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Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
Can one explain the power of global capitalism without attributing to capital a logic and coherence it does not have? Can one account for the powers of techno-science in terms that do not merely reproduce its own understanding of the world?
Rule of Experts examines these questions through a series of interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century. These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a national "economy," yet made its accurate representation impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of economic reform in unanticipated directions.
Mitchell is a widely known political theorist and one of the most innovative writers on the Middle East. He provides a rich examination of the forms of reason, power, and expertise that characterize contemporary politics. Together, these intellectually provocative essays will challenge a broad spectrum of readers to think harder, more critically, and more politically about history, power, and theory.
Rule of Experts examines these questions through a series of interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century. These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a national "economy," yet made its accurate representation impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of economic reform in unanticipated directions.
Mitchell is a widely known political theorist and one of the most innovative writers on the Middle East. He provides a rich examination of the forms of reason, power, and expertise that characterize contemporary politics. Together, these intellectually provocative essays will challenge a broad spectrum of readers to think harder, more critically, and more politically about history, power, and theory.
423 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Timothy Mitchell
59 books229 followersProfessor
Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
612 Kent Hall, Mail Code 3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212-854 5252
Email: tm2421@columbia.edu
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.
Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.
His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism.
Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.
Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review, Middle East Report (where he has also been chair of the editorial committee), Social Text, Society and Space, the Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Development and Change. He has been invited to lecture at most leading research universities in the United States, and at universities and academic conferences in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Several of his wri
Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
612 Kent Hall, Mail Code 3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212-854 5252
Email: tm2421@columbia.edu
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.
Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.
His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism.
Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.
Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review, Middle East Report (where he has also been chair of the editorial committee), Social Text, Society and Space, the Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Development and Change. He has been invited to lecture at most leading research universities in the United States, and at universities and academic conferences in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Several of his wri
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
October 4, 2019
1/5stars
im literally trained to read things im literally in a masters for reading books and i couldn't understand this wtf am i dumb
its about mosquitoes and science
thats it thats the book
1 star
im literally trained to read things im literally in a masters for reading books and i couldn't understand this wtf am i dumb
its about mosquitoes and science
thats it thats the book
1 star
October 4, 2019
“in this essay i will prove that all knowledge is wrong and nothing is true and, most importantly, that capitalism bad”
-timothy mitchell
academic texts tend to be really dry and self-indulgent but this was surprisingly a straightforward read. and i think that’s contingent on the fact that, instead of name-dropping theory buzzwords like “structuralism” and “socially-embedded economy,” mitchell uses more of an “anti-theory” that actively seeks to deconstruct these terms and concepts we tend to accept as givens. this skepticism is central to his greater argument about political economy and colonialism.
mitchell uses this critical approach in tandem with the modern history of egypt to show how the techniques of economics as a social science (development, modernization) are not inherently universal or infallible truths. he demonstrates that historically these techniques were used by an emergent political class who sought to rationalize, (re)calculate, and ultimately colonize the given geographic space that would eventually become the nation-state of egypt. as mitchell posits, the techniques of measuring wealth and economic development that remain so heavily relied on today have their roots in colonial practices and these techniques have been shown to have their own “agenda” that is not always the same as the “experts” who rely on them.
the author uses a decidedly post-modern approach for economic development discourse. as such, he posits that “modernity” in egypt was not a singular, linear progression from the traditional to modern. the western-imported ideals of modernity, mitchell argues, created a new source of political power: technology and its knowledge. these experts and their “techno-politics” sought to revolutionize the egyptian countryside “from the top-down” through agricultural reform, new laws of private property and, much later, a demonstrably perverse and exploitative form of tourism. mitchell argues that these techno politics have perpetuated a culture of political violence and coercion for which the techniques themselves can not account. therefore he surmises that there is no inherent logic or “rationalism” behind capitalism and that it is ultimately just as arbitrary as the “backwards” techniques and customs it seeks to replace.
although i mostly agree with these statements i still have some reservations. though to his credit mitchell consciously avoids “abstraction” from the extensive historiographical evidence he presents, this post-modern approach, perhaps inherently, makes some of the more broad, esoteric statements about capitalism and the unfolding of political power seem at times reductive and self-contradictory. while mitchell sees the semantics of words like “capitalism” and “economics” as inherently fluid, i think there’s still value in taking these technical concepts at “face value” while continuing to be skeptical of them. capitalism may have no inherent logic or rationalism, but with this framework, neither does anything else. this book does a good job of demonstrating the errors of colonialism and development ethos but stops short of offering any real alternatives...hence my previous review of the book which just said “capitalism BAD”
in one of the essays there’s also this really weird postscript where mitchell gives a bunch of circumstantial evidence towards one of the “expert” orientalist writers he had just roasted may or may not have also had ties to the CIA during 60s-70s. like i guess that would be fucked up were it demonstrably factual but.... what’s the point?
despite some moments where mitchell’s conspiratorial leftism shows, his framework is a really useful one for understanding why, especially in a colonial context, the implementation of certain policies often result in unintended, sometimes counterintuitive outcomes. whether or not these outcomes are enough to discount the ideals behind them remains up to interpretation (the author seems to lean towards “yes”). but in the end I still agree with his basic argument that we should be skeptical of the infallibility of “experts” who make long-reaching policy decisions concerning the economy (which is in itself a constructed idea). his thesis is well-supported based on the often violent and disastrous efforts to “develop” the economy of egypt. the author articulates the argument well and each ond of the essays really “makes you think” about how political power operates in the colonial and post-colonial context.
(i mostly wrote it for my own comprehension but shouts out to anyone who actually reads this review, follow @decafelids)
-timothy mitchell
academic texts tend to be really dry and self-indulgent but this was surprisingly a straightforward read. and i think that’s contingent on the fact that, instead of name-dropping theory buzzwords like “structuralism” and “socially-embedded economy,” mitchell uses more of an “anti-theory” that actively seeks to deconstruct these terms and concepts we tend to accept as givens. this skepticism is central to his greater argument about political economy and colonialism.
mitchell uses this critical approach in tandem with the modern history of egypt to show how the techniques of economics as a social science (development, modernization) are not inherently universal or infallible truths. he demonstrates that historically these techniques were used by an emergent political class who sought to rationalize, (re)calculate, and ultimately colonize the given geographic space that would eventually become the nation-state of egypt. as mitchell posits, the techniques of measuring wealth and economic development that remain so heavily relied on today have their roots in colonial practices and these techniques have been shown to have their own “agenda” that is not always the same as the “experts” who rely on them.
the author uses a decidedly post-modern approach for economic development discourse. as such, he posits that “modernity” in egypt was not a singular, linear progression from the traditional to modern. the western-imported ideals of modernity, mitchell argues, created a new source of political power: technology and its knowledge. these experts and their “techno-politics” sought to revolutionize the egyptian countryside “from the top-down” through agricultural reform, new laws of private property and, much later, a demonstrably perverse and exploitative form of tourism. mitchell argues that these techno politics have perpetuated a culture of political violence and coercion for which the techniques themselves can not account. therefore he surmises that there is no inherent logic or “rationalism” behind capitalism and that it is ultimately just as arbitrary as the “backwards” techniques and customs it seeks to replace.
although i mostly agree with these statements i still have some reservations. though to his credit mitchell consciously avoids “abstraction” from the extensive historiographical evidence he presents, this post-modern approach, perhaps inherently, makes some of the more broad, esoteric statements about capitalism and the unfolding of political power seem at times reductive and self-contradictory. while mitchell sees the semantics of words like “capitalism” and “economics” as inherently fluid, i think there’s still value in taking these technical concepts at “face value” while continuing to be skeptical of them. capitalism may have no inherent logic or rationalism, but with this framework, neither does anything else. this book does a good job of demonstrating the errors of colonialism and development ethos but stops short of offering any real alternatives...hence my previous review of the book which just said “capitalism BAD”
in one of the essays there’s also this really weird postscript where mitchell gives a bunch of circumstantial evidence towards one of the “expert” orientalist writers he had just roasted may or may not have also had ties to the CIA during 60s-70s. like i guess that would be fucked up were it demonstrably factual but.... what’s the point?
despite some moments where mitchell’s conspiratorial leftism shows, his framework is a really useful one for understanding why, especially in a colonial context, the implementation of certain policies often result in unintended, sometimes counterintuitive outcomes. whether or not these outcomes are enough to discount the ideals behind them remains up to interpretation (the author seems to lean towards “yes”). but in the end I still agree with his basic argument that we should be skeptical of the infallibility of “experts” who make long-reaching policy decisions concerning the economy (which is in itself a constructed idea). his thesis is well-supported based on the often violent and disastrous efforts to “develop” the economy of egypt. the author articulates the argument well and each ond of the essays really “makes you think” about how political power operates in the colonial and post-colonial context.
