Social Science Research Council

“Temporality, Personhood and the Techno-Political Making of Egyptian Society, 1869-1939”

Comparing the locations of news articles from al-Ahram, the first private Egyptian paper, with a list of railway destinations in 1876 reveals a remarkable overlap. Within Egypt, the newspaper covered only places that were connected to the railroad. In other words, the “Egypt” that the newspaper (re) presented was that of the railway map. My dissertation will, like the above exercise, re-fuse the “social” and “political” (which newspapers supposedly reflect and shape) with technologies of transportation and communication that have so far been absent from the historiographical picture.

I explore this techno-political nexus in Egypt, a key point of passing-through from Europe to India, between 1869 and 1939. The country's location, as well as its formal connection to the Ottoman Empire and consequent ambiguity of political aspects in British colonialism, amplified the importance of transportation, communication and other technological dimensions of the encounter between Egyptians and the British. In this colonial setting, my dissertation examines timekeeping, the construction of space, arrangements of personhood, as well as other cultural and political practices that developed around three interfacing technologies – the railway, the telegraph, and the newspaper.

Tracing the development of these communication and transportation networks, the dissertation investigates the relations between technology and distinctive types of horizontal connectedness that have so far been considered generic manifestations of a preexisting "social sphere". Instead of taking such a sphere as a given, I seek to anchor discourses of affiliation with “society” or a “nation”, as well as the new sensibilities that accompany these discourses, in the techno-political conditions of their historical emergence.