State of Siege: The Development of the Security State in Egypt during the Second World War.

This work examines the Egyptian experience of World War II, the development of an Egyptian-run constitutional state of emergency in response to economic and social crises during the war, and their effect on postwar support among diverse political groups for an active and even authoritarian state. This constitutional framework, based on French état de siège laws of the 19th century, became a routine institution after 1945. Egyptian Cabinet papers illustrate the process through which the Prime Minister’s office created state of siege legislation. These new laws and policies granted the Egyptian state strong police powers to imprison spies, saboteurs, and protesters without charges, along with those accused of stealing from the British army. The state of siege also included broad powers to regulate labor, to nationalize and subsidize the trade in wheat and bread and to suppress the resulting black market. The dissertation argues that this legal framework anchored new modes of surveillance and social scientific knowledge to material practices and institutions that provided continuity in crisis. These institutions were particularly important in the diplomatic colonialism of the British military occupation. They enforced legal jurisdictions and spacial zones and boundaries that microsocial interactions were always in the process of breaking down. I emphasize both inertia and change in relations of power through dynamic institutions: such as the police, food supply bureaucracy, labor unions and their surveillance, public finance and customs and nationality regimes. Focusing on the intellectual and bureaucratic underpinnings of these institutions helps explains events conventionally understood through social and political discontinuities: British decolonization and the creation of the postcolonial Egyptian state. This analysis is the first to establish the early genealogy of the legislation, bureaucratic practices, and public discourses that institutionalized and legitimated a new form of authoritarian rule and legality in Egypt, which continued in the 1958 Emergency Law and military trials for civilian crimes in the present day.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107172/1/eschewe_1.pd