., 58. 44.  Ibid., 2. 45.  During the first hookworm campaign, thymol was administered as treatment. By the 1920s, thymol had been replaced by oil of chenopodium and carbon tetrachloride. Carbon tetrachloride required fewer doses. R. T. Leiper, “Report to the Undersecretary of Public Health on the Problem of Bilharzia Control in Egypt,” p. 9, folder 93, box 7, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC; Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 28, 49. 46.  “Medical Education in Egypt, 1915, 1923–24, 1927,” p. 103, folder 1, box 1, record group 1.1, series 485, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 47.  R. T. Leiper, “Report to the Undersecretary of Public Health on the Problem of Bilharziasis Control in Egypt, 1928,” p. 3, folder 93, box 7, series 4, 5, Claude Barlow Papers, RAC. 48.  “Egypt—Hookworm Disease—Approval of Project,” January 18, 1928, folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 49.  Augustine, Helmi, and Nazmi, “Ancylostomiasis and Ascariasis,” 137. 50.  In addition to establishing treatment centers, when the “Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis Consultative Committee” reconvened in 1921, its mandate included treatment, surveys, public health campaigns, and research concerning the “pollution” of water and soil. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 14. 51.  Ibid., 63. 52.  Ibid., 64. 53.  Ibid., 99. 54.  Ibid., 64. 55.  Ibid., 98–99, 171. 56.  The section was established under the leadership of under the leadership of the undersecretary of state for the Public Health Administration of the Ministry of Interior Muhammad Shahin Pasha. Some sources report that the unit was established in 1928; others state that it was established in 1929. James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 581. 57.  Ibid; Khalil and Betache, “Treatment of Bilharziasis,” 234–35. 58.  Khalil and Betache, “Treatment of Bilharziasis,” 234–35. 59.  Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia: A World Scourge,” p. 11, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 60.  There are multiple examples of the use of vulnerable populations for medical research. See also the study on the prevalence of schistosomiasis in Naj‘ Hamadi, Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 183. Khalil and Betache, “Treatment of Bilharziasis,” 235; Khalil, “Pail Closet,” 35–62. 61.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 17. 62.  By 1937, the number of units devoted to the treatment of hookworm and schistosomiasis had increased to fifty-six. Ten years later, of the ninety-seven facilities, thirty-one



Notes to Chapter 5 201

of those units were located in hospitals, seven were independent treatment centers, and fifty-nine units were traveling clinics. Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia: A World Scourge,” box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC 2. In 1948, the Public Health Ministry reported that 1,046,019 new patients had been treated for hookworm and schistosomiasis. Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Annual Report for 1948, 123. 63.  Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia: A World Scourge,” box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC 8. 64.  In 1920, doctors at the Qasr al-‘Ayni annex treated 931 cases of schistosomiasis and 134 cases of hookworm. By 1923, the combined total number of new patients seeking treatment at the annexes at Qalyub, Mansura, Banha, and Tanta totaled almost 50,000. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 19, 46. 65.  Ibid., 63. 66.  Barlow to Heiser, March 1, 1931, folder 6, box, 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 67.  Many thanks go to Sheeren Zaky, who graciously sent me the text of both laws pertaining to schistosomiasis. 68.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 46–47. 69.  Khalil and Betache, “Treatment of Bilharziasis.” 70.  Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia: A World Scourge,” p. 11, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 71.  See, for example, the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who died following nine injections of tartar emetic. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 27. 72.  Ibid., 7. 73.  In January 1933, the Research Institute of the Public Health Department and the Faculty of Medicine sent a mission to the Siwa Oasis near Egypt’s border with Libya to investigate the health of the oasis’s inhabitants. According to the mission, “The inhabitants of Siwa claim that every inhabitant has the abdominal serpent.” Khalil, Report on the Mission, 3. 74.  Ibid., 30. During the Fouadin trials, Khalil mentions that some number of patients refused treatment with the compound. Khalil and Betache, “Treatment of Bilharziasis,” 235. 75.  That urine and stool samples consistently missed cases of infection and that partial treatments could temporarily reduce the excretion of eggs while the infection persisted in the body complicated the assessment of patients for the persistence of infection. Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 27. 76.  “Egypt—Program for 1932–-Hookworm Disease,” folder 5, box 1, series 485, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 77.  R. T. Leiper, “Report to the Undersecretary of Public Health on the Problem of Bilharzia Control in Egypt,” 1928, folder 93, box 7, series 4, 5, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 78.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 66. 79.  “Egypt—Hookworm Disease—Approval of Project,” January 18, 1928, folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 80.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 66.

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81.  Shahin Pasha to Victor Heiser, July 23, 1928, “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 82.  Ibid. 83.  While the veracity of Augustine’s claim is not possible to assess, the foundation requested that he forward the publication to his Egyptian colleagues and the article was published with all three names as coauthors. Dr. D. L. Austine to Dr. W. A. Sawyer, February 29, 1928, D. L. Augustine to F. F. Russell, March 5, 1928, and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” all in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 84.  Victor Heiser to Shahin Pasha, August 20, 1928, and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928– 29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC 85.  Sufian, Healing the Land, 311–12. 86.  Dr. W. W. Cort to Dr. F. F. Russell, February 13, 1929, and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 87.  He also earned a diploma at the London School of Tropical Hygiene. Dr. W. W. Cort to Dr. F. F. Russell, February 13, 1929, and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 88.  “Memorandum by Dr. Heiser regarding Dr. C. H. Barlow and Dr. J. Allen Scott, 6 September 1929,” and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 89.  Barlow, “Experimental Ingestion,” 40–44. 90.  Farley, Bilharzia, 105. 91.  “Program for 1933–-Hookworm Disease,” October 29, 1932, folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 92.  Victor Heiser to Dr. W. A. Sawyer, January 8, 1929, folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 93.  “Minutes, Cairo, 8 January, 1929,” folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 94.  Scott and Barlow, “Limitations to the Control,” 621; Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt— Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1931,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 95.  “Egypt—Hookworm Disease—Approval of Project, January 19, 1928,” folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 96.  C. H. Barlow to Victor Heiser, November 3, 1929, and “Egypt—Hookworm, 1928–29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 97.  “Egypt—Dr. Scott’s Report for October 1929, 26 December 1929,” and “Egypt— Hookworm, 1928–29,” both in folder 5, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 98.  C. H. Barlow to V. G. Heiser, January 1, 1930, and “Report by Dr. Heiser—May