(i mostly wrote it for my own comprehension but shouts out to anyone who actually reads this review, follow @decafelids)
September 8, 2012
Mitchell is one of the most *useful* Foucault-influenced scholars that I have read, because he steeps his arguments in history and political economy. This series of essays is no different. Nevertheless, like Tania Murray Li (The Will to Improve), James Ferguson (The Anti-Politics Machine), Beatrice Hibou (The Force of Obedience) and others, Mitchell in the end sometimes moves too much toward what I call "structuralist post-structuralism" whereby things happen more as unintended consequences rather than because people plan for them to happen. Certainly history matters and we must not unduly privilege conspiracy. However, we must also not travel too far in the other direction. Mitchell avoids this tendency by making violence a central piece of his argument. However, by remaining substantially within political economy disciplines, Mitchell misses opportunities for crossing boundaries of state, corporation and society. Though he rightly makes blurred boundaries of public and private a central part of his argument, Mitchell still remains largely within political economy approaches. Thus, valuable cultural and geographical insights (e.g. Thrift's interrogation of business practice in Carrier and Miller's Virtualism) are largely absent from the book.
Even given these shortcomings, Mitchell's book provides invaluable insights into the nexus of violence, representation and exploitation through the lens of colonial and post-colonial Egypt. Certainly worth the price.
Even given these shortcomings, Mitchell's book provides invaluable insights into the nexus of violence, representation and exploitation through the lens of colonial and post-colonial Egypt. Certainly worth the price.
January 25, 2025
كتاب آخر رائع من تيموثي ميتشل، أحببته أكثر بكثير من كتابه "استعمار مصر". يطرح الكتاب إشكالية موضوعية الخبراء، ويتساءل: هل يمكن عَقلنة ومناقشة سيرورات اجتماعية ذات خصوصية جغرافية وتاريخية، مثل الأمة والاقتصاد والسكان، كموضوعات أكاديمية بحتة؟ وهل يمكن الاستعانة بآراء الخبراء باعتبارهم يمتلكون حلولًا لمسائل حسابية؟
يبحث الكتاب في نشوء فكرة الاقتصاد وحوسبة النشاطات الإنسانية، بدءًا من ظهور الاستعمار وحتى بزوغ الدولة القومية، وكيف تمت هذه العمليات بشكل اعتباطي، تخللها الكثير من العوار نتيجة أحكام مسبقة مُسيّسة لخدمة توجهات محددة مسبقًا. كما يناقش الكتاب نشوء مفهوم "الفلاح" كموضوع للتحليل، وكيف تم التعامل مع أحد عناصر المجتمع المصري كموضوع للدراسة الأكاديمية لأغراض استشراقية، وأحيانًا استخباراتية بحتة. كان الفلاح معنيًا بأهم مشاكل مصر، مثل الأرض والملكية الخاصة والإقطاع. وقد اهتمت أوروبا بالملكية الخاصة في مصر نتيجة إفلاس عائلة محمد علي، فظهور فكرة "العزبة" أو "أرض الأسرة" لم يكن مفهومًا مثاليًا موضوعيًا يمكن تطبيقه في كل زمان ومكان، بل نشأ كجزء من عملية سياسية أكثر تعقيدًا، اتسمت بالعنف والإقصاء والقهر لتحقيقها.
يُصوَّر الاقتصاد المصري دائمًا على أنه علم تجريبي يمكن التوصل فيه إلى حلول كمسائل إحصاء أو تفاضل وتكامل، وأنه بمجرد تعيين "الخبراء التكنوقراطيين" البعيدين كل البعد عن التأدلج، سيتم حل مشاكل الاقتصاد. لكن الكتاب يرصد أنه بمجرد الاستعانة بخبراء أدوات الإمبريالية الجديدة، المتمثلة في صندوق النقد الدولي والبنك الدولي ومنظمة التجارة العالمية، تم إلحاق مصر بالسوق العالمية بطريقة قسرية، عملت على إفقار جموع الشعب المصري لصالح فئة لا تتجاوز 5% من سكانه.
فمسائل مثل ملكية الأراضي الزراعية، ونوعية الحبوب التي يتوجب زراعتها، أو تأميم القطاع المصرفي وتعويم الجنيه، كلها تمت لصالح تلك الفئات. يسرد الكتاب كيف تم تكوين كارتيلات للتجارة والإقطاع، مثل عائلات منصور وأحمد بهجت وساويرس وغيرها، للاستفراد بالمعونة الأمريكية، وكيف تم توجيه دولارات تلك المعونة للاستفادة من الأراضي الزراعية لخدمة السوق العالمية وليس السكان.
البرجوازية المصرية دخلت إلى مسرح التاريخ متأخرة جدًا، عندما كان العالم قد تقسم بالفعل بين القوى الإمبريالية. لم تكن تلك البرجوازية قادرة على لعب أي دور تقدمي، بل ولدت وهي تابعة بشكل كامل لسادتها الاستعماريين السابقين. إن البرجوازية المصرية ضعيفة ومنحطة وعميلة، فهي تابعة بشكل كامل للرأسمال الأجنبي والإمبريالية، مما يجعلها عاجزة تمامًا عن دفع المجتمع إلى الأمام. إنها مرتبطة بآلاف الخيوط، ليس فقط بالرأسمال الأجنبي، بل أيضًا بطبقة ملاك الأراضي، التي تشكل معها كتلة رجعية واحدة وعائقًا ضد التقدم.
وقد عزز صندوق النقد الدولي سرديات خاصة بتضخم السكان وضرورة ترشيد النفقات وتخفيض الدعم وخصخصة الخدمات في كل الأنحاء. لكن تلك الإجراءات، التي تمت على أيدي "خبراء" و"تكنوقراطيين"، لم تنجح في القضاء على أزمة التضخم أو عجز الموازنة أو استبدال الواردات، بل على العكس تمامًا.
ندخل الآن عام 2024، وسعر الدولار رسميًا في البنك 50 جنيهًا بعدما كان 6 جنيهات ونصف قبل حوالي عشر سنوات. كل هذا التدهور في قيمة العملة والقوة الشرائية للأفراد يجعلهم فريسة لاستغلال الشركات العابرة للقوميات، التي تستعبدهم في مؤسسات خدمية وتصنيعية داخل بلدهم، وتسهل عمليات الاستحواذ على أصول الدولة التي شارك جميع المواطنين في تنميتها ودفع ثمنها.
الكتاب مهم، وأوصي به بشدة لفهم التحولات الاقتصادية والسياسية التي مرت بها مصر، وكيفية تشكيلها من قبل القوى الخارجية والداخلية على حد سواء.
October 24, 2017
مهم جداً وفتّح عيني على كذا فكرة يمكن يبقوا تأسيسيين بعد كده. الكتاب مهتم بالأساس بتحليل الخطابات إللي أنتجت حوالين مصر في القرن العشرين، وبيستكشف الظرف التاريخي إللي الخطابات دي أنتجت فيها عشان يفهم إذا كانت الخطابات دي كانت معبرة عن حقيقة ما ولّا كانت أداة لتثبيت السلطة أو خلق وضع معين يسهل التحكم فيه وتوظيفه سياسياً. كتاب عن أركيولوجيا الخطابات عن مصر لو ينفع أقول كده. عجبني بشكل خاص الجزء الأول المعنون ب"طفيليات الرأسمالية" إللي تناول في أول فصوله انتشار الملاريا في مصر إللي قتلت 70 ألف شخص في وقت الحرب العالمية التانية (ماحدش افتكرهم تحت ضجيج الحرب إللي قتلت مصريين أقل بكتير)، وإن إللي تسبب في نقل الناموسة المسببة للملاريا كان بناء خزان أسوان في فترة سابقة نتيجة آراء الخبراء الهندسيين وقتها. الفصل إللي بعدها بيتناول مسألة التكييف القانوني لمسائل ملكية الأراضي الزراعية في عهد الخديوي إسماعيل وإزاي إن القوانين إللي إتحطت دي (نتيجة نصائح الخبراء أيضاً) أدت إلى ضرر أكبر بكتير من النفع إللي كان مرجو، وإنها كانت وسيلة من وسائل حصر الأراضي تمهيداً بعد كده لفرض السيطرة عليها، وده كان موضوع الفصل التالت أيضاً.
الجزء التالت من الكتاب شديد الأهمية أيضاً لأنه بيتناول آخر أربعين أو خمسين سنة في تاريخ البلد وإزاي كانت مشاريع التنمية والافتراضات بتاعت الخبراء الدوليين حوالين مصر بتتجاهل حقيقة الوضع في مصر على حساب تثبيت قواعد معينة وتطبيقها على جميع البلدان. وده يمكن أحد الأسس القائم عليها الكتاب وهو التمييز بين الاقتصاد وعلم الاقتصاد: الأيدولوجيا والعلم إللي بيتم الخلط بينهم وبيتشاف إن مفيش حلول أخرى لأن "الاقتصاد باعتباره علم بيشوف إن ده الحل الوحيد." ويمكن الواحد شاف ده قريب في فترة مفاوضات اليونان مع البنك المركزي الأوروبي إللي كان شايف إن سياسة التقشف هي الحل الوحيد باعتبار الاقتصاد كعلم بيحتم كده، بينما في الحقيقة التقشف ما كانش من اختيار أيديولوجي من ضمن اختيارات أخرى كتيرة.
العيب الوحيد إللي متعلق بالكتاب كان المنهج إللي بيتم بيه تناول مسائل الخصوصية الثقافية، وشفته بيجنح أكتر ناحية الكلام بتاع إن كل دولة وليها ظروفها، وده حقيقي، لكن ده مش معناه إن فيه مبادئ عامة ما ينفعش يتشاف إن تجاهلها هو جزء من احترام الخصوصية الثقافية والاجتماعية للبلد. النسبية الثقافية المميزة لمفكرين ما بعد الحداثة كانت أكتر شئ مزعج بالنسبة لي في الكتاب فعلاً.
كنت بتكلم من كام يوم عن تيموثي ميتشل مع أستاذ مهاب نصر وقال لي على كتاب عمله في أوائل الألفينات متعلق بعلاقة المجتمع المدني بمصر وإزاي إنه إتكلم عن إزاي المجتمع المدني دمر تقريباً فكرة السياسة والأحزاب. أنا لسّه ما قريتش الكتاب ده ولكن الكلام ده هو الشغل الأساسي لحد زي سامويل موين دلوقتي في هارفرد وده مجال اهتمامه البحثي أساساً عن العلاقة بين حركة حقوق الإنسان الحالية وبين إزاي، تحت مظلة الحركة دي المميزة لعصرنا، كان العصر ده هو أطيب العصور على أغنى 1% في العالم. ده الtagline بتاع أحدث كتبه. فتيموثي ميتشل برنس جداً الحقيقة D:
الجزء التالت من الكتاب شديد الأهمية أيضاً لأنه بيتناول آخر أربعين أو خمسين سنة في تاريخ البلد وإزاي كانت مشاريع التنمية والافتراضات بتاعت الخبراء الدوليين حوالين مصر بتتجاهل حقيقة الوضع في مصر على حساب تثبيت قواعد معينة وتطبيقها على جميع البلدان. وده يمكن أحد الأسس القائم عليها الكتاب وهو التمييز بين الاقتصاد وعلم الاقتصاد: الأيدولوجيا والعلم إللي بيتم الخلط بينهم وبيتشاف إن مفيش حلول أخرى لأن "الاقتصاد باعتباره علم بيشوف إن ده الحل الوحيد." ويمكن الواحد شاف ده قريب في فترة مفاوضات اليونان مع البنك المركزي الأوروبي إللي كان شايف إن سياسة التقشف هي الحل الوحيد باعتبار الاقتصاد كعلم بيحتم كده، بينما في الحقيقة التقشف ما كانش من اختيار أيديولوجي من ضمن اختيارات أخرى كتيرة.
العيب الوحيد إللي متعلق بالكتاب كان المنهج إللي بيتم بيه تناول مسائل الخصوصية الثقافية، وشفته بيجنح أكتر ناحية الكلام بتاع إن كل دولة وليها ظروفها، وده حقيقي، لكن ده مش معناه إن فيه مبادئ عامة ما ينفعش يتشاف إن تجاهلها هو جزء من احترام الخصوصية الثقافية والاجتماعية للبلد. النسبية الثقافية المميزة لمفكرين ما بعد الحداثة كانت أكتر شئ مزعج بالنسبة لي في الكتاب فعلاً.
كنت بتكلم من كام يوم عن تيموثي ميتشل مع أستاذ مهاب نصر وقال لي على كتاب عمله في أوائل الألفينات متعلق بعلاقة المجتمع المدني بمصر وإزاي إنه إتكلم عن إزاي المجتمع المدني دمر تقريباً فكرة السياسة والأحزاب. أنا لسّه ما قريتش الكتاب ده ولكن الكلام ده هو الشغل الأساسي لحد زي سامويل موين دلوقتي في هارفرد وده مجال اهتمامه البحثي أساساً عن العلاقة بين حركة حقوق الإنسان الحالية وبين إزاي، تحت مظلة الحركة دي المميزة لعصرنا، كان العصر ده هو أطيب العصور على أغنى 1% في العالم. ده الtagline بتاع أحدث كتبه. فتيموثي ميتشل برنس جداً الحقيقة D:
September 26, 2011
شكرا للسباعي ويونس على الترجمة الرائعة.
للمؤلف قدرة هائلة على الربط بين مجموعة ضخمة من الحوادث، ربطاً منطقياً محكماً، بحيث يستنتج في نهاية الفصلين الاول والثاني إلى أن أعمال المرء قد تودي به في النهاية.
استنتاجات الفصلين الأول والثاني منطقية ولا يشوبها أي خطأ. لكن الأمور ليست بمثل هذه البساطة، والاستنتاج المنطقي قد لا يكون حقيقياً بالضرورة.
أقرأ الآن الفصل الرابع، لا أستطيع مقاومة كتابة عدة كلمات هنا على سبيل التخفيف عن النفس، يدرس المؤلف كتابين شهيرين عن الفلاح المصري، واحد كتبه مثقف مصري، والآخر كتبه زائر أمريكي. ظل الكتابان بمثابة مدخلين لدراسة الفلاح المصري لفترة طويلة، ووصفا دائماً بالتفرد والصدق والإتقان. بينما يستشف قاريء كتاب حكم الخبراء الكم الهائل من العنصرية والكذب والظلم والجهل والغباءوالنظرات الفوقية المنتشرة في الفقرات المجتزأة من الكتابين. كان من الأفضل أن يوضع عنوان جانبي للكتاب: حكم الخـــراء
للمؤلف قدرة هائلة على الربط بين مجموعة ضخمة من الحوادث، ربطاً منطقياً محكماً، بحيث يستنتج في نهاية الفصلين الاول والثاني إلى أن أعمال المرء قد تودي به في النهاية.
