Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
State Building ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter opens with a brief overview of the historical geography of the Egyptian West, highlighting the diversity within the region’s human and physical landscapes. It then moves on to illustrate the uneven political geography of the Egyptian nation-state in the late nineteenth century by highlighting two salient themes: the persistence of legal exceptionalism in the western oases and other desert territories, even after Egypt’s state-wide judicial reforms starting in the 1870s; and the state’s fraught efforts to standardize its policy vis-à-vis Egypt’s bedouin population around the country. Both these themes illustrate the emergence of Egypt’s borderlands as enclaves of exceptionalism within the emergent Egyptian nation-state. Accordingly, the chapter questions prevailing notions of territorial sovereignty in the nineteenth century and argues against normative Euro-centric top-down frameworks for understanding the process of state-building in the period.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

Tax Evasion in Italy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Hien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Tax Evasion ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Italian Unification ◽  
Territorial Integration ◽  
The Church

The negative perception of Italians of their state has been formed by the deep conflict between Church and state that emerged during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy and reached its peak with Italian unification in the late nineteenth century. To the Vatican, territorial integration of the Italian nation state posed an existential threat, both at the political level (loss of territory) and at the spiritual level (diffusion of liberalism). From unification onwards the Vatican did all it could to harm the legitimacy of the Italian state. This chapter analyzes the Vatican strategy to delegitimize the Italian state and its right to tax. It shows how the willingness of Italians to pay their taxes still suffers today from the Church–state conflict.

Mapping the ‘Sports Nahda’

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-40
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Sports Club ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter traces the formation of a “sports awakening” in the Middle East during the late nineteenth century until the interwar period. This sports awakening consisted of government and private schools, fashionable sports clubs, a bustling multilingual sports press, and popular football matches and gymnastics exhibitions. The institutional and discursive trajectory of sports was not confined to a specific nation state; rather, it was a regional phenomenon. Educators, sports club administrators, students, club members, editors, columnists, and government officials helped turn sports into a regular fixture of the urban landscape of cities across the Middle East. These developments reveal the profound intellectual and ethnoreligious diversity of the individuals and institutions that shaped the defining contours of sports throughout the Middle East.

Cultivating Territorial Sovereignty in the Western Desert

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Western Desert ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Egyptian Government ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Chapter 4 explores the relationship between territoriality and economic development in late-nineteenth-century Egypt. It argues that this period witnessed a raft of projects aimed at what, in the French colonial context, was called mise en valeur—the reclamation of barren, unprofitable land. After surveying a number of such projects undertaken under the auspices of the Egyptian government, the chapter then turns its attention to the Khedive’s own grand development schemes in the Egyptian West. Foremost among these was the Maryut Railway, which he intended to run from the outskirts of Alexandria all the way to the Libyan border. The Maryut Railway functioned as one of several projects through which the Khedive sought to transform the Egyptian West into a more personalized realm of territorial sovereignty. In this regard, the Khedive strove to outdo the British Residency at its own logic of “economism” as a doctrine of ruling legitimacy.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Important Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Introduction lays out the book’s central argument about territoriality. I argue that Egypt constitutes an important case study given that it assumed more territorial definition as a modern nation-state in the late nineteenth century despite the absence of demarcated borders or clear-cut cartographic evidence. I seek to challenge prevailing historiography on territoriality that emphasizes the salience of border treaties and authoritative representational practices such as mapping, by showing instead the range of mechanisms that undergirded the projection of centralized territoriality in the nineteenth century. This argument has implications well beyond Egypt: territoriality as practiced—which we can glimpse by uncovering the lived experience of territoriality across the variegated domains of state space—was always a multilayered process of negotiation between an array of state and nonstate actors.

Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern Egypt

1990 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Building ◽  
Public Security ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
Local Protection ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Protection Rackets ◽  
Modern Egypt

A late nineteenth-century epidemic of banditry seems to have swept through the Egyptian countryside, at least according to the writings and actions of influential Egyptians at that time. Contemporary newspapers recounted daily episodes in which gangs composed of between six and sixty or seventy members raided large estates, robbed travelling merchants, and organized local protection rackets. The threat to public security drew the greatest attention in the decade following the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.

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