Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  When the US blueprint of transition to the market was not working as hoped in places such as Russia, Joseph Stiglitz, economist and author of Globalization and Its Discontents, debunked the myth of the market and pointed out the failure of US neoliberal domination from its onset. In 2002, Stiglitz wrote, “We have focused so hard on our own economic mythology, and on managing globalization to our short-term benefits, that we have been blind to what we are doing to ourselves and the world.”3 Adopting political economy theorist Karl Polanyi’s refutation of the self-regulating market and relying on financial evidence, Stiglitz asserted that the collapse of some American big firms was primarily due to excessive deregulation. Therefore, he called on the state to play an essential role in running the economy—or to “bring the state back in,” as many other political economists have argued before him.4 Outside the United States, the Washington Consensus rhetoric promised long-awaited human and economic development—and then imposed unfair free-trade agreements and programs of structural adjustment that benefited Western economic interests. “Liberalization has thus, too often, not been followed by the promised growth, but by increased misery,” Stiglitz insists.5

  From a postcolonial perspective, Timothy Mitchell also refutes US mythology surrounding the greatness of the market economy, and he looks at Upper Egypt in this regard. Mitchell investigates the discipline of economics as a Western discourse in itself, and he traces the genealogy of the making of the field in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Also referencing Polanyi, Mitchell shows how the market economy—the conventional wisdom in liberal and neoliberal theories of economics—was introduced to the colonized as a mythical “universal model” that never functioned in the ideal way that the empire claimed. Mitchell adds that in the past, under the British Empire, European experts, their modern technology, and self-regulating markets resulted in only human and environmental catastrophes. In the present, international institutions of US capitalism, mainly the IMF and the World Bank, still perpetuate this myth and generate more catastrophes in the societies where they insist on applying economic liberalization programs. In Egypt at large and Upper Egypt in particular, Mitchell illustrates that market capitalism has resulted in profound environmental crises and social disparities throughout the last two centuries.6

  In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that traditional imperial expansion is dead and there is not a single nation-state today that can play this role alone. “The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were.”7 They argue that, in fact, that a transition occurred from imperialism to empire, and they trace the genealogy of this transition from European to Euro-American global control. Whereas imperialism involved territorial expansion, empire has no territorial boundaries or fixed borders. The authors also investigate a transformation in the “paradigm of rule,” and they use Michel Foucault’s notion of “the biopolitical” to understand this newly formed paradigm. For them, Western capitalism is a key part of the logic of the new empire, just as it had been a pivotal facet of old imperialism. Hardt and Negri argue that the control of production and labor have turned into a biopolitical process in which the body and the entire life of the citizen are disciplined toward economic goals. “Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior,” they write, “following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it.”8 They predict that the postmodern empire will decline because it carries within itself the seeds of revolution—which will be led by globalized social classes they call the “multitude.”9

  Touching on the same topic, Gayatri Spivak—a founding figure in subaltern studies—recognizes US imperialism and contemplates subaltern resistance against it. Spivak indicates that in its early theoretical connotation, “‘subaltern’ referred to persons and groups cut off from upward—and, in a sense, ‘outward’—social mobility” in colonial societies under European empires.10 However, Spivak explains that in the new context of imperial America and the invention of new means of soft penetration, such as NGOs and human rights associations, the subaltern today is highly connected and assimilated into the globalized structure of power. She adds that today’s US-inspired and largely US-funded international civil society and NGOs act among subaltern individuals for the interest of global capitalism, through means such as women’s microenterprise and pharmaceutical dumping. For example, today’s subaltern “is no longer cut off from lines of access to the centre, as represented by the Bretton Woods agencies and the World Trade Organizations, is altogether interested in the rural and indigenous subalterns as [a] source of trade-related intellectual property or TRIPs.”11 The new subaltern is no longer isolated and voiceless; rather, s/he is reachable by forces of multinational corporations and affiliated NGOs that exploit her/his indigenous knowledge for global postindustrial capitalism.

  All of the above theorization about US imperial domination through the market applies to Upper Egypt. Nevertheless, the empire’s market did not meet much success there, and the subalterns of Qina Province did manage to revolt against it.

  On eve of the 2011 revolution, Qina Province lived in a mixed and confused situation between transition to the market and conspicuous state intervention. Upon applying an economic reform program in 1992, the authoritarian regime in Cairo allowed USAID officers, or “market missionaries,” access to Upper Egypt, including Qina, in order to fund many agricultural programs with local NGOs. These programs targeted both female and male peasants who owned small plots and aimed to convert their mode of production from “traditional” farming techniques addressing local needs to a “modernized” method that conformed to the international market. For example, a program called El-Shams (the Sun), started in 2003 and taught peasants how to cultivate green beans, cantaloupe, and charentais melons for exportation to Europe. The program claimed that it changed the life of thousands of farmers in Upper Egypt and improved the living standards of whole villages.12 One of the success stories it shared was about another program, AgReform: “Hasan Aly Shehata is a farmer from Dandara village in the governorate of Qena. He is married, with five daughters who are all in school, and a two-year-old son. Hasan is not well-to-do; he cultivates land in a village 40 kilometers away from his house. Hasan’s family income and well-being have improved as he started cultivating cantaloupe (not a traditional crop)—a decision based on AgReform’s technical support to Al-Waqf Farmer NGO (FNGO), of which he is an active member.”13