استنتاجات الفصلين الأول والثاني منطقية ولا يشوبها أي خطأ. لكن الأمور ليست بمثل هذه البساطة، والاستنتاج المنطقي قد لا يكون حقيقياً بالضرورة.
أقرأ الآن الفصل الرابع، لا أستطيع مقاومة كتابة عدة كلمات هنا على سبيل التخفيف عن النفس، يدرس المؤلف كتابين شهيرين عن الفلاح المصري، واحد كتبه مثقف مصري، والآخر كتبه زائر أمريكي. ظل الكتابان بمثابة مدخلين لدراسة الفلاح المصري لفترة طويلة، ووصفا دائماً بالتفرد والصدق والإتقان. بينما يستشف قاريء كتاب حكم الخبراء الكم الهائل من العنصرية والكذب والظلم والجهل والغباءوالنظرات الفوقية المنتشرة في الفقرات المجتزأة من الكتابين. كان من الأفضل أن يوضع عنوان جانبي للكتاب: حكم الخـــراء
December 9, 2024
My man Timmy Mitch has done it again.
February 27, 2011
The best aspect of this is Mitchell’s tracing of the complex ways in which governmental (often developmental) interventions take shape through a variety of agencies, and the extremely broad range of mitigating, contingent factors they encounter as they unfold. Chapters 1 and 3 exemplify this approach. Chapter 7 is a decent case study of Egypt as it has been envisioned by developers, providing an object lesson in the many criticisms of international economic development (most of which have been around since the 1970s, I’d say). Mitchell also does a good job of showing how the discourse of development posits itself as apart from the objects it describes even though it is obviously molding them.
February 27, 2015
كتاب يؤرخ لمرحلة تأسيس الدولة الحديثة فى مصر وإنعكاساتها على البيئةالإقتصاديةوالإجتماعية والمعرفية للإنسان المصرى , لفهم المشاكل الآنية علينا أن نعود لذلك الكتاب .
March 25, 2017
كنت افكر دائما عن الاطار الذي يستطيع به حاكمون مصر السابقون والحاليون واظن ايضا المستقبليون عن خطف شعب باكمله بقوه السلاح الشعب المصري بكافه اطيافه في رحله زمنيه عميقه من الاختطاف
هذا الكتاب يعبر بتميز شديد عن اختطاف الجزء الاصيل من المجتمع المصري الا وهو الفلاحون
منذ عهد محمد علي حتي عصر مبارك
هذا الكتاب يعبر بتميز شديد عن اختطاف الجزء الاصيل من المجتمع المصري الا وهو الفلاحون
منذ عهد محمد علي حتي عصر مبارك
July 7, 2023
This book (which I read for comps) feels like it wanders into many places, and it is the sort of writing style that I often enjoy reading, but am attempting to avoid in my own writing. It juxtaposes many things together, which I have a bad habit of doing, and can sometimes be hard to follow the arguments of this text all the way through.
It touches on many themes of interest to me, hydraulics and water, energy, agricultural chemistry, warfare, imperialism, ecological relations — all through the lens of political economy, Marxist theory (accompanied by Ricardo commentary), environmental history, colonial history (and its influence on the economic theories of Keynes) and the history of science and technology. And it does so by tracing these themes through the history of Egypt.
The first chapter is often included in STS and environmental history syllabi. It is entitled “Can the Mosquito Speak?” I wrote a short excerpt on it for my comps writeup. After discussing Keith Pluymers’ chapter (in the book No Wood, No Kingdom) on the rapid deforestation of Barbados through enslaved labour for the establishment of British colonial sugar plantations and his discussion of Anna Tsing’s alternative nomenclature of the Plantationocene, I wrote this little paragraph on Mitchell’s chapter:
“Sugar plantations also importantly feature in the story Timothy Mitchell (2002) tells of the mosquito’s arrival in Egypt. While transportation technologies and advancing war frontiers brought the mosquito to Egypt, it was the modernizing water infrastructure of dams and canals that enabled the mosquito’s rapid reproduction. The construction of the Aswan High Dam also kept back highly fertile river sediment from reaching downstream agricultural plots, which were soon transformed into ever expanding sugar plantations that could afford expensive new fertilizer inputs. At one of the country’s largest sugar estates, in just the second year of the new malaria epidemic, some 80-90% of the workers had contracted the disease and were too weak to harvest sugarcane. While the logics of the plantation share similarities with the logics of modern dam infrastructure and industrialization, Mitchell argues there is no singular logic undergirding it all. Theories of a unified logic give capitalism’s irrationality and its attendant violence more credit than its due.”
The irrationality and lack of coherent logic of capitalism is a consistent theme in Mitchell’s book, which I do not think I completely agree with, because I think the point of Marx’s Capital is trying to understand how capitalism works in order to figure out what to do about it.
There are snippets of Egyptian revolutionary history in some of the chapters. I wanted to include a few excerpts:
“Orders reached local officials to make a levy of camels to support the continued occupation of the Sudan; to begin work immediately on improved flood defenses at Jirja, requiring 1,085,000 hundred weight of stone; and to provide another fifty thousand men as forced laborers on the Ibrahimiyya Canal. “The system of wholesale extortion and spoilation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go,” wrote a European resident. “Egypt is one vast ‘plantation’ where the master works his slaves without even feeding them.”38 A month later an armed uprising broke out, beginning in the village of Qaw, near Jirja, and four neighboring villages, but reaching as far as Asyut forty kilometers to the north.39 The revolt was led by Ahmad al-Shaqi, known as al-Tayyib, the Good, native of the village of Salamiyya, near Luxor, and said to be the disciple of an anticolonial religious militant from India who had escaped abroad after the defeat of the 1857–58 revolt and spent several years near Asyut.”
“Local reports agreed that although religious appeals pro- vided al-Tayyib’s legitimation, his object was the new land regime. “He is a mad fanatic and a communist,” a European resident in the area was told. “He wants to divide all property equally and to kill all the Ulema.””
“Salah al-Din Husain, a villager from Kamshish who had been seized and then released again in the military-ordered arrest of thousands of political activists in the summer of 1965,49 was one of those co-opted by the mobilization program onto the new ASU committee in his village. He used this position to renew an old campaign from the 1950s against the political power of the landowning family that dominated the village. The government’s response was to have Salah Husain immediately placed under surveillance. Investigators discovered that he was the leader of a group of “communists” in his village, who were holding meetings among the peasants at which they “exploited the hatred of the village inhabitants” toward the large landowners and called for “the collectivization of agriculture and the abolition of private property.” Two party officials were sent to Kamshish, a surveillance report mentions, to hold a public meeting at which they explained the government’s idea of socialism. But Salah Husain “insisted after the conclusion of the discussion in telling the peasants that our socialism is influenced by Marxist thought.” He was creating “dangerous divisions” among party members in the village, the report concludes, and was causing a threat to the country’s “internal security.”50 It was such local threats rather than any process of development, as Harik and others would have it, that ex- plains the central government’s initiatives.”
Chapter 6 of this book, entitled “Heritage and Violence” made for some very interesting commentary on public history, which would have also been useful for further reflection during comps, though it never came up during my exam. There was a fascinating section on the architect Hassan Fathy and his connection to “appropriate technology” and how his model village project of New Gurna, elaborating on his conception of vernacular architectural styles. This story is entangled with coercive displacement of local residents funded by USAID projects as well as the development of the Aswan Dam (Fathy’s brother was an engineer involved in its development). I will just finish with a large excerpt from this chapter, which I found so fascinating:
“By the end of the 1960s, two decades after the building of New Gurna, the government had taken the place of large landowners in deciding what to grow and had constructed a second dam at Aswan. The High Dam ended the annual flooding of the Nile and enabled the authorities to extend the cultivation of sugarcane, which displaced the growing of wheat. Villagers no longer had the long weeks of the Nile flood, which in the past provided time for the laborious work of brick making and communal house building. Many no longer had their own wheat to provide the straw needed for bricks and plaster. For both these reasons, building with mud brick began to lose its advantages over the faster method of building with reinforced concrete.