Notes to Chapter 5 203

1930,” both in folder 6, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 99.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” folder 82, box 5, series 4, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 100.  Additional villages were added to the study so that in the end it examined eleven villages. The villages of Sassal, Rushdi, Tahra, and Gudayda, were used as controls; Sursuck and Gabal were treated but no latrines were built; in Ibrahim Bey, Qallin, Mit Shammas, Nazlit Abu Salim, and al-Qasba latrines were built but villagers were not treated; Dirshaba, Bahtim, Royal Khassa, and the Royal Agricultural Society’s ‘izba were treated and sanitized. James Allen Scott and Barlow, “Limitations to the Control,” 625–26. 101.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 102.  Ibid. 103.  C. H. Barlow to V. G. Heiser, January 1, 1930, folder 6, box 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 104.  By 1932, the foundation reported a 94 percent rate of use in Bahtim. “Egypt— Program for 1932–-Hookworm Disease,” folder 5, box 1, series 485, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. The Annual Report from 1931 mentions the addition of other ‘izab to the study. Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1931,” folder 82, box 6, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 105.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude Barlow Papers, RAC. 106.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1931,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 107.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 108.  Khalil, Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis, 160. 109.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” pp. 10–11, folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 110.  Barlow to Heiser, March 1, 1931, folder 6, box, 1, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 111.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1930,” folder 82, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC; Barlow to Heiser, August 22, 1931, folder 6, box 1, series 485H, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 112.  Headlee, “Epidemiological Studies,” 698–701. 113.  Ibid., 709–10. 114.  Scott also conducted a less conclusive study of the prevalence of hookworm in Egypt. He estimated that out of a total population of approximately twelve million, five million Egyptians were infected with hookworm. James Allen Scott, “Prevalence and Distribution,” 483, 491. 115.  See McMullen and Rainey, Report, 5. 116.  James Allen Scott, “Annual Report of Laboratory and Surveys for 1934,” and

204

Notes to Chapter 5

Claude H. Barlow, “Annual Report—Egypt Schistosoma Studies 1931,” both in folder 84, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 117.  See James Allen Scott, “Incidence and Distribution,” 566–613. 118.  Scott and Barlow, “Limitations to the Control,” 245–46. 119.  Ibid. 120.  Khalil, “National Campaign,” 829, 848. 121.  Khalil would conclude that the annual Nile flood replenished snail populations. Khalil, “Role of the Nile,” 142. 122.  Khalil, “On the History,” 102–5. 123.  See Claude H. Barlow, “Seasonal Incidence in the Infestation of Significant Snails with Larval Human Schistosomes,” folder 34, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC; Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Hookworm Studies, Annual Report, 1933,” folder 81, box 6, series 3, 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation, RAC; Barlow and Muench, “Life Span,” 165–73. 124.  Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia Work in Egypt,” pp. 3–4, folder 19, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 125.  Khalil, “The National Campaign,” 128-29. Barlow also reported that Khalil held this position. Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia Work in Egypt,” pp. 3–4, Folder 19, Box 2, Series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 126.  Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt—Program for 1932—Hookworm Disease—Continued,” folder 1, box 2, series 485, record group 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. Khalil disagreed with Barlow; see Claude H. Barlow, “Egypt Schistosoma Studies, Annual Report 1936,” folder 86, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 127.  Barlow, “Value of Canal Clearance,” 327–28. 128.  Ibid., 337. 129.  Ibid., 338–48. 130.  Claude H. Barlow, “The Bilharzia Snail Control Section,” folder 21, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. One of the new section’s activities was to set up a field experiment in the Fayum Oasis, in which canals and drains would be cleared of vegetation and snails and treated with copper sulfate. The Fayum study was the first occasion on which the 1941 Law 58, which mandated schistosomiasis treatment, was implemented. 131.  Khalil, “National Campaign,” 841–42. 132.  Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Annual Report for 1941, 69. 133.  The text of Law 58 is included in the annual report from the Public Health Ministry in 1941. Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Annual Report for 1941, 87–88. 134.  Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Annual Report for 1945, 93. 135.  Egyptian Public Health Ministry, Annual Report for 1946, 132. 136.  Claude H. Barlow, “Schistosoma haematobium: Some Interesting Facts Arising from a Self-Infected Case,” folder 73, box 5, series 3, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 137.  Barlow had infected Egyptian subjects with schistosomiasis in his investigation of whether the disease caused dermatitis, which he justified by the fact that the subjects he



Notes to Chapter 5 and Conclusion 205

used were already infected with the disease. Similarly, his experiments clearing canals of snail populations and vegetation depended on infected individuals to do the labor of clearance. Claude H. Barlow, “The Effect upon Snails of Clearing Canals of Vegetation and Snails, 25 October 1931,” in “Annual Report—Egypt Schistosomiasis Studies 1931,” folder 84, box 6, series 4, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 138.  Barlow recorded the details of his self-infection in a journal. folder 73, box 5, series 3, Claude H. Barlow Papers, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 139.  Ibid. 140.  Barlow, “Schistosoma haematobium: Some Interesting Facts Arising from a SelfInfected Case,” folder 73, box 5, series 3, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 141.  Ibid. 142.  Ibid. 143.  Barlow chose to return to Egypt for treatment with tartar emetic, as he “did feel like trusting to an American doctor to give the injections. Tartar emetic is a terribly corrosive drug if it escapes into the tissues in even minute quantities. American doctors, having no Bilharziasis to treat, might get careless and it was my arm being treated.” Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia Work in Egypt,” folder 19, box 2, series 2, Claude Barlow Papers, RAC. 144.  Barlow, “Schistosoma haematobium: Some Interesting Facts Arising from a SelfInfected Case,” folder 73, box 5, series 3, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 145.  Claude H. Barlow, “Dr. Barlow’s Schistosomiasis Case, May 1945–-March 1946,” folder 73, box 5, series 3, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC. 146.  Khalil, “National Campaign,” 845–47. 147.  Ibid., 819–20. 148.  Claude H. Barlow, “Bilharzia: A World Scourge,” p. 9, box 2, series 2, Claude H. Barlow Papers, RAC.

Conclusion: The Afterlives of the Perennial Subject 1.  Egyptian Ministry of Science Research, Proceedings, 9. 2.  Baker, Egypt’s Uncertain Revolution, 197–217. 3.  Ibid., 3. My emphasis. 4.  See Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide, on the politics of this project. 5.  See Mossallam, “‘We Are the Ones,’” 297–314. 6.  J. D. Maitland, British Embassy, Cairo, to R. S. Scrivener, North and East Africa Department, Foreign Office, May 16, 1964, FO 371-178650, TNA. 7.  Barakat, “Epidemiology of Schistosomiasis,” 428–29. 8.  Ibid., 426. 9.  Frank et al., “Role,” 887–91.

