Pascale Ghazaleh
EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Property of the People: The Battle for National Wealth and Citizens’ Rights in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt
Previous Fellowships: 2017/ 2018
Pascale Ghazaleh is an Associate Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. She specializes in Ottoman history and nineteenth-century Egypt. She received her PhD in History from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. She has published research on the social organization of craft guilds in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Egypt, and on the material culture and social networks of merchants in Cairo during the same period. During her time as a EUME Fellow, she will be working on a project about ownership practices and their relation to the constitution of national resources in late nineteenth-century Egypt. In the academic year 2017/18 and in summer 2019, she is a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and associated with the Center for Global History at Freie Universität Berlin.
The Property of the People: The Battle for National Wealth and Citizens’ Rights in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt
The process of state-building in Egypt during the nineteenth century involved a degree of brutality, as individuals experienced increasingly direct government in the form of military conscription, tax collection, recruitment for public works projects, and census-taking. Pascale Ghazaleh wishes to investigate whether the abstract idea of national resources as the basis of the national economy – viewed increasingly as an autonomous sphere in later years – developed as a response to various forms of expropriation to which citizens were subjected as part of a drive toward “colonial administrative-market unification,” in Benedict Anderson’s words. Rather than focusing on ways in which intellectuals from newly educated classes formulated this idea, I want to look at how different social groups laid claim to resources in the name of their Egyptian-ness.
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