Thanks to the dam, moreover, even the mud itself was less and less available. The fields were no longer flooded, there was no longer an annual deposit of Nile silt, and no longer any renewal of the alluvial mud out of which mud-brick houses were built. Before the High Dam, the Nile carried some 124 million tons of sediment to the sea each year, depositing nearly ten million tons on the flood plain. After the dam, 98 percent of that sediment remained behind the dam.49 By the 1980s the government was forced to ban the use of alluvial mud for brick making, to protect agricultural land. Fathy’s celebration of a vernacular based on centuries of accumulation of local mud was launched at precisely the moment when (and for reasons connected with the fact that) the mud for the first time in history was no longer in supply.
If the irrigation works at Aswan caused mud-brick building to gradually disappear, ironically they had also played an unnoticed role in Fathy’s production of an Egyptian vernacular. Gharb Aswan, the village in which Fathy discovered an Egyptian architecture “preserved for centuries,” was in fact a modern village. It was built at the turn of the century to house people from the Nubian villages to the south, which were submerged by the reservoir created by the first Aswan Dam.50 The dam had given Fathy the opportunity to build his vernacular village, by creating first the estates and then the epidemics that brought the politics of rural reconstruction into being. These irrigation works had simultaneously destroyed the country of Nubia, whose rebuilt houses were the inspiration for his Egyptian vernacular. The nation, and its heritage, must be made out of the material lives of others. In doing so, however, it incorporates processes and materials whose use and meaning it does not entirely control.
Fifty years later the government was still trying to evict the population of old Gurna, and still describing them as lawless and unhygienic. To the old arguments about tomb robbing, official statements in the 1990s now added the claim that their “living conditions are poor, unhygienic, and spoil the view,” and that the presence of this large population in what was now recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site prevented its archaeological preservation and its development as an “open air museum.”
The issues were still those of heritage and civilization. But by the close of the twentieth century, Hassan Fathy’s vision of a national culture in- spired by the revival of peasant initiative and know-how had disappeared, along with most of the houses of his model village. Instead the government planned an open-air museum, in which the role of the peasant, as we will see, was rather smaller. The development plans of the 1980s and 1990s are discussed more fully in the final section of this book. But the plans for the development of tourism and national heritage in Gurna can provide an introduction to these issues, as well as a contrast with the peasant politics of an earlier period.
In 1982 the World Bank hired the U.S. consulting firm Arthur D. Little to draw up a program for increasing tourism revenue in Luxor (the same firm had been hired to do a similar study in 1953).52 The consultants re- vived the proposal for the depopulation of Gurna, along with Hassan Fathy’s scheme to set up a cooperative to improve the quality of locally made souvenirs. With the local population removed, the increase in tourism revenue was to come from better “visitor management” and improved infrastructure to enable the development of luxury hotels and Nile cruise ships.”
It touches on many themes of interest to me, hydraulics and water, energy, agricultural chemistry, warfare, imperialism, ecological relations — all through the lens of political economy, Marxist theory (accompanied by Ricardo commentary), environmental history, colonial history (and its influence on the economic theories of Keynes) and the history of science and technology. And it does so by tracing these themes through the history of Egypt.
The first chapter is often included in STS and environmental history syllabi. It is entitled “Can the Mosquito Speak?” I wrote a short excerpt on it for my comps writeup. After discussing Keith Pluymers’ chapter (in the book No Wood, No Kingdom) on the rapid deforestation of Barbados through enslaved labour for the establishment of British colonial sugar plantations and his discussion of Anna Tsing’s alternative nomenclature of the Plantationocene, I wrote this little paragraph on Mitchell’s chapter:
“Sugar plantations also importantly feature in the story Timothy Mitchell (2002) tells of the mosquito’s arrival in Egypt. While transportation technologies and advancing war frontiers brought the mosquito to Egypt, it was the modernizing water infrastructure of dams and canals that enabled the mosquito’s rapid reproduction. The construction of the Aswan High Dam also kept back highly fertile river sediment from reaching downstream agricultural plots, which were soon transformed into ever expanding sugar plantations that could afford expensive new fertilizer inputs. At one of the country’s largest sugar estates, in just the second year of the new malaria epidemic, some 80-90% of the workers had contracted the disease and were too weak to harvest sugarcane. While the logics of the plantation share similarities with the logics of modern dam infrastructure and industrialization, Mitchell argues there is no singular logic undergirding it all. Theories of a unified logic give capitalism’s irrationality and its attendant violence more credit than its due.”
The irrationality and lack of coherent logic of capitalism is a consistent theme in Mitchell’s book, which I do not think I completely agree with, because I think the point of Marx’s Capital is trying to understand how capitalism works in order to figure out what to do about it.
There are snippets of Egyptian revolutionary history in some of the chapters. I wanted to include a few excerpts:
“Orders reached local officials to make a levy of camels to support the continued occupation of the Sudan; to begin work immediately on improved flood defenses at Jirja, requiring 1,085,000 hundred weight of stone; and to provide another fifty thousand men as forced laborers on the Ibrahimiyya Canal. “The system of wholesale extortion and spoilation has reached a point beyond which it would be difficult to go,” wrote a European resident. “Egypt is one vast ‘plantation’ where the master works his slaves without even feeding them.”38 A month later an armed uprising broke out, beginning in the village of Qaw, near Jirja, and four neighboring villages, but reaching as far as Asyut forty kilometers to the north.39 The revolt was led by Ahmad al-Shaqi, known as al-Tayyib, the Good, native of the village of Salamiyya, near Luxor, and said to be the disciple of an anticolonial religious militant from India who had escaped abroad after the defeat of the 1857–58 revolt and spent several years near Asyut.”
“Local reports agreed that although religious appeals pro- vided al-Tayyib’s legitimation, his object was the new land regime. “He is a mad fanatic and a communist,” a European resident in the area was told. “He wants to divide all property equally and to kill all the Ulema.””
“Salah al-Din Husain, a villager from Kamshish who had been seized and then released again in the military-ordered arrest of thousands of political activists in the summer of 1965,49 was one of those co-opted by the mobilization program onto the new ASU committee in his village. He used this position to renew an old campaign from the 1950s against the political power of the landowning family that dominated the village. The government’s response was to have Salah Husain immediately placed under surveillance. Investigators discovered that he was the leader of a group of “communists” in his village, who were holding meetings among the peasants at which they “exploited the hatred of the village inhabitants” toward the large landowners and called for “the collectivization of agriculture and the abolition of private property.” Two party officials were sent to Kamshish, a surveillance report mentions, to hold a public meeting at which they explained the government’s idea of socialism. But Salah Husain “insisted after the conclusion of the discussion in telling the peasants that our socialism is influenced by Marxist thought.” He was creating “dangerous divisions” among party members in the village, the report concludes, and was causing a threat to the country’s “internal security.”50 It was such local threats rather than any process of development, as Harik and others would have it, that ex- plains the central government’s initiatives.”
Chapter 6 of this book, entitled “Heritage and Violence” made for some very interesting commentary on public history, which would have also been useful for further reflection during comps, though it never came up during my exam. There was a fascinating section on the architect Hassan Fathy and his connection to “appropriate technology” and how his model village project of New Gurna, elaborating on his conception of vernacular architectural styles. This story is entangled with coercive displacement of local residents funded by USAID projects as well as the development of the Aswan Dam (Fathy’s brother was an engineer involved in its development). I will just finish with a large excerpt from this chapter, which I found so fascinating:
“By the end of the 1960s, two decades after the building of New Gurna, the government had taken the place of large landowners in deciding what to grow and had constructed a second dam at Aswan. The High Dam ended the annual flooding of the Nile and enabled the authorities to extend the cultivation of sugarcane, which displaced the growing of wheat. Villagers no longer had the long weeks of the Nile flood, which in the past provided time for the laborious work of brick making and communal house building. Many no longer had their own wheat to provide the straw needed for bricks and plaster. For both these reasons, building with mud brick began to lose its advantages over the faster method of building with reinforced concrete.