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References

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Index

Locators in italics refer to illustrations; those followed by “n” indicate endnotes. Abbas, Raouf, 184n35 ‘Abbas Pasha, 21, 22, 129 ‘Abbud, Muhammad Ahmad, 66, 98, 160, 180n146 ‘Abd al-Ati, Hammad, 169n55 ‘Abd al-‘Azim, Muhammad, 148 ‘Abd al-Fattah, 34 ‘Abd al-Nasser, Gamal, 160–62 ‘Abd al-Salam, Shaykh Ahmad, 98 ‘Abd al-Salih, Muhammad Gabr, 71–72 Abu Qurqas mill, 93 Abu Za‘bal hospital and medical school, 115 Addiscombe seminary, England, 23 agrarian insurgency (1919), 93 Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition, 145 agricultural calendar, 99, 103. See also calendars; seasons and seasonality agricultural code (“statute of peasant agriculture,” 1829–1830), 19 agricultural councils, 22 agricultural space, production and practice of, 10–11 ahl al-wuquf or ahl al-khibra (“local men

of knowledge, expertise, and experience”), 20 Ahmad, Muhammad (al-mahdi), 48 Aird and Co., 49, 60, 174n26 Ali, Mehmed: agricultural code of, 19; corvée labor and, 17–19; cotton production and, 4; Giza pyramids destruction order, 167n11; irrigation administration and, 16, 17–21, 40; landholding elite and, 8–9; land seizures in Armant, 59; maize and, 111; medicine and, 115, 128; ministerial system and, 9; new state institutions under, 19–20; peasant revolts and, 86, 186n80–187n81; praise for, 33; Sudan, invasion and occupation of, 2; sugar industry and, 5, 76–77; Wadi Rayan depression and, 40 Anache, Nestor, 93, 190n137 Ancylostoma duodenale, 100, 109–11, 116, 119, 134–36, 147, 194n38, 194n46 ancylostomiasis (ankylostomiasis). See hookworm Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 62

232 Index

Ankylostoma and Bilharzia Consultative Committee, 131 Ankylostomiasis and Bilharziasis in Egypt (Khalil), 131–32, 134, 137, 139 Ankylostomiasis Consultative Committee, 130, 131 Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, 6 al-Armani, Artin Sikyas, 21 Armant district, 59, 177n80 Armant mill, 76, 93, 189n117 armes savantes, 167n27 Arminjon, Pierre, 182n5 Ascaris lumbridcoides, 111, 134–36, 140, 147 Aswan, 28, 50, 53 Aswan Dam. See Khazan Aswan Aswan High Dam, 72, 160–64 Aswan province, 70–71 Asyut Barrage, 64, 174n25, 174n29, 178n95, 180n142 Asyut province, 58, 70–71, 110, 130–31, 176n71, 179n130 Augustine, D. L., 134–36, 142, 194n46, 202n83 authority: after formal end to British occupation, 63; assemblages of, 75–76, 78–83, 86–88, 91, 93–98, 129–30, 143–47, 158; Daira Sanieh Commission, sugar, and colonial authority, 79–83; disease treatment and, 140–41; Egyptian Sugar Company and, 95; expertise and, 11; subject production and geographies of authority, 8–11, 78, 80–82, 86–88, 91–96, 98; sugar industry and, 81–83, 97; thwarted, 31, 81–83, 144 backwater curve, prediction of, 72 Bahtim, 143, 144 Baker, Benjamin, 41–42, 49, 60–61 baladi (local) cane, 77 Bank Misr, 95, 177n79 al-Baqli, Muhammad ‘Ali, 117

Baramuda (Coptic month), 99 Barlow, Claude H., 142–55, 204n137, 205n143 barrages: Asyut, 64, 174n25, 174n29, 178n95, 180n142; basin irrigation and, 178n95; corvée labor on, 19; Delta, 17, 21, 23, 27, 34, 36–37, 118, 172n145, 180n142; Giza pyramids ordered disassembled for, 167n11; Isna, 60, 64, 179n130, 180n142; list of, 167n10; Naj‘ Hamadi, 64, 179n130; Nile Delta apex, 57, 64; Zifta, 57, 175n64 basin irrigation: barrages and, 178n95, 179n130; dikes and, 166n6; disease rates and, 105, 132; filling, discharge, and maintenance, 3–4, 29–30, 101, 178n95, 179n130; historicizing narratives, 33; irrigation frontier and, 57; Naj‘ Hamadi Barrage and, 64; perennial irrigation vs., 6; persistence of, 76, 132; planting of, 3–4; repair of, 36; replace by canal network, 2, 17, 19, 21, 58, 70; sayfi vs., 39; size of, 166n6; takhfif (release of water), 31; value and, 61; wheat production and, 3 “Ba’una itch,” 114 Bayadiyya village, 82 Bayer IG Farben, 136 al-Bayumi, Muhammad, 21 Betache, M. H., 136, 138 Bilharz, Theodor, 116–17, 160, 161 bilharzia (bilharziasis; bilharziosis). See schistosomiasis Bilharzia Research Section, 131–33 Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section, 148–50, 151, 154–55 Biomphalaria alexandrina, 106, 193n17, 193n27 Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt, 49, 173n18 blindness, 115, 195n78 Blue, John A. C., 49 bodies, human: disease pathways through



the body, 105, 107–8, 109, 111, 152; environmental diseases as marks on, 99–100, 103–13; Hippocratic-Galenic understanding of, 114; as locus of perception and site of subject formation, 7, 78, 80, 86–87, 96, 100–113, 128, 130, 132–36, 138–41, 150–54; as objects of experimentation, 138; parasite journey through, 107–8; parasitic disease, bodily experience of, 108–9; shaduf and, 101; as terrain of imperial discovery, 117. See also disease; pain bollworm, 6 Boulé, Auguste, 41–42, 84 brigandage, 88 British civil engineering, 23–25, 41–42, 66 British occupation (overview), 9, 63. See also specific topics, such as irrigation engineers or colonial economy British Residency, 63, 65, 71–72 British War Office, 125 Brown, Hanbury, 27 Brown, Nathan, 38 Buchanan, R. A., 23 Bulinus truncatus, 106, 192n17, 193n27 Cail firm, 76, 78 Cairo: drinking water in, 121; Isma‘iliyya quarter, construction of, 22–23; Jewish community in, 83, 95; map, 18; in Mubarak’s khitat, 31; ophthalmological clinics in, 128; schistosomiasis among female populations in, 121–22; streets named after engineers, 21; sugar demand, 77. See also specific institutions La Caisse de la Dette Publique (Public Debt Commission), 26 calendars, 30, 99, 103. See also seasons and seasonality Camel Corps, Egyptian, 92, 199n31 Camp Huckstep, 150 canals: al-Marg, 150; Cassel, 91; as centers of village life, 7; in central Egypt, 58;

Index 233

corvée labor on, 19; depth of, 167n9; excavation of, under Mehmed Ali, 17; excavation of, under Isma‘il, 21–22; Ibrahimiyya, 21, 34, 77, 184n38; Isma‘iliyya, 22; Mahmudiyya, 19, 20; Minufiyya, 22; Nubariyya, 31; parasites and, 107; Suez, 21 capitalism: assemblages of authority and, 83–98, 158. See also Khazan Aswan; sugar industry; colonial capitalism carbon tetrachloride, 200n45 Carter, J. C., 142–45 cash crop agriculture, 4–5, 21, 64, 84. See also sugar industry Cassel, Ernest, 48–49, 58, 83, 89–90, 129, 174n24, 176n75, 198n16 Cassel Canal, 91 cattle plague (rinderpest), 101 cement mortar and cement industry, 51, 174n37 central Egypt: Abu Qurqas mill, 93; Bayadiyya village, 82; canals and barrages, construction of, 17; conversion to perennial irrigation, 58–59, 110; Daira Sanieh, 5, 21, 58–59, 77–86, 176n75, 176n78, 177n79; Dayrut, 57; irrigation frontier and, 57–58; major towns and villages (map), 85. Maghagha, 82. Matana mill, 93; Matay district, 82; Minya province, 58, 176n71, 176n78–177n79. Rawda, 28, 78; Rayramun mill, 76–77. Shaykh Fadl mill, 84. See also sugar industry Chandler, A. C., 147 Chlamydia trachomatis, 115, 195n78 chlorosis, Egyptian, 116 cholera, 116, 118 Christopherson, G. P., 199n40 Church Missionary Society, 133, 199n43 civil engineering, British, 23–25, 41–42, 66 Clement, Anne, 38 Clot, Antoine Bey, 116, 153

234 Index

colonial capitalism, 46–49, 57–60, 64–68, 76, 79–98, 158–60 colonial economy: Egyptian Sugar Company and, 83–98; end of, 159–60; interwar persistence of, 92–98; 157– 58; interwar technocratic expertise and, 63, 68–69, 158; parasitic disease and, 100, 103–112, 123–26; public health and, 130–41, 155; riparian transformation and, 3; state-private boundary, blurring of, 10, 48–49, 58–59, 83–88, 91–92, 94–97; sugar industry and postWWI conflict sites, 92–93 colonial state space, production of, 10 Company Law 140 (1947), 98 conflict over Nile waters, 61–64 Connaught, Duke and Duchess of, 53, 175n48 conscripted labor. See corvée labor conscription, military, 8 contagion theory of disease, 115–16 Cooper, Hugh, 65–66 copper sulfate, 147 Coptic calendar, 30 corruption narratives, 35 Cort, William Walter, 143 corvée labor: abolition of, 81, 86; Ali and, 17; avoidance of, 8; British engineers and, 37–39; on canals and barrages, 19; dispossession and, 8–9; opposition and movement to end, 38–39; southern region and, 86; sugar industry and, 77, 78, 80 cotton production: canals and, 17; colonial economy and, 4–5; growth of, 40; Ottoman-Egyptian state and, 4; seasons and, 103; switch to sugar after WWI, 92; value of, 178n108 cotton worms, 6 Cozzika family, 97–98 Craig, J. I., 176n69 Crédit Foncier Égyptien, 59, 78, 84, 89, 177n79

Croft, H., 66 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord, 9, 34–35, 48–49, 56, 58, 174n24, 198n16 Cronier, Ernest, 84, 88 Crouchley, A. E., 182n16 Cuddy, Brendan, 24 curly pondweed (Potamogeton crispus), 6 al-Dab‘iyya estates, 96 Dacorogna, Dr., 129 Daira Khassa, 77, 78 Daira Sanieh Commission, 58, 59, 79–83, 183n22, 183n25 Daira Sanieh estates: cash crops on, 21; consolidation of holdings, 79–80; factories, 182n16; purchase and sale of, 58–59, 176n75; sugar industry at, 77–86 Daira Sanieh Land Company, 58–59, 176n78, 177n79 Dar al-Handasa, 20 Darb al-Jamamiz palace, 22 Davis, Diana, 33 Davis, Eric, 177n79 Dayrut, 57 debt, 25–26, 35–36, 48, 58, 88, 101 defecation, 141–42, 146, 152 Defrance, A., 92 Delta, Nile: canal network and spread of perennial Nile through, 2–3, 17; cotton in, 3–5, 27, 178n108; disease and infection in, 105, 110, 113, 118, 130, 132, 163; Isma‘iliyya Canal and, 22; land reclamation in, 58; maize in, 5, 112, 157; migrant wage workers in, 86; parasitic disease and, 132, 193n25; sefi (perennially irrigated lands), 39; sugar demand in, 77; taxable land in, 40; treatment facilities in, 133, 134; value and, 61; Villiers Stuart on Upper Egypt vs., 75; Willcocks on, 33 Delta Barrage: construction of, 17, 21; disease and, 118; MacDonald and,



180n142; Mubarak as nazir of, 23; repair of, 36–37, 138, 172n145; Willcocks and, 27, 34 demand for irrigation water, 59–60 Department of Public Health, 196n91 description, acts of, 159 dhura shami (maize), 112–13, 194n55 Di-Capua, Yoav, 68 Diémer, Michel, 96 dikes, 19, 22, 166n6 disease: body pathways, 105, 107–8, 109, 111, 152; cholera, 116, 118; colonial economy, multispecies ecologies, and, 113–14, 123–26; endemism, 105, 117, 124–25; hepatitis C, 164; international reputations of scientists and, 11; Ottoman hospitals, 114–15; pellagra, 112–13, 114, 120; perennial irrigation and, 6–7, 100–103, 102, 107, 110, 112, 117–20, 125–26, 132; plague, 99, 114, 116, 153, 192n2; at Qasr al-‘Ayni, 118–19; rinderpest (cattle plague), 101; smallpox, 128; symptoms, 108–9, 111–12, 114; temporality and seasonality of, 99, 101, 103, 114; theories of, 113–16; trachoma, 115, 129, 192nn3–4. See also hookworm; parasites; public health and treatment of disease; schistosomiasis Diwan al-Abniya (Council of Buildings), 19 Diwan al-Madaris (Council of Schools), 22 diwan al-taftish (administration), 78 Doss, Tawfiq, 71 Doss, Wahib, 70–71 Draneht Pasha, 78 Dubini, Angelo, 116 Dunlop, Douglas, 56 al-Durr, 70 East India Company, 23 École des Ponts et Chaussées, 84

Index 235

École Polytechnique, Paris, 20, 23 economy, colonial. See colonial economy Education Department, 19, 21 Egyptian Chamber of Deputies, 70, 71 Egyptian Council of Ministers, 1, 70 Egyptian Irrigation (Willcocks), 32 Egyptian Medical Congress, First, 120 Egyptian Sugar Company (la Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte): assassinations of company personnel, 75–76, 87–88, 96; expansion of, 5; formation of, 83–86; French government losing influence over, 90–91; interwar period and continued colonialism, 92–98; irrigation frontier and, 57; Kom Ombo expansion, 88–92; labor and, 86–87, 96; nationalization of, 160; Nubian community displacement and, 72; reorganization of (1906), 89; southern Egypt context and, 86; violent treatment of workers, 87, 96; wages, 96; WWI and, 92 El-Dessouky, Assem (al-Dasuqi, ‘Asim), 166n3, 166n4, 167n9, 168n38, 168n40, 168n42, 184n35, 184n39 Elgood, Bonté, 121–23 Endemic Disease Hospital and Research Institute, 136 Endemic Disease Section, 136, 138, 144 engineering, irrigation: under ‘Abbas, Sa‘id, and Isma‘il, 21–23; basin irrigation, 29–31; British Egypt and vernacular of the Nile, 25–31; British India and, 23–25; expertise performed through text, 31–35; materialities of maintenance and corvée labor, 35–39; under Mehmed Ali, 17–20; models of measuring and valuing the land, 39–40; Nilometers, 27–28; Ottoman legal code and, 16–17; as “young science,” 15, 16. See also Khazan Aswan, construction of