  USAID also partnered with a gigantic food corporation, Heinz, in funding a five-year agribusiness project targeting small farmers in Qina and other provinces, beginning in 2008. According to its managers, the project “applies a market-driven value chain approach. It invests in the vast but largely unrealized potential of thousands of Upper Egypt’s small farmers to meet modern-day market demands.”14 It was designed to target a large number of peasants—nearly eight thousand—and to foster continuous contact between them and the global market.

  Aside from the fact that a large percentage of these programs’ budgets were allocated to the high salaries of foreign employees and payments to American experts, local peasants in Qina asserted that the projects had little impact. One could barely notice any change in the mode of production and the lives of the inhabitants of the province’s numerous villages. In an interview with an older farmer from Armant in the fall of 2010, he told me that peasants were unable to compete on the international market with their minute plots and without state subsidies. He explained that the European Union granted subsidies to its farmers, who worked with advanced machinery and technology, and gave Qina’s farmers limited access to their markets. Economic liberalization eliminated subsidizes for fertilizers, seeds, and machinery. Thus, with ever-increasing rents, small-plot tenant farmers—who were often targeted by USAID-funded NGOs—found it almost impossible to enter the highly competitive global market.

  In th
e meantime, the sugarcane cultivators of Qina Province went on strike. The government purchased their harvest for the province’s state-owned sugar factories at unfairly cheap prices, and corrupt officials assisted private businesses in doing the same. In 2008, the farmers of Armant and Ruzayqat refused to deliver their harvest to the state factories unless the government raised prices. One of the province’s Parliament members, ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Ghul of Qus, who had held his seat for thirty years as a member of the northern ruling party, the National Democratic Party, condemned the strike. He characterized it as an illegal action of public disobedience that the people of the province were not naturally inclined to commit, asserting that it was incited by oppositional groups and human rights organizations.15

  The same sugarcane farmers were also losing their lands to the old elite families of the colonial era, since the new legal codes of market reform reversed the Arab socialist codes and introduced private property laws anew. Thousands of Qina’s peasants had been evicted, or were awaiting eviction, from their plots in order to cede their land back to the large old families. These were the same families that were the co-opted local elite and propertied class during the period of British colonialism, before the 1952 military coup and subsequent socialist reforms. Under Mubarak, these families were co-opted by the northern authoritarian regime through membership in the ruling party and allocation of parliamentary seats.16 The Washington Consensus preached market reforms as the only way for promised economic and human development. However, in reality these reforms worked for the benefit of the business and rural elite, who controlled the ruling party and the Parliament, at the expense of the peasants and laborers of Qina.

  When widespread bread riots swept the province in 2007, there was a huge USAID wheat silo in the fields bordering the city of Qus. The struggle to purchase subsidized bread killed many people in the villages of Qina during the months preceding the outbreak of a national crisis in Cairo. In the long lines in front of state bakeries, Qina’s villagers shot each other to get a share of the cheap bread, while preachers in mosques called upon them to consume less and not to waste leftovers.17 Egypt is “traditionally the largest U.S. wheat consumer,” through the USAID aid program.18 The annual influx of US aid to Egypt mostly takes the form of imported American products, and wheat makes up a considerable portion of these goods. Despite its calls for global free trade, the US government has pressured the Egyptian state to buy the more expensive American wheat instead of the cheaper alternatives from other countries, such as former Soviet states. Concurrently, economic liberalization measures have compelled the Egyptian government to eliminate its subsidies to peasants, including wheat cultivators, while the US government gives generous subsidies to its wheat cultivators.19

  On the eve of the 2011 revolution in Qina, legendary bandits still hid in the mountains to show their discontent with the confused situation. Building on the traditions of two hundred years of subaltern unrest in Qina, stories of southern bandits took new trajectories. Many such bandits began their careers cooperating with the corrupt regime and its security apparatus, which then disowned them when they became a threat to the central government. Many years ago, there was a legendary bandit known as al-Khutt, whose name has become the title given to every other great bandit appearing in the province after him. Nawfal Sa‘d, who finally fell to police bullets in 2007, was another khutt who inherited the terrifying persona of his predecessor. Nawfal was an unemployed forty-year-old from the Hawwara clan that independently ruled Upper Egypt for centuries during Ottoman times. He started his criminal career in Qina in the 1990s, when he assisted the regime in crushing Islamic fundamentalists and in violently supporting the candidates of the ruling National Democratic Party during parliamentary elections. He became friends with high-ranking police officers, who protected him in return for a considerable share of his illicit income. In a village in Naj‘ Hammadi, his house was a huge fort protected from the back by the mountains, hidden in the front behind the high sugarcane fields, and guarded day and night by his heavily armed gang. The security apparatus soon came to view him as a threat, and the time came to terminate him. The police shot Nawfal in a fierce battle on account of many charges against him: aside from drug dealing, robbery, and murder, he was charged several times for resisting the authorities and threatening public security. For many months after he died, his wife attempted to avenge his death by murdering the village traitors who had assisted the police in reaching him.20

  FIGURE 6. Protesting women in Karnak, Luxor, during the 2011 revolution.

  FIGURE 7. The McDonald’s sign appears next to a revolutionary crowd in Luxor, January 2011.

  Finally, on 25 January 2011, the discontented youth of the province created their own Facebook groups to join Cairene compatriots in making the revolution. Youth coalitions quickly took form in every town in Qina, and they led thousands of lower- and middle-class groups to meet in every big and small square in the province to foster the spirit of Tahrir.21 The Egyptian Revolution in the south and the north rendered America another “imagined empire.” Its neoliberal market stumbled just as the British liberal market before it, and the subalterns of the south revived their means to rebel.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Many world historians use the concept of “informal empire” to refer to indirect forms of imperial hegemony that do not include military occupation. See Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 10. On US aid in general, and USAID’s wheat aid in particular and Egyptian dependency, see Galal Amin, Egypt’s Economic Predicament (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

  2. Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents (London: W.W. Norton, 2003) insists that the United States spreads the neoliberal myth of development through market reform in the third world. On the impact of market reform policies on Qina’s peasants, see the reports of the Land Center of Human Rights, 2000–2008, Cairo, www.lchr-eg.org (accessed 11 February 2012).

  3. See UNDP (UN Development Programme), Arab Human Development Report 2004 (New York: UNDP, 2005); World Bank, “Egypt Project and Programs,” http://go.worldbank.org/C15AQ9EG50 (accessed 5 October 2008).

  4. Facebook group, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8412576147 (accessed 9 March 2010). The movie’s title is Al-Jazira, and among the popular TV series on Upper Egyptian mountain-based bandits are Hada’iq al-Shaytan and Dhi’ab al-Jabal.

  5. This book uses the term microhistory differently from its original meaning, proposed by historians such as Giovanni Levi, Carlo Ginzburg, and Macro Ferrari, which focuses on the peoples and internal dynamics of small European villages and towns. Rather, this book looks at small places while putting their internal dynamics and transformations into the larger context of the world economy and global imperialism.

  6. Qina in this book refers to a province that has consisted of many towns, such as Qina, Qus, Luxor, Isna, and Farshut, and numerous villages, including Salimiyya, Armant, Qammula, Samhud, Maris, and others. During the nineteenth century, the government sometimes split the province into two provinces, mudiriyyas of Qina and Isna, for administrative purposes. Today, the province is administratively split into the two governorates of Qina and Luxor. Regardless of administrative divisions, this book deals with Qina as historically one province at all times.

  7. Edouard de Montulé, Voyage en Amérique, en Italie, en Sicile et en Égypte pendant les années 1816, 1817, 1818 et 1819 (Paris: Delaunay, 1821), 2:271.

  8. Ibid.; ‘Ali Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida li-Misr al-Qahira (Cairo: Matba‘at Bulaq, 1887), 14:120.

  9. Vivant Denon, Voyage dans le Basse et la Haute Égypte, pendant les Campagne du Général Bonaparte (Paris: Imprimerie de P. Didot l’aine, 1802), 235–36.

  10. Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya, 14:128–29. Also see Taqyy al-Din al-Maqrizi, Al-Mawa‘iz wa-l-I‘tibar bi Dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-’Athar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyya, 1987), 1:202–3. And also see Abu al-Fadl al-Idfawi, Al-Tali‘ al-Sa�
��id al-Jami‘ li Asma’ Nujaba’ al-Sa‘id (Cairo: al-Dar al-Misriyya lil-Ta‘lif wa-al-Tarjama, 1966), 13, 18.

  11. W.J. Fischel, “The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt,” in M.N. Pearson (ed.), Spices in the Indian Ocean World (London: Ashgate Variorum, 1996), 56.

  12. Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya, 14:129, 133–34.

  13. See Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Janet Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  14. See Muhammad al-Maraghi al-Jirjawi, Tarikh Wilayyat al-Sa‘id fi al-‘Asrayn al-Mamluki wa-l-‘Uthmani al-Musamma bi Nur al-‘Uyun bi-Dhikr Jirja fi ‘Ahd Thalathat Qurun (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda, 1997); Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1987).

  15. On the 1820s revolts, see J.A. St. John, Egypt and Nubia (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), 378–81; and ‘Ali Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya al-Jadida li-Misr al-Qahira (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1994), 12:116–17.

  16. On the 1864 revolt, see Lucie Austin Duff-Gordon, Letters from Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1865), 341–71.

  17. See, for example, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, A History of Egypt: From Arab Conquest to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and the Arabic books published by Silsilat Tarikh al-Misriyyin during 1980s and 1990s in Cairo by al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab.