The Animal in Ottoman Egypt

Moreover, the increasingly strict definitions of social spaces in Egypt that began with the removal of garbage and dogs from Cairo and Alexandria would be further refined in the nineteenth century to enclose criminals, the infirm, and the conscripted in various state institutions. Thus through parallel technologies of rule, conceptions of life, and state practices, certain humans came to be treated in the same ways nonhuman animals had before them.

replacing animals with humans in the economy of rural labor in Ottoman Egypt made possible, both conceptually and materially, the later replacement of humans with machines.

Second, animal histories offer new insights into the global transition of early modern rural societies into state bureaucracies—a development that occurred throughout the world between approximately 1750 and 1850.

First, animal histories matter. They are fundamental to understanding any society at any time. Animals were everywhere in the past and help us to understand historical processes and phenomena as disparate as public health, commercial agriculture, trade, bourgeois cultural sensibilities, labor history, religious conceptions of humanity, and violence.

22 In these colonial hierarchies, nonhumans often stood above certain kinds of (nearly always non-European) humans.

At the turn of the twentieth century, there were numerous other instances of Britons beating Egyptians for mistreating animals—examples of human violence against other humans to protect nonhumans.

Many British anti-cruelty advocates in colonial Egypt expressed their animal welfare politics through violence toward human animals: “thrashing a camel-driver who had ill-treated his animal,”

Lord Cromer, the highest British colonial official in Egypt and staunch upholder of the white man’s burden—a man who clearly believed in the inferiority of non-European humans—was a strong advocate for the rights of animals in Egypt.

Modern psychologists and sociologists of violence have long observed—as did Thomas Aquinas centuries before them—that human violence against animals is often the first step toward human violence against other humans.5 Taking the long view of this idea, known as the progression thesis, shows that the historical processes that made possible mass violence against humans in the nineteenth century, the cordoning off of spaces throughout Ottoman Egypt, and the strict definitions of productive social and economic realms were part of deeper, slower, and more complex trajectories in the early modern human-animal relationship.

Such disciplining forms of governance thereafter served as the primary mediator of these people’s relationships to the rest of society. “The people of Egypt,” in Timothy Mitchell’s words, “were made inmates of their own villages.”1 Mehmet ʿAli’s state and those of his successors built prisons, conscription camps, quarantine regimes, hospitals, schools, asylums, and police stations in ways unprecedented in Egyptian history.2 All of these institutions—which, of course, regularly faced resistance to their illusory efforts at control—were charged with managing living creatures deemed socially useless or economically unproductive. This process was first worked out in the field of human-animal relations.3 As countless animals came to be defined as no longer socially, economically, or politically productive, they were killed, caged, or physically removed from society. The nineteenth-century Egyptian state did much the same to its human population.