1. Bayle St John, Village Life in Egypt , 2 vols. (London, 1852), 1:35; Helen Rivlin, The Agricultural Policy of Muhammad Ali in Egypt , pp. 89-101; on Egyptian politics in general in this period, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali , pp. 100-61.

2. Jean Deny, Sommaire des archives turques du Caire (Cairo, 1930), pp. 126-9; Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 79, 89-101.

3. See Daniel Crecelius, The Roots of Modern Egypt: A Study of the Regimes of `Ali Bey al-Kabir and Muhammad Bey Abu al-Dhahab,1760-1775 ; on intellectual changes in this earlier period, see Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism, 1769-1840 . I am grateful to Peter Gran for his comments on an earlier version of some of the chapters of this book.

4. Albert Hourani analyses the nature of these households and their power, and their nineteenth-century transformation, in 'Ottoman reform and the politics of notables', in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: the Nineteenth Century , ed. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers, pp. 41-68.

5. Michel Foucault, 'Two lectures', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 , pp. 78-108, and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison . The following pages owe much of their analysis to the paths of enquiry opened up by Foucault. The phrase 'productive powers' is found in 'Report on Egypt and Candia' by John Bowring, the friend of Jeremy Bentham, who served as an advisor to the Egyptian government.

6. Jeremy Bentham's panoptic principle was devised in factories run by his brother Samuel on the Potemkin estates, land colonised by Russia after the defeat of the Ottomans in 1768-74. See Mathew S. Anderson, 'Samuel Bentham in Russia', The American Slavic and East European Review 15 (1956): 157-72.

7. On the formation of this landowning class see F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1874: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy , pp. 109-21.

8. See D. Farhi, 'Nizam-i cedid: military reform in Egypt under Mehmed `Ali', Asian and African Studies 8 (1972): 153.

9. André Raymond, Grandes villes arabes. á l'époque ottomane , pp. 69-78; Crecelius, Roots of Modern Egypt , pp. 15-24.

10. Justin McCarthy, 'Nineteenth-century Egyptian population', Middle Eastern Studies 12 (October 1978): 37, n. 77; if the National Guard of the early 1840s is included, the Egyptian military may have been much larger still. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , p. 351, n. 28.

11. Amin Sami, al-Ta`lim fi Misr fi sanatay 1914-1915, wa-bayan tafsili li-nashr al-ta`lim al-awwali wa-l-ibtida' bi-anha' al-diyar al-misriyya , p. 8.

12. Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt , pp. 135-7.

13. See Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire Under Selim III, 1789-1807 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 86-179.

14. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey , 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 57.

15. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , p. 251. The introduction of the nizam jadid in Tunisia began a decade later: see L. Carl Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmed Bey, 1837-55 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 261-321. In Morocco, men began to write about the innovation of nizam in the 1830s: see Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain (1830-1912) (Paris: Maspero, 1977), pp. 272-84.

16. Amin Sami, al-Ta`lim , p. 8.

17. Mustafa Reshid Celebi Effendi, 'An explanation of the nizam-y-gedid', in William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia Including Various Political Observations Relating to Them (London: Longman et al ., 1820), appendix 5, p. 234. A baccal is a greengrocer.

18. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', pp. 236-7.

19. Compare with the Mamluk furusiyya exercises described by Ayalon, where military training was a parade, a game, a public entertainment, and a mark of individual honour, in which the cavalryman displayed and developed his bodily prowess, his agility, his skill with horse and lance, his chivalry: David Ayalon, 'Notes on the furusiyya exercises and games in the Mamluk Sultanate', in The Mamluk Military Society: Collected Studies (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979), ch. 2. Although European artillery experts were employed in Egypt in the 1770s, they made little impact on the tactics of the army, which continued to rely on the charge of the individual cavalier as the preferred form of attack. See Crecelius, Roots of Modern Egypt , pp. 77-8, 175.

20. Military Instructions of the Late King of Prussia, etc. , fifth English edition, 1818, p. 5, cited in J. F. C. Fuller, The Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence Upon History , 3 vols. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955), vol. 2: From the Spanish Armada to the Battle of Waterloo , p. 196.

21. Fuller, Decisive Battles , 2: 192-215. V. J. Parry, on the other hand, describes this change in European practice, which the nizam jadid was an attempt to adopt, as 'not so much a new departure as an elaboration of accepted, indeed of ''traditional" practice': 'La manière de combattre', in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. by V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 240. It is true that drill had been systematised and routinely practised by European armies for over two hundred years, since the innovations of Maurice of Nassau. Only in the later eighteenth century, however, were simultaneous breakthroughs made in drill, signalling and command, embodying the new thought about what an army was and how it could be created, that resulted in armies doubling their speed of manoeuvre, tripling their firing rate, and quadrupling their manageable size.

22. Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Ta'rikh muddat al-faransis bi-Misr , edited by S. Moreh and published with a translation as Al-Jabarti's Chronicle of the First Seven Months of the French Occupation of Egypt, Muharram-Rajab 1213 (15,June-December 1798) , p. 21.

23. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', pp. 268-9. The elaboration and significance of these techniques in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe are discussed by Foucault, Discipline and Punish , pp. 135-69.

24. Fuller, Decisive Battles , 2: 192-215; Foucault, Discipline and Punish , pp. 162-3.

25. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', p. 268. The British military advisor attached to the Turkish forces that fought the French considered the Ottomans excellently armed and supplied, lacking only the new system of discipline. 'They have fine men,' he wrote, 'excellent horses, good guns, plenty of ammunition and provisions and forage, and in short great abundance of all the materials

required to constitute a formidable army, but they want order and system.' (General Koehler, British military advisor to the regular Ottoman army during the Egyptian campaign, in despatch to London, 29th January 1800. FO 78/28, cited in Shaw, Between Old and New , p. 136.)

26. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', p. 269; cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish , p. 163.

27. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', p. 242.

28. ibid . pp. 166-7.

27. Mustafa Reshid, 'Nizam-y-gedid', p. 242.

28. ibid . pp. 166-7.

29. Ahmad Izzat Abd al-Karim, Ta'rikh al-taàlim fi asr Muhammad Ali (Cairo, 1938), pp. 82-92; James Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt , pp. 115-80.

30. A.-B. Clot Bey, Mémoires , ed. Jacques Tagher (Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 1949), p. 325.

31. Heyworth-Dunne, Education in Modern Egypt , pp. 185, 195, The kurbaj is a leather whip.

32. ibid . p. 197.

31. Heyworth-Dunne, Education in Modern Egypt , pp. 185, 195, The kurbaj is a leather whip.

32. ibid . p. 197.

33. John Bowring, 'Report on Egypt and Candia', p. 49.

34. As reported by the British Consul-General, Colonel Patrick Campbell: FO 78/4086, cited Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , p. 211.

35. Deny, Sommaire des archives turques du Caire , pp. 150-3.

36. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 89, 102-3.

37. These paragraphs were republished one month after the issuing of the booklet under the title 'Qanun al-filaha' (The Agricultural Code). Hiroshi Kato, 'Egyptian village community under Muhammad Ali's rule: an annotation of Qanun al-filaha', Orient 16 (1980): 183.

38. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 78, 89-98.

39. ibid . pp. 105-36, 200-12.

38. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 78, 89-98.

39. ibid . pp. 105-36, 200-12.

40. Bowring, 'Report on Egypt and Candia', p. 49; Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Muhammad Ali , pp. 132-6; on the political nature of such revolt see Fred Lawson, 'Rural revolt and provincial society in Egypt, 1820-24', International journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1981): 131-53.

41. Bowring, 'Report on Egypt and Candia', pp. 5-6.

42. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt , p. 135; on the British intervention, and its effect on Egypt's nascent, military-based industrialisation, see Marsot, Muhammad Ali , pp. 232-57.

43. Original translation from the British Foreign Office records: FO 78/502, 24th May 1844, in Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , appendix 3, p. 271.

44. Original translation from the British Foreign Office records: FO 78/231, 16th March 1833, cited in Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 276-7.

45. On the comparison with contemporary European methods, see Marsot, Muhammad Ali , p. 129.

46. Cited Moustafa Fahmy, La révolution de l'industrie en Egypte et ses conséquences sociales au 19e siècle (1800-1850) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1954), p. 19.

47. Rivlin, Agricultural Policy , pp. 65-70; Marsot, Muhammad Ali, pp. 157-60, 250-1.

48. Kenneth Cuno traces the origin of this system and its antecedents in 'The origins of private ownership of land in Egypt: a reappraisal', International journal of Middle Eastern Studies 12 (1980): 245-75.

49. D'Arnaud, 'Reconstruction des villages de l'Egypte', p. 280; see also Ali Mubarak, al-Khitat al-jadida li-Misr al-qahira wa-muduniha wa-biladiha al-qadima wa-l-shahira , 15: 7.

50. St John, Village Life , 1: 104.

51. On space as a system of magnitudes, and the 'neutrality of order', see Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization , pp. 20, 326. The term 'enframing' is borrowed from Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , pp. 20-1.

52. See Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayed, Le déracinement: la crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1964). For a further discussion of the 'discipline of space' see Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World .

53. Bowring, 'Report on Egypt and Candia', p. 3.

54. P. S. Girard, 'Mémoire sur l'agriculture, l'industrie, et le commerce de l'Egypte', Description de l'Egypte, état moderne , 2 vols. (Paris, 1809-22), vol. 1, part 1, p. 688, cited Charles Issawi, ed., The Economic History of the Middle East 1800-1914: A Book of Readings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 376.

