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INTRODUCTION

Imagined Empires, Real Rebels

Empire is almighty. It is an all-encompassing political entity capable of penetrating places big and small, near and far, and establishing full hegemony. The semidivine omnipotence of empire is made manifest not only in its ability to control the high politics of the metropolis but also in its penetration of the daily life of peoples in the remotest places—in the periphery of the periphery of the empire. Wherever it appears, empire is competent, fast, and successful in achieving its goals and altering people’s lives. But that is a myth. Omnipotent empire was imagined. Although empire managed to extend into the farthest places on earth, it failed in that which it thought itself to be most competent, instead leaving behind environmental devastation and revolt. The history of Qina Province, a small place deep in the south of Egypt, over the last five hundred years proves this case.

On the eve of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, I visited the southern half of the country, Upper Egypt, in order to conduct field research for this book. In the farmlands bordering a small town in Qina Province, I noticed an enormous cylindrical, silver building that looked alien to its surroundings. When I inquired about its contents, I learned that this was a silo for the wheat from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The controversial American food aid to Egypt, which many analysts believe to be a tool of imperial hegemony through the establishment of grain dependency, had made its way to the farthest reaches of Upper Egypt. I also learned that the “informal empire” made an appearance in the province in many other ways.¹ For almost twenty years before the 2011 revolution, deposed President Hosni Mubarak’s economic reform program—which followed the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”—deeply hurt the large number of sugarcane cultivators in Qina. The former legal codes of landholding, promulgated by the Arab socialist regime of the 1960s, were reversed by a new code of private property, Law 96 of 1992. Peasants were evicted from land that the state had returned to the elite families of the pre-1952 colonial era.²

Under Mubarak’s overthrown regime, the US presence in Upper Egypt was conspicuously strong, yet failing. Its failure throughout Egypt was a major reason for the eruption of the 2011 revolution. American market reforms, confidently advocated as the most efficient way toward economic development, did not yield results in Upper Egypt, even two decades after their application. The southern provinces, including Qina, were and still are known, to be the most underdeveloped regions throughout the country’s modern history. The UN Development Programme’s annual reports on Arab human development place Upper Egypt at the bottom of the ladder of human development, and several World Bank reports allude to the same fact.³ On the eve of the 2011 revolution, protests against the failed empire spread across the south, especially in Qina Province. The southern provinces were the most rebellious among Egypt’s regions against the central government in Cairo, which applied the dysfunctional US policies of market reform.

Gangs of bandits known as matarid al-jabal, who take refuge in the mountains surrounding the Nile in the south, have grown to symbolize ruthless crime as well as audacious resistance against the state and its failed free market policies. Many popular TV series and movies present a criminal, yet romantic, image of these bandits. They even make their appearance on Facebook: an opposition group of youth, resenting the authoritarian regime that subjugated itself to American domination, named itself after a memorable proclamation by a legendary southern bandit, ‘Izzat ‘Ali Hanafi. The story of ‘Izzat, whose execution filled the newspapers while I was conducting my archival research in 2006, was made into the most popular Egyptian movie two years later. In a key scene in the film, the angry, outlawed protagonist, or ‘Izzat, says, “From today, there is no government. I am the government.” (Min el naharda mafish hakuma. Ana el hakuma.) This fierce political statement immediately grew popular among youth across Egypt and was quickly adopted as the name of the Facebook opposition group.⁴ Eventually, the south, the north, and Cairo all rose to overthrow the US-friendly, neoliberal regime on 25 January 2011.

Over the last five centuries, many other informal and formal empires have made disturbing appearances in Qina Province and have similarly failed. They were all “imagined empires” that confidently went south and stumbled in applying imperial policies in which they claimed to be, or were under the illusion of being, the most efficient. The failure of these empires generated environmental destruction while altering established systems of land and river management and leaving behind sweeping epidemic diseases. More importantly, they provoked massive subaltern revolts championed by peasants, women, laborers, and ever-ruthless bandits. This book looks at five world empires that showed up in Qina Province: the Ottoman (1500–1800), the French (1798–1801), Muhammad ‘Ali’s (1805–48), the “informal” British (1848–82), and finally the formal British (1882–1950) empires. This book relates a microhistory of the villages and small towns of the province that goes beyond this little-known place to investigate the global history of imperialism and nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against empire.⁵

This book goes south to Qina Province in order to explore the ignored history of Upper Egypt and to deconstruct established myths about early modern and modern world empires.⁶ The book’s five chapters, each about one empire that manifested in Qina, investigate the modes of imperial hegemony, the discursive images that empires advocate about themselves, and the empires’ failure to fulfill such images because of their inability to control local resources and subjugate Qina’s peoples. Many of these empires claimed to introduce “modernity” to the colonized peoples of Qina, particularly through market forces, but their form of modernity only dispossessed peasants, repressed laborers, and further subjugated women. With the indispensable assistance of co-opted local elites of the south, imperial modernity and its market economy disrupted existing systems of landownership, irrigation, trade, and more and left behind immense waves of the plague and cholera. Qina’s lower classes, who were harmed—sometimes killed—by imperial incompetence, devised their own modes of both daily-life resistance and massive uprisings against the empire, in which audacious bandits assumed leadership roles. At the end of this book, the epilogue raises questions about an imagined US Empire and its failed market economy in the south, which partially resulted in Qina’s participation in the 2011 revolution.

WHY QINA PROVINCE?

During the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, the small towns and villages of Qina were engaged in many actions of protest, including sit-ins, marches, and strikes. The province’s inhabitants were building on a long tradition of expressing discontent and rebelling. For many centuries, Qina Province was the vibrant capital of an autonomous state in Upper Egypt, and it witnessed many great revolts. Its numerous villages, Nile cities, and Red Sea ports were thriving centers of commercial agriculture, long-distance trade, and manufacturing activities. Egypt’s passage to modernity under consecutive empires terminated the independent state in Upper Egypt, peripheralized the south within the Egyptian centralized government and economy, and relegated its seat, Qina, to utter marginalization.

The historiography of imperialism in Egypt has long focused only on Cairo and the Delta in the north, ignoring Upper Egypt and its revolutions. Narratives of imperial hegemony and local resistance have been written from the point of view of the north, and the voice of the south has gone unheard. The domination of nationalistic, elite, and Cairo-centered approaches in Egyptian history has rendered the narratives of subalterns in a place like Qina Province irrelevant in the larger tale of the country. Upper Egypt does have a different story to tell about its relation with empire—imagined empires. Qina, a seemingly remote and insignificant province, stands out as an alternative case to study, and its uprisings reveal many myths of imperialism.

In 1819, a French traveler by the name of Edouard de Montulé, observed that “after Alexandria, Damietta, Rosetta and Cairo, [the city of Qina] is probably the most important city in Egypt.”⁷ De Montulé was so impressed by the luxurious life in the city—graceful white buildings, bazaars, restaurants, and bakeries—that he declared it comparable to Paris.⁸ About two decades before this date, Vivant Denon, a French Egyptologist who accompanied Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops to Upper Egypt, described a vivid scene of Qina’s regional market, with goods from Arabia, East Africa, North Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. In 1799, Denon stated,

We left Kous [Qus], and arrived at Keneh [Qina], where we found a number of merchants of all nations. By encountering the natives of very foreign countries, remote distances seem closer. When we begin to reckon the days required for the journey, and the necessary means of affecting it, the space to be passed over ceases to be immense. The Red Sea, Gidda, Mecca, seemed like neighboring places to the town where we were; and India itself was but a short way beyond them. In the opposite direction the oases were actually no more than three days’ journey off us, and ceased to appear to our imagination as an undiscovered country. . . . The journey to Darfur may be accomplished in forty days, a hundred more are required to reach Tombuctoo. A merchant whom I found in Keneh . . . had often been in Darfur, where the caravans arrive from Tombuctoo. . . . Here we also found many Turkish, Meccan and Moorish merchants, come to exchange coffee and Indian cottons for corn.⁹

Qina Province had maintained this prosperity for hundreds of years before these two accounts were written. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, historians from the Ayyubid (1171–1250) and Mamluk (1250–1517) periods described scenes of busy trade and pilgrimage routes, advanced educational institutions, and flourishing sugarcane cultivation and sugar industry in and around Qina. Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) described Qina Province’s city of Qus as “full of markets, with extensive facilities and services, full of peoples because of the abundance of the imported and exported commodities brought by Yemeni, Indian, and Abyssinian merchants and pilgrims because it was the stopping place of all, the forum of friends, and the meeting point of the pilgrims of North Africa, Egypt and Alexandria.”¹⁰ A recent historian, W.J. Fischel asserts that “Qus, next to Cairo, was the most important commercial center of Egypt at this period.”¹¹ According to Abu al-Fadl al-‘Umari (1301–49), this city had large commercial complexes and numerous inns for the accommodation of international merchants, in addition to luxurious houses, schools of higher education, public bathes, gardens, vast farms, and more. Qina Province was home to various kinds of craftsmen, merchants, large landowners, shari‘a scholars, and wealthy Muslims and Christian Copts.¹²

