Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1882-1922 Shehab Ismail Submitted in Parti
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Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1882-1922 Shehab Ismail Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Shehab Ismail All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Engineering Metropolis: Contagion, Capital, and the Making of British Colonial Cairo, 1882-1922 Shehab Ismail This dissertation traces the transition of colonial Cairo from a marginal space to the British regime to an object of colonial governance and the site of technological and social intervention. It examines what caused this transition, how it shaped the spatial and social landscape of a booming metropolis, and how these developments produced and sustained opportunities, contradictions, and spaces for contestation and opposition. This dissertation challenges the current literature on British Cairo, which treats the colonial era (1882-1922) as a homogeneous expression of the regime’s retreat and of capital-led growth, by providing an account of the regime’s program of infrastructural reorganization and schemes of public housing and town planning. Because the literature largely ignores this history, it does not detect the colonial regime’s increasing discomfort at capital-led urban development or the regime’s late attempt to refashion its relation to capital and to take charge of Cairo’s future growth. The first part of this dissertation examines the pressures and crises that led to this transition. A protracted biological crisis that saw waves of cholera epidemics and high death rates underscored the need for constructing and improving infrastructures of sanitation and service provision. And capital’s forceful entry into the city led to a speculative property bubble, a housing crisis, and uncoordinated urban expansion, which made the disjointed framework of urban administration and the absence of regulations all the more evident. These crises made the colonial regime liable to critiques from elites, proponents, and certainly from the nascent anticolonial movement. The second part examines projects of sanitation and schemes of housing and town planning that the regime turned to since the beginning of the twentieth century and that embodied a changing approach to the city. During the latter two decades of the occupation, the colonial regime invested in upgrading Cairo’s water supply and constructing the city’s first sewage network. This dissertation traces not only how these infrastructural technologies worked but also how they became sites of contestation over power and knowledge. It examines the reception of infrastructures by urban dwellers across the social spectrum, the techno-social debates they occasioned among expert managers and designers, including above all engineers and public hygienists, and the social visions they embodied. Finally, the regime broached projects of public housing and town planning that constituted, in one sense, the culmination of a program of infrastructural reorganization, and in another, an attempt to give coherence to urban governance and assume leadership over the city’s development. By offering material improvement, these schemes were also meant to neutralize political discontent, which nonetheless erupted with the 1919 revolution. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures and Maps ii Measures and Currency iv Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 1. The Biological Crisis of Cairo 24 2. Housing the City: Health, Speculation, and Crisis 77 3. Conflict on the Nile: Taste, Technoscience, and the Water Controversy 140 4. Engineering Cairo: Sewers and the Social 211 5. Planning the City: Engaging Capital, Neutralizing Politics 290 Conclusion 350 Bibliography 357 i LIST OF FIGURES AND MAPS Orientation map, circa 1900 3 1.1. Cholera in Boulaq, 1883. 35 1.2. Cholera in Boulaq, 1883. 36 1.3. The Khalig Canal. 47 1.4. A Street in Sayyida Zainab after Rain, circa 1909. 50 1.5. Cholera Huts in Old Cairo. 67 1.6. The Khalig Canal in 1896. 68 1.7. Al-Azhar Cholera Riots in 1896. 70 2.1. Cairo’s Slums, circa 1880s. 82 2.2. ‘Eshash al-Kharboutli. 91 3.1. Map of water infrastructure, showing city limits, circa 1904. 149 3.2. A standpipe in Qobba, circa 1920s. 154 3.3. Advertisement for drinking water anti-bacterial drops. 161 3.4. Ataba Square, circa 1910. 162 4.1. Pneumatic cart belonging to the Cairo Sewage Transport Company. 223 4.2. Cairo Sewage Transport Company advertisement. 224 4.3. Longitudinal profile study for Baldwin Latham’s proposed scheme. 228 ii 4.4. Charles Carkeet James. 245 4.5. Map of the sewage system. 249 4.6. Advertisement for the Shone ejector. 251 4.7. Pipes at the background of a donkey market in Cairo. 256 4.8. Water allowance in 1907 and projected allowance in 1932. 