Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wilson Chacko Jacob is an Assistant Professor of History at Concordia University, Montreal.

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WORKING OUT EGYPT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Note on Transliteration...................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................TP1ξTP1TC1[Introduction]TC1 1Chapter One Imagination: Projecting British Masculinity...................................27Chapter Two Genealogy: Mustafa Kamil and Effendi Masculinity..............................44Chapter Three Institution: Physical Culture and Self-Government...........................65Chapter Four Association: Scouting, Freedom, Violence.....................................92Chapter Five Games: International Culture and Desiring Bodies.............................125Chapter Six Communication: Sex, Gender, and Norms of Physical Culture.....................156Chapter Seven Fashion: Global Affects of Colonial Modernity...............................186Chapter Eight Knowledge: Death, Life, and the Sovereign Other.............................225Notes.....................................................................................263Bibliography..............................................................................359Index.....................................................................................409

Chapter One

Projecting British Masculinity

Rarely has public opinion in Eng land been so deeply moved as when the news arrived of the fall of Khartoum. The daily movements of the relief expeditions had been watched by anxious multitudes of General Gordon's countrymen, yearning for news of one who seemed to embody in his own person the peculiar form of heroism which is perhaps most of all calculated to move the Anglo-Saxon race. When General Gordon's fate was known a wail of sorrow and disappointment was heard throughout the land.—EVELYN BARING, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt

The imperialism of the last third of the nineteenth century, which ignited the scramble for Africa, heightened the Great Game, and incited anticolonial nationalisms, was a highly complex phenomenon involving multiple actors and events, and even today occasions debate among historians. Some are revisiting old arguments—in favor of empire—that it seemed had been put to rest by the culmination of anticolonial movements around the world half a century ago. These arguments will not be rehearsed here. The concern of this chapter is an image central to the justificatory claims of imperialism in the period of high colonialism in the late nineteenth century that has reemerged in the current post–cold war twenty-first century: the masculine Western subject as heroic savior.

The narrative of salvation, which had a somewhat longer genealogy, became an increasingly normal aspect of English and French colonial projects during the Victorian age, even though it had detractors from the very beginning and was critiqued as largely disingenuous by those who were ostensibly to be saved. Nonetheless, it came to serve as a powerful ideological tool in the service of justifying empire at home to metropolitan populations that were beginning to identify as national subjects and were becoming increasingly active in the domain of politics carved out by liberalism. In the multilayered iconography of imperialism being produced from the second half of the nineteenth century within an expanded liberal political framework, the heroic Englishman was a privileged figure. The appearance of this icon was every bit as material as imperial architecture, for example, and just as effective in representing an official image of empire.

The Englishman was densely fashioned, an ornament, "hierarchy made visible, immanent and actual," in David Cannadine's language. He was not being sold to the British public only: the secret of his success was investigated and the results disseminated in France, Egypt, and elsewhere. The constitution of his manly character—physical and moral—was hailed as the model for individual and national progress.

The Sudan campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s popularized as household names, in Britain as well as in Egypt, two exemplars of this ideal: General Charles Gordon (1833–85) and General Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916). As the epigraph vividly suggests, the intersections of Gordon's life in particular with Britain's imperial adventures tell a fascinating story of how masculinity was shaped and might in turn shape policy and play a crucial role in the composition of a national drama.

By the 1880s, Gordon had achieved a certain level of popularity through his participation in the Crimean War and later in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion, which earned him the nickname Chinese Gordon. He was the product of an age in which the "muscular Christian" model of masculinity became popular. The possession of a Christian morality defined by charity, self-sacrifice, and purity combined with physical fortitude was supposed to create a new man who would be successful in all of his domains—family, nation, and empire. The rapid expansion from around midcentury of sports, physical culture activities, and youth groups such as the Boy Brigades evinced the impact of this model.

By the end of the century, an important perspective emerged that regarded the empire as being in a state of decline. The evidence had been building from the Indian rebellions of 1857 to the Afghan Wars, the successes of the Mahdi's army in Sudan, and the Boer War. These signs of imperial weakness, ironically coming to a head at the time of Britain's greatest expansion, served to consolidate a sense of national degeneration and to reaffirm the need for programs of masculine regeneration on an ever larger scale.

Within this context, images of proper masculinity—sometimes represented by an earlier generation of sturdy men like Gordon and other times by a new breed reared on scientific principles, or a mix of the two—were being circulated by the popular press through newspapers, magazines, and novels. Often-cited examples are Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1856), the adventure stories of H. Rider Haggard and G. A. Henty, and boys' magazines like The Boy's Own Paper and Chums. By the end of the century, eyewitness accounts from the scene of imperial battles became a highly popular journalistic genre. The young Winston Churchill contributed reports to British papers from Cuba, India, South Africa, and Sudan. His dispatches on the reconquest of Sudan were collected and published as The River War in 1899. The heroic Englishman was a globetrotter if nothing else.

The number of published materials issued during and after the Sudan campaigns is astonishing. A quick search of works in English of varying genres, including travel narratives, official reports, speeches, opinions, histories, ethnologies, biographies, memoirs, novels, poetry, illustrations, and sheet music number well into the hundreds for the 1880s and 1890s. And as Cromer noted, the British public, "the Anglo-Saxon race," was hooked on these narratives (prosaic, poetic, and musical apparently) of spectacular heroism. The proliferation of new images of masculinity in the last third of the nineteenth century was the product of a number of social and technological transformations...