236 Index

engineers, irrigation: British, 15–16, 23–31, 36–43, 56, 66; dreamscapes of, 39–43; Egyptian, 16–23, 34–35, 56, 63, 68–69; expertise, authority and, 11, 53–57, 158–59; expertise performed through text, 31–35, 68–69; French, 19; Italian, 41; new conception of, 19–20, 57; role of, 10; training of, 20–21, 23–24, 26–27, 56 Esnault, Henri, 75–76, 87–88 expertise: bound to environment, 28–31, 43, 57, 63; disease treatment and, 141, 144, 154–56; Khazan Aswan and, 53–57; as performance, 11–12, 27–35, 53–54, 68–69, 132–38, 145, 150–54, 158; race and medical expertise, 133; textual performance of, 31–35, 68–69, 159 eye infections, 103, 115, 129, 192n3, 198n17 Fahmy, Ibrahim, 65–66 Fahmy, Khaled, 128 Fahmy, Mustafa, 49 Fakhry, Hussein, 49 al-Falaki, Isma‘il, 168n35 falatiyya attacks, 87–88, 93 Farshut mill, 76 Fayum Oasis, 149, 204n130 fecal samples, 127–28, 144 Ferguson, A. R., 123 fertilizers, artificial, 6 Fitzmaurice, Maurice, 49, 174n30, 175n43 floods: of 1891, 28; agriculture and, 2–3; Bahira province, 172n146; basins and, 3, 17, 60; Coptic calendar and, 30, 99; cultivated area and, 36; end of Nile flood, 162; Khazan Aswan and, 53–55; low years, 36, 79; management and administration of, 40; measurement of river height, 28; parasites and, 110, 147; red and green waters, 28–29; snail hosts and, 147

flood season, 3–5, 19, 101 folk songs, 25, 53, 100 Foreign Office, 9 Foster, E. W. P., 29, 172n146 Fouadin, 136–38, 140, 152, 201n74 Fowler, John, 37, 42 Free Officers coup (1952), 5, 155, 156, 159–60 From the Garden of Eden to the Crossing of the Jordan (Willcocks), 33 frontier, irrigation, 57–58 Ganges Canal, 24, 25 Garstin, William, 31, 41–42, 48, 53, 55, 61, 172n149 Gay-Lussac, M. 80, 96 Gebel Silsila, Sudan, 40 gender and disease, 107, 110–11, 193n31, 194n46, 198n17 geophagia, 28, 170n90 George, D. S., 52, 53 Gezira agricultural scheme, 61–63, 179n131 Gilmartin, David, 30, 37 Girga province, 70–71, 179n130 Gismann, Annie, 151 Giza pyramids, 167n11 Gordon, Lucie Duff, 187n83 Goswami, Manu, 10 Greek laborers, 51 green water, 28–29 Griesinger, Wilhelm, 116–17 Haemophilus aegyptius, 195n78 hakim basha (state-appointed doctor), 127, 128 Halim, Ibrahim, 184n41 Halim, Mehemet Aly, 184n41 Harari, Victor, 89, 90, 97 Harb Pasha, Talat, 97 Hawamdiyya refinery, 84, 93, 98, 186n69 Headlee, William, 146 Heiser, Victor, 143



Helmi, M., 142, 194n46 helminthology, 125 hepatic fibrosis, 164 hepatitis C, 164 Hidayat, Salah al-Din, 157 Hippocratic-Galenic medicine, 114, 115, 195n67 hookworm (ancylostomiasis): body pathways, 111; gender and, 110–11; irrigation and, 109–10; prevalence surveys, 110, 130–31, 134–36, 203n114; rihaqan anemia from, 114; sanitation campaign and, 146; “soil pollution” and, 142; symptoms, 111–12, 136; transmission of, 109, 153; treatment, 118, 133, 138, 200n45 hospitals, 114–23, 129–30, 133–34, 198n24 humors, 114 hygiene, 141–47 Ibrahimiyya Canal, 21, 34, 77, 184n38 Ibrahim Pasha, 76–77, 168n36 India, 24–25, 37 Indian Irrigation Service, 27 Indian Public Works Department, 24 infrastructure: civil engineering, British, 23–25, 41–42, 66; corvée labor and, 38; development of, 21; historical visions of, 33; maintenance and repair of, 27, 35–36; marginalization of Nubians and, 71. See also engineering, irrigation; Khazan Aswan; Public Works Ministry institutional formation, 19, 22 Institution of Civil Engineers, 23, 66 International Symposium on Bilharziasis, First, 160 irrigation, basin. See basin irrigation irrigation, perennial. See perennial irrigation irrigation canals. See canals irrigation districts (circles), 26

Index 237

irrigation engineering. See engineering, irrigation irrigation engineers. See engineers, irrigation irrigation frontier, 57–58 Irrigation Investment Company, 49 “irrigation million,” 26, 169n73 irrigation pumps, 21, 103, 168n36, 172n145 Islamic calendar, 30 Isma‘il, Khedive: debt and, 25; irrigation administration and, 21–23, 35, 42; land seized by, 77; ministerial system and, 9–10; public health and, 129; sugar industry and, 5, 77–78 Isma‘iliyya Canal, 22 Isma‘iliyya quarter, Cairo, 22–23 Isna Barrage, 60, 64, 179n130, 180n142 Italian stonemasons, 51 ‘izab (large estates), 9, 91, 143, 145–46, 148 James Heyworth-Dunne, 167n26 Jumel, Louis Alexis, 4 Kamal, Ahmad Pasha, 177n80 Kamal, Yusuf, 86, 96, 186n76 Kanunname-i Mısır (Ottoman legal code), 16–17 Keinosuke, Miyairi, 125 Kennedy, M. Ralston, 62–63 Khairy, Ahmad, 65 Khalil, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Khaliq, 131– 32, 141–50, 154–55, 160, 193n28, 194n41, 199n38, 201n74 Khalil Pasha, 81 khamasin (sandstorms), 99, 114, 115 kharajiyya land holdings, 47 Khazan Aswan (Aswan Dam): Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes and, 6; construction of (1898–1902), 49–53, 52; disease and, 120, 123; displacements from, 1–2, 69–72, 165n2; expertise and,

238 Index

53–57; Gezira scheme, Sennar dam, and nationalism, 61–64; heightening, first (1907–1912), 60–61; heightening, second (1928–1934), 64–66, 67, 69–72, 177n94; housing and facilities for workers, 51; inaugurations, 2, 53; labor and, 50–51; landscape of value, irrigation frontier, and, 57–61; land tax reform and funding of, 47–49; masonry of, 52, 175n42; new Nile River produced by, 46, 57; postcards of, 53, 54; as rearrangement of stone, 45; shoring-up project (1905–1906), 55–56; silting and, 41, 55; siting and planning, 40–43; sluices and release of waters, 41, 53–55, 54, 175n50; total cost for construction, 174n25 Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida (Mubarak), 31–32 khitat genre, 31–32 King Fu’ad University, 131, 136 Kishaf, 50 Kitchner, Lord, 130 knowledge, vernacular and local, 17, 30–31 Kozma, Liat, 128 Krämer, Gudrun, 189n108 Kuhnke, Laverne, 195n67 al-Kumi, ‘Umar, 77 Kom Ombo mill, 90–91, 93, 96 Kom Ombo plain, 72, 89–92, 162 Kupferschmidt, Uri, 182n16 Labib, Ali, 120 Labor Corps, Egyptian, 92, 199n31 labor regimes: activism and strikes, 93, 98; agricultural tools of, 100–103; child labor, 187n89; disease and, 103–13; ecologies of pain, 6–8; on Khazan Aswan, 50–51; mutamassir (Egyptianized) communities, 51; price of, 58; rental model, 80–83; skilled labor, 51, 96, 132, 191n143, 191n145;

sugar industry and, 78, 80–83, 86–87, 92; wage labor gangs, 38, 86. See also corvée labor Lake Nasser, 162 La Motte, Comte de, 40 land conversion, 58, 162 land grants, 8 landholders, large, 8–9, 93, 95. See also Daira Sanieh estates land law, 1858 (al-La’iha al-Sa‘idiyya), 8–9 land reclamation schemes, 58, 176n69 land reform, 159 land tax system, 47–48, 70, 173n8 Lane, Sandra D., 192n4 latrine construction, 141–45 Law 29 (1948), 155 Law 58 (1941), 140, 150 Leiper, Robert, 125, 131, 147 Liberal Constitutionalist party, 95 Linant de Bellefonds, Louis Maurice Adolphe, 19, 21 loans, 26, 48–49, 58–59, 77, 79, 84, 161, 173n18, 174n24 local knowledge. See knowledge, vernacular and local local officials, 9, 17, 26, 30–31, 38, 82, 93, 141 Looss, Arthur, 119, 122, 125, 130, 131 MacAllan, A. F., 129, 155 MacDonagh, J. E. R., 199n40 MacDonald, Murdoch, 61–66, 180n142, 180nn142–43 Madden, Frank Cole, 109, 119, 121, 123 Maghagha, 82 Mahmud, Hassan, 196n91 Mahmudiyya Canal, 19, 20 Mahmud Pasha, Muhammad, 97 Mahramji, Mustafa (Baghat Pasha), 21–22, 168n39 Maitland, J. D., 162 maize (corn), 5, 112–13, 194nn55–56 malaria, 6, 166n15



Mansell, Toni, 24 Manson, Patrick, 125 al-Marg Canal, 150 Marwaw village, 1 masonry dams, 60 Matana mill, 93 Matay district, 82 material perennial Nile. See engineering, irrigation; Khazan Aswan; perennial irrigation; sugar industry Mazhar, Muhammad, 21 Mazuel, Jean, 182nn5–6, 182n16, 188n101 The Medical Diseases of Egypt (Sandwith), 120 medicine, expertise, and authority, 11. See also disease; parasites; public health and treatment of disease Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7 Mikhail, Alan, 17, 101, 167n15 Millar, M. Inhorn, 192n4 ministerial system, 9–10 Ministry of Interior, 22 Minoru, Suzuki, 125 Minufiyya Canal, 22 Minya province, 58, 176n71, 176n78–177n79 Mitchell, Timothy, 6, 10 Monnier, Jean-Baptiste, 77 mosquitoes, 6 Mubarak, Ali, 22–23, 31–32, 68, 159, 169n53 mudirin (local provincial governors), 82 mufattishin (inspectors), 78–79, 81, 185n48 Muhandiskhanah (the Polytechnique), 20–21, 22, 23, 34, 56, 129 multispecies relationality and ecologies, 7, 99–100, 103–14. See also parasites mummies, 124, 130 Murad Pasha, Ibrahim, 199n27 Mustafa, Ghazi, 81–82 Mustafa Bey, Ahmad, 97

Index 239

Musturud, 143, 144 mutamassir (Egyptianized) communities, 51 Naj‘ Hamadi Barrage, 64, 179n130 Naj‘ Hamadi mill, 75, 84, 86, 93, 96, 132, 189n116 Namzi, M., 142 narratives by British engineers, 33 nationalists, 61–63, 92–93 National Liver Institute, 164 Naus, Henri, 89, 92–93, 95, 96, 97 Nazmi, M., 194n46 Necator americanus, 110, 194n37, 194n42 Neisseria gonorrhoeae, 195n78 niacin, 113 Nile: Blue and White Niles, intersection of (“second delta”), 61; peak height, measurement of, 28; red and green waters of, 28–29 Nile, perennial. See perennial Nile Nile Control Works (MacDonald), 62 Nile Delta. See Delta, Nile Nile Delta apex barrage, 57, 64 Nile flood. See floods Nile Projects Commission, 62–63 Nile Reservoir Works at Aswan and Asyut (George), 53 Nile Water Commission, 64 Nile Waters Agreement, 64, 179n131 nili (flood crops), 4 Nilometers, 27–28 Norton-Griffiths, John, 65–66 Nubariyya Canal, 31 Nubia and Nubians, 1–2, 69–72, 162–63, 180n154 Nubian identity, 71 Oncomelania nosophora, 125 ophthalmia, Egyptian, 115, 195n78 ophthalmic hospitals, 129 Ottoman legal code, 16–17 Owen, Roger, 168n36, 182n16

240 Index

pain: ecologies of, 6–8, 123–24; parasitic disease and, 109, 111, 136, 140–41, 151, 158; shaduf and, 101; summer cultivation and, 101 parasites: Ancylostoma duodenale, 100, 109–11, 116, 119, 194n38, 194n46; Ascaris lumbridcoides, 111, 134–36, 140, 147; Necator americanus, 110, 194n37, 194n42; Schistosoma haematobium, 100, 105–8, 109, 114, 124, 124, 132–33, 147, 150–54, 163, 193n25, 193n31, 197n117; Schistosoma japonica, 125; Schistosoma mansoni, 100, 104, 105–8, 132, 147, 151–54, 163–64, 193n25, 193n31 parasitic disease. See disease past, narratives of, 33 Pastré de Paris, 76 Pearson, Karl, 60 pellagra, 112–13, 114, 120, 196n100 perennial canals. See canals perennial irrigation: basin irrigation vs., 6; conversion of central Egypt to, 58; corvée labor and, 38; measurement of, 39–40; parasitic disease and, 6–7, 100–103, 102, 107, 110, 112, 117–20, 125–26, 132; riparian transformation and, 3; transformation of relational agricultural ecologies and, 6–7. See also engineering, irrigation Perennial Irrigation and Flood Protection for Egypt (Willcocks), 40 perennial Nile: Aswan High Dam and, 162–63; built beginnings of, 16–23; colonial economy and, 157–58; cotton, irrigation, and, 5; ecologies of pain and, 6–8, 101, 103–113; expertise and, 11–12, 36-37, 39, 53–57, 63, 158–59; geographies of, 5–6, 58–59, 69–70; liver disease and, 164; material effects of claiming for Egyptian nation, 72–73; parasitic disease and bodies of, 124, 125, 136; southern Egypt and,

76; spread of, 3; subjectivity production and, 3, 8–11, 157, 160. See also engineering, irrigation; Khazan Aswan; sugar industry performance of expertise, 11–12, 27–35, 53–54, 68–69, 132–38, 145, 150–54, 158 Périer, M., 90 Perry, Edwin Cooper, 119 Pharaonic medicine, 195n67 phenomenology, 7 Philae Temple, 41, 60 photography, 53 physicians, 11, 113–26, 131–33, 138, 141 plague, 99, 114, 116, 153, 192n2 Plasmodium falciparum, 6, 166n15 political economy, 3, 158 Po River, Italy, 41, 172n157 Potamogeton crispus (curly pondweed), 6 propaganda, public health, 136, 137, 139, 141–42, 145 Prophetic medicine (Tibb al-Nabi), 195n67 Pruner, Franz, 116 Public Debt Commission, 48 public health and treatment of disease: under Ali, ‘Abbas, and Sa‘id, 128–29; Barlow’s self-infection, 150–54; Cassel fund, 129, 198n16; coerced treatment and resistance, 138–41, 153; colonial order and, 155–56; Department of Public Health, 196n91; in early British occupation, 118; Endemic Disease Section, 136, 138, 144; experience of treatment, 140–41; expertise and, 154–56; hookworm treatment, 118, 133, 138, 200n45; local practitioners, treatment by, 118; number of patients, 119, 138, 201n64; public education campaign, 136, 137, 139, 141–42, 145; reinfection, 141, 147, 155; research of the Bilharzia Research Section, 131–33; Rockefeller Foundation and,



Index 241

130, 142–47, 155; sanitation research and latrine construction, 141–47; schistosomiasis treatment, 118–19, 133, 136–41, 135, 152–53; smallpox vaccinations, 128; snail eradication efforts and Bilharzia Snail Destruction Section, 147–50, 149, 154–55; surveys of hookworm and schistosomiasis prevalence, 127–28, 130–31, 134–35, 146; treatment centers and hospitals, 129–30, 133, 134, 134, 138, 200n62 Public Health Department, 10, 130–35, 141–48 Public Works Ministry: Mehmed Ali’s bureaucratic reorganization and, 19; annual reports of, 28; appointments to, 21, 27, 34, 37; authority and, 9–10; corvée labor and, 38–39; Delta Barrage repair, 172n145; Egyptian engineers, number of, 56; expeditions on dam sites, 40–42; financing of, 26; infrastructural landscape and, 27; Irrigation Department, 26; under Isma‘il, 22; nationalists and, 62–63; thwarting of, 30–31; undersecretary of state for, 26, 34, 41, 61, 169n75; wage labor gangs and, 86 pumps, 21, 103, 168n36, 172n145

Rafalowitch, Artemy, 128 Raffinerie C. Say, 84, 88, 90 railway construction, 21, 77, 84 ramad (bacterial eye infections), 103 Ransomes and Rapier, 49, 65 Rawda, 28, 78 Rayramun mill, 76–77 Al-Rayy fi Misr (Irrigation in Egypt; Sirri), 68–69 red water, 28 relational agricultural ecologies, transformation of, 6–7, 103–114 rental model of sugar labor, 80–83 resistance, 30–31, 86, 138–41, 153 Richards, Alan, 177n79, 187n96 rihaqan (anemia), 114 rinderpest (cattle plague), 101 Rivlin, Helen, 167n9 Rockefeller Foundation, 130, 142–47, 155 Rogers Pasha, 198n14 Rohidin, 20 Rolo, Simon, 84 Ross, Justin, 28–29, 36 Rothschilds of London, 48 Rousseau, L., 78, 183n30 Royal Engineers School (now Royal School of Military Engineering), 23 Ruffer, Marc, 124–25

Qasr al-‘Ayni hospital and medical school, 115–23, 129, 131 Qattawi, Moise, 84 Qattawi, Yusuf, 84, 89–90, 95 Qattawi–Suarès-de Manasce–Rolo group, 83–84, 95 Qina province, 70–71 qushuf (pellagra rash), 114 Qutb, Sayyid, 127–28, 131

Sabri Pasha, Sharif, 97 Saft al-‘Inab village, 192n14 Sa‘id Pasha, 21, 22, 129 al-Salah, Ahmad, 86, 186n81 Sami, Amin, 68–69, 159 Sandwith, Fleming Ment, 118, 120, 155, 194n51, 196n91, 196n100, 197n109 Sanitary Department, 118, 196n91 sanitation campaign, 141–47 saqiya (animal-propelled waterwheel), 101, 103, 192n14 al-sarf (emptying), 29 Saul, Samir, 182n16 sayfi (summer crops), 4, 17, 39, 101

race and racialization: disease and, 113, 117, 126, 141, 153; expertise and, 11, 68, 133; nationalist engineering and, 63; sugar industry and, 87

242 Index

scale and scalarity, 12, 60, 64, 70, 107, 103–13, 155, 163 Schistosoma haematobium, 100, 105–8, 109, 114, 124, 124, 132–33, 147, 150–54, 163, 193n25, 193n31, 197n117 Schistosoma japonica, 125 Schistosoma mansoni, 100, 104, 105–8, 132, 147, 151–54, 163–64, 193n25, 193n31 Schistosoma spp., 117, 119, 120 schistosomiasis (bilharzia): Barlow’s self-infection, 150–54; “Ba’una itch,” 114; body pathways, 105, 107–8, 152; continued spread of, 163–64; endemism, 105, 124–25; gender and, 107, 193n31; intermediate snail hosts, 105–7, 106, 125; irrigation and, 107; life cycle of, 125; in mummies, 124; prevalence studies, 132–33, 146; Rashda outbreak, 147; repeat infections, 108–9; symptoms, 108–9, 136, 197n117; transmission cycle of, 124, 152; transmission of, 105, 120–24; treatment, 118–19, 133, 136–41, 135, 152–53 science and revolution, 160 Scott, James Allen, 105, 107, 110, 113, 142–47, 193n25, 203n114 Scott-Moncrieff, Colin, 15–16, 25–31, 33–39, 169n73 seasons and seasonality: flood, winter, and summer, 3–4, 101; parasitic disease and, 99, 101, 103, 114; wheat production and, 3–4 Seine River, Paris, 41 self-infection, 119, 150–54 Sennar dam, 62, 64 shaduf irrigation, 100–103, 102, 107 Shafiq, Muhammad, 71 Shahin Pasha, Muhammad, 142, 145, 200n56 Shallal village, 1 Shamm al-Nisim holiday, 99