Thanks to the dam, moreover, even the mud itself was less and less available. The fields were no longer flooded, there was no longer an annual deposit of Nile silt, and no longer any renewal of the alluvial mud out of which mud-brick houses were built. Before the High Dam, the Nile carried some 124 million tons of sediment to the sea each year, depositing nearly ten million tons on the flood plain. After the dam, 98 percent of that sediment remained behind the dam.49 By the 1980s the government was forced to ban the use of alluvial mud for brick making, to protect agricultural land. Fathy’s celebration of a vernacular based on centuries of accumulation of local mud was launched at precisely the moment when (and for reasons connected with the fact that) the mud for the first time in history was no longer in supply.
If the irrigation works at Aswan caused mud-brick building to gradually disappear, ironically they had also played an unnoticed role in Fathy’s production of an Egyptian vernacular. Gharb Aswan, the village in which Fathy discovered an Egyptian architecture “preserved for centuries,” was in fact a modern village. It was built at the turn of the century to house people from the Nubian villages to the south, which were submerged by the reservoir created by the first Aswan Dam.50 The dam had given Fathy the opportunity to build his vernacular village, by creating first the estates and then the epidemics that brought the politics of rural reconstruction into being. These irrigation works had simultaneously destroyed the country of Nubia, whose rebuilt houses were the inspiration for his Egyptian vernacular. The nation, and its heritage, must be made out of the material lives of others. In doing so, however, it incorporates processes and materials whose use and meaning it does not entirely control.
Fifty years later the government was still trying to evict the population of old Gurna, and still describing them as lawless and unhygienic. To the old arguments about tomb robbing, official statements in the 1990s now added the claim that their “living conditions are poor, unhygienic, and spoil the view,” and that the presence of this large population in what was now recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site prevented its archaeological preservation and its development as an “open air museum.”
The issues were still those of heritage and civilization. But by the close of the twentieth century, Hassan Fathy’s vision of a national culture in- spired by the revival of peasant initiative and know-how had disappeared, along with most of the houses of his model village. Instead the government planned an open-air museum, in which the role of the peasant, as we will see, was rather smaller. The development plans of the 1980s and 1990s are discussed more fully in the final section of this book. But the plans for the development of tourism and national heritage in Gurna can provide an introduction to these issues, as well as a contrast with the peasant politics of an earlier period.
In 1982 the World Bank hired the U.S. consulting firm Arthur D. Little to draw up a program for increasing tourism revenue in Luxor (the same firm had been hired to do a similar study in 1953).52 The consultants re- vived the proposal for the depopulation of Gurna, along with Hassan Fathy’s scheme to set up a cooperative to improve the quality of locally made souvenirs. With the local population removed, the increase in tourism revenue was to come from better “visitor management” and improved infrastructure to enable the development of luxury hotels and Nile cruise ships.”
December 3, 2016
لهذا الكتاب قصة.. رشحه لي أحد الأصدقاء فسألته عن موضوعه فلم يتمكن من شرح الخط الرئيسي لي بأي شكل، وأيضًا عندما نظرت إلى الفهرس والقطعة المختارة على ظهر الكتاب لم اتمكن أيضًا من فهم الموضوع الرئيسي. الحقيقة إن مفيش موضوع معين للكتاب، وفور أن قرأته تذكرت مناظرة تشومسكي وفوكو الشهيرة حينما أخذ فوكو في الاستطراد في شرح فكرته بشكل معقد للغاية، وثم في أقل من دقيقة استطاع تشومسكي تلخيص فكرته بيسر شديد.
ما أقصده إنه من الواضح إن اغلب الدراسات البنيوية ( وأعتقد إن الدراسة في هذا الكتاب بنيوية في كثير من ملامحها) تصر عن قصد وعمد على تعقيد الفكرة بشكل غير عادي، في حين إن الفكرة في غالب الأوقات لا تكون بهذا التعقيد أو العمق. يحاول تيموثي ميتشل هنا استعراض عدة قضايا متفرقة في تاريخ مصر الحديث بشرح البنى المختلفة التي يمكن تفسير الظاهرة مع الإصرار ( بشكل يتفق مع البنيوية) على تجاهل دور الإنسان كلاعب رئيسي في الأحداث، فالعالم يسير كنتاج لبنى اجتماعية واقتصادية وثقافية حتمية، وكل محاولات الإنسان لتنفيذ أي شيء على ارض الواقع من بنى أفكاره، يتم تنفيذه بشكل مختلف تمامًا عما قصده ( مثال سد أسوان كما يطرح الكتاب) فالبٌنى المختلفة تجعل الأمور تسير في حتمية أخرى منفصلة تمامًا عن دور الإنسان.
من الأمور اللافتة للنظر أن أغلب الاتجاهات الحديثة ( بشكل واضح جدًا جدًا في هذا الكتاب وفي استعمار مصر أيضًا لنفس المؤلف) تتجنب تمامًا إصدار أي أحكام قيمية، فما من قيمة في الأساس. يوضح الكاتب في تحليله لأغلب قضاياه دور العنف الرئيسي دون أن يدينه بشكل قيمي.. يوضحه فقط، وكأن ما من طريقة أخرى لإدارة الأمور.. الحداثة تساوي العنف دون أن ندينها... مجرد تقرير لوقائع تسير في حتمية مفتعلة غريبة.
مناظرة فوكو وتشومسكي واختلاف الفيلسوفين وضحت لي جدًا المدار السيء الذي تدور فيه البنيوية..
هذا قطعًا لبا يمنع أن بعض تحليلات الكتاب عميقة وجيدة شأنها شأن أغلب الدراسيات الحديثة التي تحاول تقديم منظور مختلف، لكني في النهاية لن أقرأ أي دراسة لهذا المؤلف بعد ذلك، لأن الدراسات البنيوية فعلا مفتعلة وتصر على تعقيد أمور بسيطة بشكل غير عادي فيعتقد القاريء أن المشكلة فيه وفي قصور فهمه، وهذا متعمد - هكذا أعتقد - ليغطي على ضحالة وغرابة كثير من الأفكار بتغليفها بإطار من العمق المصطنع.
ما أقصده إنه من الواضح إن اغلب الدراسات البنيوية ( وأعتقد إن الدراسة في هذا الكتاب بنيوية في كثير من ملامحها) تصر عن قصد وعمد على تعقيد الفكرة بشكل غير عادي، في حين إن الفكرة في غالب الأوقات لا تكون بهذا التعقيد أو العمق. يحاول تيموثي ميتشل هنا استعراض عدة قضايا متفرقة في تاريخ مصر الحديث بشرح البنى المختلفة التي يمكن تفسير الظاهرة مع الإصرار ( بشكل يتفق مع البنيوية) على تجاهل دور الإنسان كلاعب رئيسي في الأحداث، فالعالم يسير كنتاج لبنى اجتماعية واقتصادية وثقافية حتمية، وكل محاولات الإنسان لتنفيذ أي شيء على ارض الواقع من بنى أفكاره، يتم تنفيذه بشكل مختلف تمامًا عما قصده ( مثال سد أسوان كما يطرح الكتاب) فالبٌنى المختلفة تجعل الأمور تسير في حتمية أخرى منفصلة تمامًا عن دور الإنسان.
من الأمور اللافتة للنظر أن أغلب الاتجاهات الحديثة ( بشكل واضح جدًا جدًا في هذا الكتاب وفي استعمار مصر أيضًا لنفس المؤلف) تتجنب تمامًا إصدار أي أحكام قيمية، فما من قيمة في الأساس. يوضح الكاتب في تحليله لأغلب قضاياه دور العنف الرئيسي دون أن يدينه بشكل قيمي.. يوضحه فقط، وكأن ما من طريقة أخرى لإدارة الأمور.. الحداثة تساوي العنف دون أن ندينها... مجرد تقرير لوقائع تسير في حتمية مفتعلة غريبة.
