2025 Theses Doctoral

Colonial Carcerality: Prisons and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1882-1954

El-Shafei, Alaa

This dissertation reconstructs the colonial origins of the contemporary Egyptian penal system. It analyzes colonial carcerality as a mode of rule that posited prisons as the solution to overlapping economic and social crises. Under the heading of “good government,” the British occupation of Egypt produced a sprawling system of mass incarceration comparable, in proportional terms, to the most intensive anywhere in the world over the long twentieth-century.

Drawing on sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and English, the dissertation tells the story of the Egyptian penal system from the perspective of its chief actors: the prisoners who suffered its degradations, the guards who surrounded them, and the officials who sat atop the prison hierarchy. It shows how incarcerated Egyptians theorized carcerality itself as a colonizing force, a pattern of lawless and unaccountable government replicated across core state institutions.

Colonial prisons served a paradoxical role, as both a cornerstone of colonial domination and a crucible for resistance against it. On one hand, prisons consolidated imperial rule; they underpinned a punitive legal system, provided the labor that built the colonial state’s signature infrastructure projects, and suppressed democratic possibility. Yet these same features turned prisons into a site for reimagining political liberation. Prisoners’ resistance infused anticolonial activism with new purpose and helped bring down the colonial order. Through prisons, ordinary Egyptians and anticolonial activists developed new ideas about citizenship, gender, and race, as well as justice and liberation. Prisons were central to making the modern nation.