sharaqi (uncultivated land), 30, 36, 64, 80–81 sharecropping, 3, 9, 78, 183n22 Sharqiyya province, 110, 130–31 Shaykh Fadl mill, 84 Shibin al-Kum, 164 shitwi (winter crops), 4, 39 Sidqi, Isma‘il, 65, 72, 97 Silsila pass, 40 Sirri, Husayn, 68–69, 159 Sirri, Isma‘il, 57 Siwa Oasis, 201n73 Sixty Years in the East (Willcocks), 32 slow violence, 8, 103–14 smallpox vaccinations, 128 snail hosts, 106, 125, 147–50, 192n17, 193n27 Société des Sucreries-Raffinerie d’Egypte, 84 Société Egyptienne d’Irrigation, 86 Société Générale des Sucreries de la Haute-Egypte, 84 Société Générale des Sucreries et de la Raffinerie d’Egypte. See Egyptian Sugar Company soil salinization, 6 soldiers: American, 150; British, 92, 125, 199n40; French, 117; levying of, 78; schistosomiasis and, 125, 150, 199n40; Turkish, 50 Sonsino, Prospero, 117–18 southern/Upper Egypt: Armant district, 59, 177n80; Armant mill, 76, 93, 189n117; Aswan, 28, 50, 53; Aswan province, 70–71; agrarian insurgency (1919), 93; colloquial dialect of, 36; al-Dab‘iyya estates, 96; expedition for dam siting (1894), 41–42; Farshut mill, 76; Kom Ombo mill, 90–91, 93, 96; Kom Ombo plain, 72, 89–92, 162; labor gangs from, 86; major towns and villages (map), 85; Naj‘ Hamadi mill, 75, 84, 86, 93,



96, 132, 189n116; Qina province, 70–71; revolts in, 86; value and, 61; Villiers Stuart’s description of, 75, 86; Willcocks in, 36; WWI recruitment from, 92. See also Khazan Aswan; sugar industry structural violence, 8–9, 17, 19, 35, 37-39, 77–78, 80–81, 86–87, 107, 128, 138 student missions to Europe, 23 Suarès, Felix, 84, 89 Suarès, Joseph, 84, 89 Suarès, Raphael, 83, 86, 89–90, 95, 121, 189n108 subject production: authority assemblages, 158; body-ecology relations and, 7, 103–114; colonial economy and, 157; geographies of authority and, 8–11, 78, 80–82, 86–88, 91–96, 98; materiality of environment and, 159 Sudan: financing of campaign in, 58; Gezira agricultural scheme and Egyptian nationalists, 61–63, 179n131; Khazan Aswan displacements in, 70; military conflict with, 48, 50, 51; Sennar dam, 62, 64 Suez Canal, 21 Suez Canal Company, 161 Suez Crisis, 160 sugar industry: acreage decline, 80–81; on Daira Sanieh estates, 77–86; expansion in central and southern Egypt, 88–92; formation of Egyptian Sugar Company, 83–88; French government’s loss of influence, 90–91; interwar period and continued colonialism, 92–98; labor in, 86–87, 96; labor shortages, 78, 92, 183n30; mills, 77–78, 84, 86, 89, 93, 96, 182n5, 187n97; modern, roots of, 76–79; nationalization, 160; protected status for, 97; revolts and labor actions, 86, 92–93, 98, 186n81; role of sugarcane, 5; total cultivated area, 188n99; violence and, 75–76,

Index 243

87–88, 96; WWI and, 92. See also Egyptian Sugar Company summer crops (sayfi), 4, 17, 39, 101 surveys, public health, 110, 127–28, 130–31, 134–35, 146 taftish (plantations), 78, 185n48 takhfif (release of water from basin), 31 Tal‘at, Muhammad, 120–22, 197n109 tamam al-rayy level, 29 tanbur (Archimedean screw), 103, 104, 107, 192n14 Taqwim al-Nil (Almanac of the Nile; Sami), 68–69 tartar emetic (potassium antimony tartrate), 135, 138–41, 152–53, 205n143 Tawfiq, Khedive, 32 taxable land, increase in, 40. See also land tax system al-Tayyib, Ahmad, 86, 187n83 text, performance of expertise through, 31–35, 68-69, 159 Theodor Bilharz Research Institute, 160 Thomason College of Civil Engineering, 24–25 thymol, 200n45 Tibb al-Nabi (Prophetic medicine), 195n67 Tieman, Walter, 187n88 tin iblis (the devil’s soil), 28 Topham, Jones, and Railton, 66 Torricelli, Giacomo, 41–42 trachoma, 115, 129, 192nn3–4 travel narratives, 33 treatment of disease. See public health and treatment of disease tropical medicine, field of, 11, 125, 131, 153, 155–56 tryptophan, 113 ‘Umar Effendi, 77 ‘umda (village headman), 9 Upper Egypt. See southern/Upper Egypt

244 Index

urinary blood fluke. See Schistosoma haematobium urination, 141–42, 152 urine samples, 127–28, 144 ‘ushuriyya land holdings, 47 usine centrale, 76, 182n8 usufruct rights, 82 value: of cotton crop, 178n108; graduated terrain of, 61; Khazan Aswan, irrigation frontier, and downstream landscape of, 57–61; land tax and, 47 Veiled Protectorate, 9 vernacular knowledge, 17, 30–31 Vetch, John, 196n79 Villiers Stuart, Henry, 75, 80, 83, 86 violence: disease and, 98, 123; structural or slow, 8–9, 17, 19, 35, 37–39, 77– 78, 80–81, 86–87, 103–114, 128, 138; sugar industry and, 75–76, 87–88, 95, 96. See also pain Vitalis, Robert, 176n75 Wadi Halfa, 70 Wadi Kom Ombo Company (Wadi Kom Ombo Society), 72, 89–94 Wadi Rayan depression, 40–41 Wafd party, 61 wage labor, 3, 38, 78, 96, 183n25

wage labor gangs, 86 water quantity measurement, 39–40 Webb, A. L., 178n102 wheat production, 3–4 Whitehouse, Frederic Cope, 40–41 Willcocks, William: act of description, 159; Daira Sanieh and, 58–59, 177n83; Gezira scheme and, 62–63; irrigation engineering and, 27–33, 36–38, 40–42; Khazan Aswan and, 61, 66; on land reclamation schemes, 176n69; land tax reassessment and, 47; at Muhandiskhanah, 171n123; reports by, 40, 172n149; on value of surplus waters, 57 winter crops (shitwi), 4, 39 World War I: 1919 revolution, 61; Camel Corps and Labor Corps, 92, 199n31; eye infection campaign and, 130; schistosomiasis and, 125, 150; sugar industry and, 92 worms, parasitic. See parasites Yeken Pasha, Adly, 97 Yusuf, Nasrallah, 81–82 Zaki, Muhammad Pasha, 36 Zifta Barrage, 57, 175n64 Ziwar, Ahmad, 64