مناظرة فوكو وتشومسكي واختلاف الفيلسوفين وضحت لي جدًا المدار السيء الذي تدور فيه البنيوية..
هذا قطعًا لبا يمنع أن بعض تحليلات الكتاب عميقة وجيدة شأنها شأن أغلب الدراسيات الحديثة التي تحاول تقديم منظور مختلف، لكني في النهاية لن أقرأ أي دراسة لهذا المؤلف بعد ذلك، لأن الدراسات البنيوية فعلا مفتعلة وتصر على تعقيد أمور بسيطة بشكل غير عادي فيعتقد القاريء أن المشكلة فيه وفي قصور فهمه، وهذا متعمد - هكذا أعتقد - ليغطي على ضحالة وغرابة كثير من الأفكار بتغليفها بإطار من العمق المصطنع.
December 5, 2009
Wow. Who would expect this???! For me the first two parts (especially the first couple of chapters) were eye-opening. I am inspired by his argument of the bifurcation of the world in modernity --- reminds me of Giddens' "consequences of modernity" in that we always "trust" the system but we really don't know how it works. "Colonial relationship" is only one element in his story of Egypt -- just an enforcer of these processes.
July 16, 2010
Interesting history of how something taken for granted as natural and pre-existing, "the economy" (in the macroeconomic sense), actually was created in egypt through acts of violence (creating and enforcing particular schemes of private property) and transnational experts applying "universal" social scientific principles. Heavy hitting theory implications and might have some intimidating theory speak in the conclusions of each chapter, but the histories themselves are quite readable.
August 6, 2016
Truly amazing book by Mitchell. HE narrates the emergence of a modern class of technocrats in Egypt and traces the interaction of environment, foreign policy, and local politics to explain the changes in the constitution of Egyptian society under the influence of modernity and colonialism. I particularly liked the section on the failure of the Aswan damn and the slew of unexpected collateral effects that it creates.
December 18, 2007
For all of Mitchell's daunting rep, my undergrads actually kind of dug this. An angry book that doesn't seem angry at first.
June 11, 2009
One of the most insightful and fascinating books I have ever read.
June 8, 2014
Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts tackles many different, though related, issues in the study of the Egyptian countryside, all of which are unified by the theme of adding complexity to matters that have been examined previously, but in ways that the author finds incomplete or insufficient. Most importantly, he argues that the economy is neither a social construction nor a new way of describing something that has always existed, but a cultural representation of something that has a material reality. Although from chapter to chapter the work might seem to be a collection of loosely related essays, taken as a whole, Rule of Experts contains a coherent narrative that explores, through both historical and economic analysis, the marginalization of the Egyptian peasant (primarily, although there are other actors) in Egyptian historiography.
After an introduction that outlines several of his main ideas, Mitchell delves directly into the subject of complexity in his first chapter. Tracking the multifarious factors that led to the spread of malaria in the early 1940s, the author reveals how the epidemic was rooted in a complex web of human agency, technological development, political and military exigencies, and non-human actors, most of which acted on a global, as well as national, scale. In doing so, he not only asserts that the dichotomy between “natural” and “human” factors is false, but also uncovers the intentional way in which it and similar dichotomies have been constructed. In the following chapter Mitchell examines the development of private property law in Egypt, which has been framed as a “universal right” and a sign of progress in the nation. The problem was, he argues, that Ottoman notions of property were based on complex claims to revenue and that attempts to institute private property forced the government to reduce the issue to a more simple conception of “ownership of land”. Doing so engendered significant resistance from the people it was intended to help, including land desertion from those who did not see the value in state attempts to institute modern farming. All of this led eventually to violence, a characteristic that Mitchell sees as having played a significant role in the introduction of many “modern” concepts. Moreover, the implementation of private property did not take the land away from the state, but merely developed new relationships of control that tied it to the wealthiest and most exploitative owners. Intending to break the perceived “arbitrariness” of the Ottoman system, land reform in Egypt introduced new forms of arbitrary power and hid them beneath a new system that appeared rational and peasant-friendly.
In his third chapter, Mitchell introduces a new theme, that of the “character of calculability”. The author’s basic argument in this section is that new developments that allowed for the quantification of models that had not been conceptualized this way previously created new forms of “political power”. Maps and surveys, for example, produced “a knowledge and command of space” that helped erase the violent and arbitrary way in which private property was established in Egypt. In a similar fashion, currency brought shape to nascent notions of the “economy”. Calculability furthered the creation of dichotomies by positing a false separation between the subject and the object being calculated but, as Mitchell demonstrates, this distance was an illusion. Moreover, calculability also feigned rationality and objective expertise where it did not exist. Using the example of the “national economy”, the author demonstrates that, for several reasons that include blurred and often arbitrary boundaries, as well as the difficulty and biases inherent in conducting surveys and censuses, economic and statistical knowledge was not as accurate a reflection of reality as it liked to believe it was. Even in map making, the aims of the state and even the very units of measurement used distanced the final product from “reality”. As mentioned above, maps, used to delineate private property, were forced to reduce the complexity of Ottoman notions of property into “land ownership”, which meant that any representation of “property” that was based on measurements of territory was itself a distortion of the “reality” of the system, in addition to being transformative of that “reality” rather than objectively distant.
The second part of Mitchell’s book is a more academic and historiographical analysis that concerns the field of “peasant studies”. In chapter four the author outlines how “peasant studies” were framed by Orientalist scholarship, while chapter five highlights how such works focused systematically on the violence from the rural population rather than against it, because concentrating on the latter would have disrupted basic Orientalist tenets of the field. In the final chapter of this section, “Heritage and Violence”, he argues that as nations needed to prove their modernity (and, in some cases, justify their existence) by demonstrating that they had a past, they engaged in a conscious process of transforming their country into something that was both inclusive and restrictive. In doing so they needed to formulate new images of, and relationships to, the countryside that often required ignoring or forgetting about certain elements of the past, a feat that usually entailed violent and destructive actions.
Mitchell’s final section is entitled “Fixing the Economy” and is, unsurprisingly, more geared towards economic analysis than the previous ones. The underlying idea behind these three chapters is that international bodies have misunderstood Egypt’s needs on a routine basis, which the author attributes in a large part to the dichotomies that have ruled modern political, economic, and sociological discourse. For example, one of the common economic criticisms of Egypt is that it is “overpopulated”, but Mitchell questions and then unpacks this term and demonstrates that the problem is more complicated than a simple imbalance between food production capabilities and population. Defining the problem as “natural” allowed both the state and international bodies to ignore the political reasons behind the disparity between food and people. Naturally, when the problem was misidentified, the proposed solutions did not yield positive results, thus dragging the country further into trouble.
To understand completely all of the nuances of Mitchell’s arguments would require familiarity with political, economic, sociological, and historical theory, but one need not be an expert in any of these fields to find value in this work. The author outlines his claims in a lucid and intelligible manner and engages in theory only insofar as is necessary to remain rigorous and grounded and to demonstrate his proficiency. Such discussions rarely become overly complex, although it is possible to get lost at times in those fields with which the reader is not familiar. Overall, Rule of Experts is considered a seminal work of Egyptian history that has influenced several fields and whose underlying premise could be applied to many other nations. It is not a quick or easy read, but one that provides valuable insights and reminds us both how easy it is to dismiss or ignore the complexities in the world and of the potentially dire consequences in doing so.
After an introduction that outlines several of his main ideas, Mitchell delves directly into the subject of complexity in his first chapter. Tracking the multifarious factors that led to the spread of malaria in the early 1940s, the author reveals how the epidemic was rooted in a complex web of human agency, technological development, political and military exigencies, and non-human actors, most of which acted on a global, as well as national, scale. In doing so, he not only asserts that the dichotomy between “natural” and “human” factors is false, but also uncovers the intentional way in which it and similar dichotomies have been constructed. In the following chapter Mitchell examines the development of private property law in Egypt, which has been framed as a “universal right” and a sign of progress in the nation. The problem was, he argues, that Ottoman notions of property were based on complex claims to revenue and that attempts to institute private property forced the government to reduce the issue to a more simple conception of “ownership of land”. Doing so engendered significant resistance from the people it was intended to help, including land desertion from those who did not see the value in state attempts to institute modern farming. All of this led eventually to violence, a characteristic that Mitchell sees as having played a significant role in the introduction of many “modern” concepts. Moreover, the implementation of private property did not take the land away from the state, but merely developed new relationships of control that tied it to the wealthiest and most exploitative owners. Intending to break the perceived “arbitrariness” of the Ottoman system, land reform in Egypt introduced new forms of arbitrary power and hid them beneath a new system that appeared rational and peasant-friendly.
In his third chapter, Mitchell introduces a new theme, that of the “character of calculability”. The author’s basic argument in this section is that new developments that allowed for the quantification of models that had not been conceptualized this way previously created new forms of “political power”. Maps and surveys, for example, produced “a knowledge and command of space” that helped erase the violent and arbitrary way in which private property was established in Egypt. In a similar fashion, currency brought shape to nascent notions of the “economy”. Calculability furthered the creation of dichotomies by positing a false separation between the subject and the object being calculated but, as Mitchell demonstrates, this distance was an illusion. Moreover, calculability also feigned rationality and objective expertise where it did not exist. Using the example of the “national economy”, the author demonstrates that, for several reasons that include blurred and often arbitrary boundaries, as well as the difficulty and biases inherent in conducting surveys and censuses, economic and statistical knowledge was not as accurate a reflection of reality as it liked to believe it was. Even in map making, the aims of the state and even the very units of measurement used distanced the final product from “reality”. As mentioned above, maps, used to delineate private property, were forced to reduce the complexity of Ottoman notions of property into “land ownership”, which meant that any representation of “property” that was based on measurements of territory was itself a distortion of the “reality” of the system, in addition to being transformative of that “reality” rather than objectively distant.
The second part of Mitchell’s book is a more academic and historiographical analysis that concerns the field of “peasant studies”. In chapter four the author outlines how “peasant studies” were framed by Orientalist scholarship, while chapter five highlights how such works focused systematically on the violence from the rural population rather than against it, because concentrating on the latter would have disrupted basic Orientalist tenets of the field. In the final chapter of this section, “Heritage and Violence”, he argues that as nations needed to prove their modernity (and, in some cases, justify their existence) by demonstrating that they had a past, they engaged in a conscious process of transforming their country into something that was both inclusive and restrictive. In doing so they needed to formulate new images of, and relationships to, the countryside that often required ignoring or forgetting about certain elements of the past, a feat that usually entailed violent and destructive actions.
Mitchell’s final section is entitled “Fixing the Economy” and is, unsurprisingly, more geared towards economic analysis than the previous ones. The underlying idea behind these three chapters is that international bodies have misunderstood Egypt’s needs on a routine basis, which the author attributes in a large part to the dichotomies that have ruled modern political, economic, and sociological discourse. For example, one of the common economic criticisms of Egypt is that it is “overpopulated”, but Mitchell questions and then unpacks this term and demonstrates that the problem is more complicated than a simple imbalance between food production capabilities and population. Defining the problem as “natural” allowed both the state and international bodies to ignore the political reasons behind the disparity between food and people. Naturally, when the problem was misidentified, the proposed solutions did not yield positive results, thus dragging the country further into trouble.
To understand completely all of the nuances of Mitchell’s arguments would require familiarity with political, economic, sociological, and historical theory, but one need not be an expert in any of these fields to find value in this work. The author outlines his claims in a lucid and intelligible manner and engages in theory only insofar as is necessary to remain rigorous and grounded and to demonstrate his proficiency. Such discussions rarely become overly complex, although it is possible to get lost at times in those fields with which the reader is not familiar. Overall, Rule of Experts is considered a seminal work of Egyptian history that has influenced several fields and whose underlying premise could be applied to many other nations. It is not a quick or easy read, but one that provides valuable insights and reminds us both how easy it is to dismiss or ignore the complexities in the world and of the potentially dire consequences in doing so.
December 19, 2024
I'm back. And this is pretty phenomenal in the literal sense, in that it sort of occurs as a "wow, that is certainly a phenomenon." You know what I mean? I did really appreciate this, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It also appears as a sort of flex (not in a bad way) by Mitchell, who is so obviously extremely widely (and deeply) read across postcolonial and economic theory and is also a very keen historian of Egypt. I appreciate very much the discussion of (the) economy/economics and their constructions and inventions, and the whole book is a quite effective show of Mitchell's ability to think technically. It's a nice read when so much of the general discourse about technocrats/technocracy seems to often just be "these people don't know what they're doing": Mitchell probably agrees with that, but the book is deeper than that, I think. Sometimes it can be a little reductive/seem to give almost too much weight to social science/scientists, but it is about these things after all, and generally I find the heavy-handedness is often vindicated. It made me think about how creative of an endeavor history/theory can be.
December 25, 2018
This was one of my favourite books during my MSc and since Rule by Experts I have read nearly everything Mitchell has produced. This book can really be read in two ways: as an expertly researched and written account of Egypt’s colonial history, and as a work of extraordinary social theory. Mitchell shows how concepts like democracy, development, the economy, and even Egypt itself, are not ideas that have emerged on their own, but techno-scientific arenas that have emerged from historically specific actor-networks of technology, their related types of expertise, and the forms of knowledge and calculations that they allow for. The outcome is an entirely original way of thinking about the history of capitalism, colonialism, poverty and development.
October 4, 2018
Enjoyable read. The intro is a bit heavy on theory and not representative of the vibrant and engaging narratives he presents in the beginning of the book. Mitchell writes with authority and humor (especially appreciate the "can the subaltern speak?" in the "can the mosquito speak?" paragraph) A bit dogmatic and abstract at times but still presents compelling arguments that dismantle "logics" behind capitalism.
May 9, 2018
Essential reading in political science, critical economic studies, and social history. Mitchell is unparalleled and absolutely, incandescently, meticulous, and his insistence on uncompromising rigor is refreshing. I can think of few equals in critical theory, none in the field of political science.
March 25, 2020
Very interesting to read but hard to understand everything the writer wants to deliver
I enjoyed reading it so much, but I need to read once or twice again so I can gain all the knowledge the author is delivering
I enjoyed reading it so much, but I need to read once or twice again so I can gain all the knowledge the author is delivering
March 22, 2017
المرة التانية ليا مع تيموثي ميتشل وكالعادة الراجل مبهر جدا في مقدار العمق اللي بيعرض بيه موضوعاته وقدرته الرهيبة على لحم الكثير(فششخ) من التفاصيل في نسق واحد متجانس لدرجة الإذهال مشكلتي الوحيدة معاه اني مهما ركزت لازم أتهوه من الخطوط العريضة للمقال من كتر التفاصيل وبالتالي الكتاب يقرأ مرتين على الأقل مع ضرورة شديدة للتركيز وعدم السرحان
من ناحية تانية وبغض النظر عن دسامة الكتاب فهو ممتع للغاية و منير للغاية
من ناحية تانية وبغض النظر عن دسامة الكتاب فهو ممتع للغاية و منير للغاية
February 25, 2019
This, along with his Carbon Democracy, have the potential to entirely shift one's view of the world and the narrative of progress and development as both necessary and inevitable.
June 24, 2019
need to collect my notes about this. surprisingly useful / predictive given that it was written in 2002.
Read
November 4, 2020Good shit.*
*Mosquito and dam facts
*Mosquito and dam facts
July 15, 2022
A very good piece of academic writing that is as insightful as it is puzzling to read. Good consideration of technocrats.
January 8, 2023
If there’s one book on capitalism that you must read, let it be this!
November 13, 2025
مش عارفة حاسة الكتاب صعب في فهمه أو اني لسه مش بهذا القدر من التفكير السياسي لدرجة اني بقالي حوالي سنة بحاول اتخطى بعض الصفحات فيه
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