269 4.9. Number of applications for connection to public sewers, 1914-1931. 283 5.1. Two copies of Grand Bey’s map showing Faggala and Daher. 316 5.2. Plate from Barois’ map and urban survey. 318 5.3. Index map for Cairo, 1:1000. 322 5.4. Plans showing method of numbering houses. 325 5.5. Density map of Cairo. 330 5.6. Major streets, circa 1920s. 332 5.7. Plan showing two areas for future development, 1921. 336 5.8. Housing scheme at Abbasiya, 1921. 337 5.9. Alexandria town planning scheme, 1919. 342 5.10. Housing scheme for the poor in Alexandria, 1919. 344 5.11. William McLean’s development diagram. 345 iii MEASURES AND CURRENCY LE = 100 piasters = 1000 milliemes LE = £1. 0s. 6d. French franc = approximately 3.80 piasters 1 imperial gallon = 4.546 cubic liters 1 feddan = 1.038 acres = 4200 square meters iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have incurred many debts in producing this dissertation. Marwa Elshakry has been a patient and supportive advisor. Her perspective on the history of science and technology and on Middle Eastern history guided me during the course of research and writing. This dissertation would not have been possible without her generous feedback on papers, rough drafts, and chapters. This project goes back to an eye-opening conversation with Khaled Fahmy in New York in 2008, when he first alerted me to the spatial consequences of mid-nineteenth century theories and practices of public health. And when I embarked on this project a few years later, one of the most challenging tasks was to remain attentive to the continuities and discontinuities between the mid-nineteenth century Cairo that he studied and the turn of the century city that I explored. Khaled also introduced me (and countless other historians) to the Egyptian National Archives. I am fortunate to have Timothy Mitchell on my committee. His theoretical insights and his comments on chapters made an impact on my scholarship. And I am grateful for the opportunity to work with two historians working on New York. Elizabeth Blackmar introduced me to new ways to study the urban landscape and to questions of housing and its commodification. Gergely Baics’ empirical rigor and use of Geographic Information System (GIS) to analyze historical cities are inspirational. His close reading and exhaustive comments on chapters are much appreciated. I learned much from conversations with Pamela Smith, Deborah Coen, David Rosner, and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan. Kind thanks are due to Robert Vitalis, Eve Troutt Powell, and Anne Norton from the University of Pennsylvania. I owe Bob more than I can put in words and I am grateful that he brought Mike Davis’ City of Quarts to my attention early in graduate school. Eve’s generosity made this v dissertation possible. My earliest thoughts on this project go back to an independent study with her when we closely read parts of Ali Mubarak’s Khitat. The financial and practical support for the research and writing of this project came primarily from Columbia University’s Department of History and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A Mellon grant from the American Council of Learned Societies made possible the last phase of writing. I received support from more people than I could recall at numerous archives and libraries including the Egyptian National Archives, the National Archives of the United Kingdom, and the Archives of the Institution of Civil Engineers (London). I am thankful to Engineer Adel Hasan Zaki from the Greater Cairo Sanitary Drainage Company for providing permits to access the records of the company and to visit many of the historical sites of Cairo’s colonial sewage network. I am thankful to Ahmad Shokr, Omar Cheta, On Barak, Ceyda Karamursel, Murad Idris, Pascale Ghazaleh, Begum Adalet, Mohammed Ezzeldin, Jeremy Dell, Sarah El-Kazaz, Jon Argaman, Aimee Genell, and Dale Stahl for their support and feedback. I survived graduate school thanks to the camaraderie of Adrien Zakar, John Chen, Ulug Kuzuoglu, Rahul Sarwate, Angela Giordani, Owain Lawson, Natasha Pesaran, Allison Powers, Samuel Fury Daly, Ibrahim El- Houdaiby, and Nada Khalifa. The research and writing of this dissertation coincided with momentous events in the life of Egyptians including myself. I entered the graduate program at Columbia months after the revolution of January 2011. And I began archival fieldwork in Egypt in mid-June 2013, two weeks before the military coup of June 30. During the months following the coup, I mostly stayed in my neighborhood as many revolutionary comrades did in order to avoid arrest, harassment by security forces or Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, curfews, and carnage—the Rab’a al-‘Adawiya vi massacre being the biggest and most dreadful. During these rough months and years when our hopes and our very sense