Intimate disputes, illicit violence: Gender, law, and the *state in colonial Egypt, 1849--1923.

This dissertation examines the multiple ways in which the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ottoman-Egyptian and British state exercised its authority over its male and female subjects. As I argue, this authority was enunciated through new colonial institutions, bureaucratic regulations, and hybrid social intermediaries that simultaneously created and reaffirmed conflicting ideas of sexual difference. Using Arabic and British legal records, as well as non-legal sources such as popular memoirs, travel narratives, and colonial administrative reports, I demonstrate how the different inter-ethnic actors living in the city and the countryside responded to the colonial state's encroachments in their intimate disputes, and the various litigious approaches that they used to contest and appropriate new legal definitions of violent behavior. Whether they were rural peasants or working-class Europeans, non-elite actors engaged actively with the colonial state through a number of complex legal strategies based on material ideas of family, masculinity, domestic space, and sexual respectability. These strategies, in turn, manifested themselves most explicitly in violent crimes such as homicide, sexual assault, and other spectacles of physical violence. Violent crimes and other displays of violence occurred in a range of settings between different social groups during this period, and illustrate the importance of gendered notions of familial and state authority. This dissertation therefore posits an alternative approach to Egyptian social history that foregrounds material conceptions of family and sexuality, inter-ethnic relations, domestic space, and the economic nature of colonial violence by drawing on primary research conducted in the national archives and legal libraries of Cairo and London. By examining the fluid manner in which non-elite denizens navigated the intimate disputes and illicit violence of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egyptian society, the following work offers a different interpretation of local and official understandings of law, gender, and the state in colonial Egypt.Ph.D.Middle Eastern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124550/2/3150080.pd