Saturday, January 5, 2013
La Galerie 3 (New Orleans Marriott)
Egypt’s Western Desert was the site of the Battle of El-Alamein in 1942, the turning point for the British in the Second World War, yet the Egyptian state remained formally non-belligerent until 1945. Military and Egyptian nationalist historiography has long depicted Egyptian state and society as passive, colonized observers of the War — and often reluctant hosts to 500,000 Allied troops. As a nominally independent state in a bilateral defense treaty with Britain, the war actually posed Egypt unique challenges and opportunities. Although Egypt did not declare war on the Axis countries, it declared a constitutional state of emergency as the basis for a contentious collaboration with Britain and the Allies. I argue this legal framework was crucial to permanently expanding the concept of public security in the Egyptian state from merely one of reactive punishment of crime into the preeminent exercise of sovereignty over public space and economic production and consumption.
In one sense, this policy created new physical infrastructure as well as a legal and ideological discourse to divide the military space of war from a civilian space of peace. This was consonant with a common Egyptian policy trope, “helping Egypt avoid the disaster of war,” which the Egyptian elite and British both hoped would prevent the recurrence of another social revolution like after the First World War in 1919. Emergency military tribunals for civilians (according to records obtained for the first time from the Egyptian National Archives) expanded briskly to maintain this fiction, prosecuting tens of thousands of cases of theft, assault and murder between soldiers and Egyptians as laborers in Allied military workshops or in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. In another sense, an ecological and economic disaster resulting from the interruption of Egypt’s world trade, and a poorly regulated flood of military spending, required an even deeper state intervention in the fields, factories and households of every Egyptian. Just as the Allied Middle East Supply Center regulated regional trade to utilize less shipping, Egypt used the state of emergency to mandate the growth and nationalize the trade of grain. A rationing and price control scheme subsidized bread, rice and kerosene for the first time and attempted to combat a rampant black market. These new commitments required a dramatic expansion of state surveillance into formerly private space. The Egyptian state’s relative success in these operations prevented the creep of British authority into domestic affairs, but the ideological alignment of increased executive power and Egyptian sovereignty set precedents making the resumption of liberal legality and representative democracy difficult during the postwar period.
This proposal takes advantage of the poster format: it will employ maps depicting the physical changes in Egypt’s infrastructure and the geographical distribution of troops, police and laborers, visual representation of quantitative data, as well as archive images from the Imperial War Museum and contemporary newsmedia.
In one sense, this policy created new physical infrastructure as well as a legal and ideological discourse to divide the military space of war from a civilian space of peace. This was consonant with a common Egyptian policy trope, “helping Egypt avoid the disaster of war,” which the Egyptian elite and British both hoped would prevent the recurrence of another social revolution like after the First World War in 1919. Emergency military tribunals for civilians (according to records obtained for the first time from the Egyptian National Archives) expanded briskly to maintain this fiction, prosecuting tens of thousands of cases of theft, assault and murder between soldiers and Egyptians as laborers in Allied military workshops or in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. In another sense, an ecological and economic disaster resulting from the interruption of Egypt’s world trade, and a poorly regulated flood of military spending, required an even deeper state intervention in the fields, factories and households of every Egyptian. Just as the Allied Middle East Supply Center regulated regional trade to utilize less shipping, Egypt used the state of emergency to mandate the growth and nationalize the trade of grain. A rationing and price control scheme subsidized bread, rice and kerosene for the first time and attempted to combat a rampant black market. These new commitments required a dramatic expansion of state surveillance into formerly private space. The Egyptian state’s relative success in these operations prevented the creep of British authority into domestic affairs, but the ideological alignment of increased executive power and Egyptian sovereignty set precedents making the resumption of liberal legality and representative democracy difficult during the postwar period.
This proposal takes advantage of the poster format: it will employ maps depicting the physical changes in Egypt’s infrastructure and the geographical distribution of troops, police and laborers, visual representation of quantitative data, as well as archive images from the Imperial War Museum and contemporary newsmedia.