Qina Province owed its rise to prominence to being an integral part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy. Before the advent of a modern European “world system,” the Indian Ocean world economy incorporated the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean and served as the engine for Afro-Asian trade. European trade was on the periphery of this global system and was mainly a recipient of its commodities.¹³ Upper Egypt, especially Qina and its Red Sea ports, was a central meeting point in a regional market that incorporated places such as Hijaz, Yemen, India, Sudan, Abyssinia, and Morocco, and the Upper Egyptian market was an essential trade circle in the vast Indian Ocean market. The economic prosperity of Upper Egypt allowed the formation of an autonomous state in the south, whose capital was always a Nile port city within Qina Province. During the Mamluk period, an Arab tribe, the Hawwara, controlled landownership, long-distance trade, and the sugar industries in Upper Egypt, and it founded a powerful dynasty in the south.¹⁴

When the Ottoman Empire invaded Egypt in 1517, it did not conquer the south. Rather, it made peace treaties with the region’s ruling elite, leaving the native dynasty in power in return for an annual tribute. During the three centuries of Ottoman imperial rule in Egypt, the country was divided between a military Mamluk regime in the north, whose capital was Cairo, and a civil tribal regime in the south, whose capital was Qina. The southern regime reported directly to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and maintained administrative autonomy. Later attempts by the Ottomans to annex the south to the northern regime only brought about rebellion and plague. On the eve of the nineteenth century, the French mounted a campaign to “liberate” Egypt from the Mamluk despots of the Ottoman Empire, but they only did so in Cairo and the north. The French failed to control the south and faced a fierce war of Jihad led by native Arab tribes and Hijazi volunteers. This conflict led to a new wave of the plague, and eventually the French had to install the same Mamluk tyrants—the ancien régime—to rule over the autonomous state of Upper Egypt.

When Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1805–48) came to power in Egypt, he attempted to subjugate Upper Egypt and unify the north and south under a centralized government, ruled from his seat in Cairo. After six long years of vicious wars to conquer the south, Upper Egypt became the “first colony” in Muhammad ‘Ali’s expanding empire. He used the resources of Qina and the other provinces of Upper Egypt to support his military expansion and conquest of new territories outside Egypt. Shortly afterward, between 1820 and 1824, a series of unprecedented massive revolts erupted in Qina Province to overthrow the pasha’s government. Muhammad ‘Ali crushed these revolts and subsequently marginalized the south within his unified state and empire.¹⁵

The pasha’s empire did not survive long. It collapsed in the face of “informal” British imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. A European-led, capitalist world system emerged to undo and replace the old Indian Ocean one, cutting off Qina Province from its regional trade connections. Cairo’s incumbents—who were the grandsons of Muhammad ‘Ali and inherited his unified state—shifted Egypt’s economic center to the cotton-producing north, the Delta, in order to meet the demands of the British industrialists. Moreover, the informal British Empire pressured Cairo to introduce market measures, such as free trade, to the south. Once more, in 1864, the increasingly impoverished inhabitants of Qina Province embarked on a massive revolt against Cairo’s regime.¹⁶ When the British Empire formally colonized Egypt in 1882, it was time again to fully subjugate and incorporate the ever-rebellious south. The colonial regime worked with Cairo’s ruling elite to forge a nation-state, unifying the north with the south in one capitalist market. But the introduction of colonial capitalism in the south failed, generating a cholera epidemic and provoking novel forms of subaltern unrest—against both the empire and the nation-state—in Qina Province.

Thus, Upper Egypt, and particularly Qina Province, had a fundamentally different relation with world empires than the north did. Nonetheless, the prevailing nationalistic historiography of Egypt ignores this and positions the perspectives of Cairo and the Delta as the one narrative of a presumed “nation.” The integration of the south into a northern regime, followed by the south’s peripheralization within the centralized state from the nineteenth century onward, also facilitated the region’s marginalization in historical accounts. Both Arabic and English histories of Egypt are overwhelmingly Cairo- or north-centered. Moreover, they celebrate bourgeois struggles against colonialism in which elite Cairene female and male heroes champion nationalistic resistance against the empire, and they intentionally miss subaltern struggles in the south.¹⁷

Only a few historians have attempted to recount the history of Upper Egypt. Peter Gran sheds light on the ignored narrative of the impoverished south, especially under British colonialism. From a Marxian stance, Gran applies Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “Southern Question” to Upper Egypt. “In . . . a certain kind of capitalist nation-state hegemony, . . . the Northern ruling class exploits the Southern peasantry with the collusion and assistance of the Southern ruling elite by playing the Northern worker against this Southern peasant,” Gran explains.¹⁸ He argues that British colonialism generated such a phenomenon in Egypt when it expanded capitalist cotton cultivation and helped create a modern industrial sector in the Delta, turning Upper Egyptians into a mere peasantry. In another treatment of southern Egypt’s history, Martina Rieker applies a subaltern studies approach to the question of Upper Egypt under British rule, also within the nation–state confinements. She argues that under the British administration the successful process of building a modernized state made the populations of Cairo and the Delta into citizens and reduced the southern population to cheap labor.¹⁹ This book attempts to add nuanced analysis to the invaluable contributions of Gran and Rieker by expanding the time period of Upper Egyptian history under study from the Ottoman to the contemporary era and by inviting the empire as a unit of analysis.

The dominant unit of analysis in Middle Eastern history has long been the nation-state, which renders local stories of the margin or low-class resentment unimportant within the larger heroic tale of bourgeois national independence and elite nation building. As this book shifts the unit of analysis from the nation-state to the empire, it recovers the history of Upper Egypt from the universalized nationalist narratives and restores the silenced voices of the subalterns of the south. This book retrieves the history of Upper Egypt from within alternative histories of failed empires. It frees the south from the nationalistic narrative and then investigates particular ramifications of colonialism and unique modes of resistance in its remote capital province, Qina.

THEORIZING THE EMPIRE

While narrating the story of Qina Province and the empire, this book relies on variant theoretical approaches to analyze the relation between the local southern communities and their external hegemons. Marxist, dependency, world-system, postcolonial, and subaltern studies approaches have previously deconstructed major myths about early modern and modern empires in global history at large and Middle Eastern history in particular. They have attempted to reveal the destructive faces and present an undermining critique of colonialism. This book brings many insights of these theories into the study of Upper Egypt and through their lenses attempts to show novel intricacies in the case of Qina.

In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri affirm that empire is still alive and well. With a Marxian stance and postmodern rhetoric, Hardt and Negri indicate that today’s empire is different from traditional imperialism. Whereas imperialism in the past was based on a European nation-state’s territorial expansion outside its borders of sovereignty, the new existing empire “is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers. . . . The rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depth of the social world. . . . The object of its rule is social life in its entirety. . . . [It is] the paradigmatic form of biopower.”²⁰ Thus, contrary to what many think, empire concerns not just the United States; rather, it is a global system governed by NGOs, multinational corporations, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and, to a significant degree, the United States. In Hardt and Negri’s argument, there is a tone of fascination, albeit with criticism, for empire as a legendary entity whose “rule has no limits.” It is “a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality.”²¹ The global exploited subjects, or the “multitude” as the authors call them, could try and resist the empire, but they would have to invent new tools of mobilization through interconnectedness to take the empire down—perhaps in the distant future.

About a century before the birth of Hardt and Negri’s postmodern empire, Marxist theory asserted that modern imperialism was, in the words of Lenin “the highest stage of capitalism.” A prominent Marxist critic of Western imperialism, Giovanni Arrighi defines empire as the main capitalist hegemon that dominates the world in one historical moment or another. Arrighi extended Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—which he coined to analyze noncoercive, persuasive nation-state authority—to understand how empire has exercised power over subjugated states and economies. “The power of the hegemon is something more and different than ‘dominance’ pure and simple. It is the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of ‘intellectual and moral leadership,’” Arrighi asserts.²² He suggests that in early modern and modern global history, there were three successive capitalist hegemons: the Italians, the Dutch, and the British. He adds that the United States inherited the British Empire in becoming a global capitalist hegemon today. Despite recognizing the fallacies of Western capitalism, Arrighi assigns it a triumphant role in creating the modern world system that assimilated economies in and outside Europe into one interstate system.²³ He shows that the British Empire, for instance, was successful in establishing world hegemony through imposing free-trade agreements, and native resistance could not end this exploitive situation. “Under British hegemony,” says Arrighi, “non-Western people did not qualify as national communities in the eyes of the hegemonic power and of its allies, clients, and followers. . . . Non-Western people . . . had from the start resisted those aspects of Free-Trade Imperialism that more directly impinged upon their customary rights to self determination and to livelihood. By and large, however, this resistance had been ineffectual.”²⁴

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ON ARCHIVAL SOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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