Fallahin on Trial in Colonial Egypt: Apprehending the Peasantry through Orality, Writing, and Performance

This dissertation explores the experiences of Egyptian peasants from the Delta province of Minufiyya who were tried for murder by newly created "native" or "national" courts between 1884 and 1914. Through the study of 2,000 pages of criminal files, I deconstruct how the colonial state used the modern techniques of judicial orality, writing, and performance, both to justify a series of reforms that turned the entire legal process into a parody of justice, and to develop a grand narrative that essentialized peasants as revengeful, greedy, and passionate and ultimately linked their alleged immorality to their illiteracy. Furthermore, my work sheds light on how peasants reacted to this process of moralization of the law by promoting the "honor of the brigand" through violence and poetry. Finally, by focusing on the many petitions contained in the judicial files, my dissertation provides new insight into the development of a "vernacular" culture of the law that betrays the peasants' awareness of the highly political nature of the legal process. By presenting and analyzing an untapped wealth of Egyptian archives produced by the native courts, this research not only sheds invaluable light on the workings and hence the very nature of British colonial justice in Egypt, but also represents a significant advance in the knowledge of the origins of Egypt's current legal system. On a more theoretical level, this study also constitutes an important contribution to the reflection on the subaltern subject initiated by Rosalind O'Hanlon and Talal Asad, by showing how the peasants' agency paradoxically lies in their "disempowerment."Ph