55. Bowring, 'Report on Egypt and Candia', pp. 3-4.

56. D'Arnaud, 'Reconstruction des villages', p. 279.

57. Although Bourdieu's essay 'The Kabyle house or the world reversed' is a struc-turalist interpretation, his later Outline of a Theory of Practice offers what might be called a post-structuralist reading of the same material. For an attempt to describe the life of the pre-colonial village in Egypt, see Jacques Berque, Histoire sociale d'un village égyptien au XXe siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1957), and Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution , pp. 45-59, 65-9.

58. Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 7.

59. Bourdieu, Outline , p. 90; 'Kabyle house', pp. 135-6.

60. Bourdieu, Outline , pp. 90-1.

61. Bourdieu, 'Kabyle house', p. 138; Outline , p. 116.

62. Bourdieu, 'Kabyle house', p. 139.

63. Brinkley Messick, 'Subordinate discourse: women, weaving and gender relations in North Africa', American Ethnologist 14/2 (1987): 20-35.

64. Cf. Mushin Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun's Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; Phoenix ed., 1964), pp. 184-7.

65. This is not to deny, of course, that there were regular, carefully ordered constructions in pre-nineteenth-century Arab cities (often laid out as the core of newly founded dynastic capitals) - just as the Kabyle house can be understood as a carefully ordered construction. The point is not the regularity of the building in modern cities, which in itself is nothing new, but the new distinction between the materiality of the city and its non-material structure. It is interesting

to note the remark of al-Jahiz on the circular palace-complex (misleadingly referred to as the 'round city') constructed in the year 762 by the Caliph al-Mansur: 'It is as though it were poured into a mould and cast'. The regularity of the building is evoked by referring to the process of construction, and not in terms of any distinction between the materiality of the city and its 'structure'. Cited J. Lassner, 'The Caliph's personal domain: the city plan of Baghdad re-examined', in Albert Hourani and S. M. Stem, eds., The Islamic City , p. 103.

66. Bourdieu, 'Kabyle house', p. 145; Outline , pp. 111, 126.

67. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza , 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967-85), 4: 64-74; David King, 'Architecture and astronomy: the ventilators of Cairo and their secrets', Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 97-133.

68. King, 'Architecture and astronomy'.

69. Raymond, Grandes villes arabes , p. 186.

70. Roberto Berardi, 'Espace et ville en pays d'Islam', in D. Chevallier, ed., L'Espace sociale de la ville arabe , p. 106.

71. 'The whole shows very clearly the appearance of their private life. The architecture portrays their necessities and customs, which do not result only from the heat of the climate. It portrays extremely well the political and social state of the Muslim and Oriental nations: polygamy, the seclusion of women, the absence of all political life, and a tyrannical and suspicious government which forces people to live hidden lives and seek all spiritual satisfaction within the private life of the family.' Alexis de Tocqueville, 'Notes du voyage en Algérie de 1841', Oeuvres complètes , gen. ed. J. P. Mayer, vol. 5, Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie , ed. J. P. Mayer and André Jardin (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), part 2, p. 192.

72. Melvin Richter, 'Tocqueville on Algeria', Review of Politics 25 (1963): 369-98; on the floating hotel, see Charles-Henri Favrod, La révolution algérienne , cited William B. Quandt, Revolution and Political Leadership: Algeria 1954-68 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), p. 3.

73. P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., The Cambridge History of Islam , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 2: 256-7.

74. 'It is not with the material, topographical aspects of the Islamic city that I wish to deal, but with its inner structure. I should like to suggest that one of the most essential characteristics of the Islamic city is the looseness of its structure, the absence of corporate municipal institutions.' S. M. Stern, 'The constitution of the Islamic city', in Hourani and Stern, eds., The Islamic City , p. 26.

75. Oleg Grabar, 'The illustrated maqamat of the thirteenth century: the bourgeoisie and the arts', in Hourani and Stern, eds., The Islamic City , p. 213; Goitein, Mediterranean Society , 4: 34.

76. Muhammad al-Sanusi al-Tunisi, Istitla'at al-barisiyya fi ma'rad sanat 1889 (Tunis, 1309h), p. 242.

77. Cf. Jacques Derrida, 'The double session', in Dissemination , p. 191.

78. Bourdieu, Outline , pp. 109-58; cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences , pp. 17-30; Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production , pp. 53-67. Similarly, with the jars of grain used for cooking: to tell the quantity of grain they held, these jars have holes down the side, so that the grain itself can indicate its level. The quantity is not measured by some measuring device, or represented on an abstract scale whose arbitrary divisions would 'stand for' a certain amount. Nothing is arbitrary in that sense. The grain indicates its own level by a direct reference or repetition.

79. Derrida, 'The double session', p. 191.

80. Max Weber, ' "Objectivity" in social science and social policy', in The Methodology of the Social Sciences , p. 81, emphasis in original, translation modified.

81. Max Weber, 'Science as a vocation', From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology , trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 139.