Great Social Laboratory

Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

• @fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgmentsiii Note on Transliterationiii Abbreviationsiii @toc2:Introduction: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Knowledge Production1 @toc1:IThe Anthropology of the Modern Egyptians: From the Fin-De-Si'cle to the Second World War @toc2:Chapter 1The Ethnographic Moment000 Chapter 2Anthropology's Indigenous Interlocutors: Race and Egyptian Nationalism000 @toc1:IIFrom Ethnographic Realism to Social Engineering: The Problem of the Peasantry, 1925-1945 @toc2:Chapter 3The Painting of Rural Life000 Chapter 4Rural Reconstruction: The "Road to a New Sanitary Life"000 @toc1:IIIThe Problem of Population, 19251945 @toc2:Chapter 5Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: the Emergence of Population Discourse000 Chapter 6Body Politics: Gender, Reproduction and Modernity000 @toc1:IVThe Revolutionary Moment @toc2:Chapter 7Etatism: Theorizing the Revolutionary State000 Conclusion000 @toc4:Notes000 Bibliography000 Index000

"This excellent and well-researched book recounts the formation and application of colonial knowledge—especially of ethnography, human geography, and demography—in the attempts to modernize and govern Egypt. It makes a significant contribution to the important debate about colonial modernity that has so far been largely confined to India."—Talal Asad, City University of New York, author of Formations of the Secular "The Great Social Laboratory is a brilliant study of the tension between imperial projects and nationalist imaginings. Examining the ways in which colonial Egypt became a site and object of social scientific knowledge, Omnia El Shakry offers a seminal contribution to debates about the place of colonialism in the development of modern science."—Timothy Mitchell, New York University "Omnia El Shakry's contribution is a rich and erudite one. It draws on a range of archival sources in Arabic, French, and English, offering original readings of texts and political events of Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. Her argument is eloquent and the evidence compelling. The Great Social Laboratory is an essential addition to courses across the critical social sciences and humanities."—Journal of Middle East Women's Studies