The Well-Watered Subject: Economy, Disease, and the Relationship between Space and Subjectivity in Colonial Egypt

The introduction of perennial irrigation in Egypt during the early nineteenth century, and its extension following the construction of the 1902 Aswan dam, transformed the environments comprising Egyptian agriculture. In perennially irrigated regions of Egypt, soil became waterlogged and increasingly saline; imports of artificial fertilizers increased dramatically; crops such as cotton introduced new calendars of labor and interactions with the material environments that comprised agriculture. The temporal frameworks, ecological changes, and intensified labor regimes of perennial irrigation also produced new experiences of disease, specifically pellagra, ancylostomiasis (hookworm), and bilharzia. By the early twentieth century, the incidence of the two infections that cause bilharzia – Schistosomiasis haematobium and Schistosomiasis mansoni – and that of hookworm well exceeded half of the population of the Nile Delta, meaning that environmental disease had come to constitute normative experiences of the physical body in some regions of Egypt. This paper considers the nature of colonial space and its production at the scale of the body, pursuing the following questions: First, what does it mean to think the production of agricultural space as both colonial and environmental? Second, how do we account for the (newly) diseased and spatially situated bodies of Egyptian cultivator-laborers in formulations of colonial subjectivity in Egypt? Finally, how does a serious consideration of ecology and its role in the production of space unsettle the historiographical narrative of Egypt’s colonial history? In Egypt, colonial economy and the environmental changes that it spurred began in the decades before the British formally occupied Egypt. This paper explores the contributions of the non-human material world in the production of colonial spaces, including those of the body, in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt.