Nurturing the Nation : The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923

Focusing on gender and the family, this erudite and innovative history reconsiders the origins of Egyptian nationalism and the revolution of 1919 by linking social changes in class and household structure to the politics of engagement with British colonial rule. Lisa Pollard deftly argues that the Egyptian state's modernizing projects in the nineteenth century reinforced ideals of monogamy and bourgeois domesticity among Egypt's elite classes and connected those ideals with political and economic success. At the same time, the British used domestic and personal practices such as polygamy, the harem, and the veiling of women to claim that the ruling classes had become corrupt and therefore to legitimize an open-ended tenure for themselves in Egypt. To rid themselves of British rule, bourgeois Egyptian nationalists constructed a familial-political culture that trained new generations of nationalists and used them to demonstrate to the British that it was time for the occupation to end. That culture was put to use in the 1919 Egyptian revolution, in which the reformed, bourgeois family was exhibited as the standard for "modern" Egypt. Frontmatter List of Illustrations (page ix) Acknowledgments (page xi) Note on Translation and Transliteration (page xv) Introduction (page 1) 1. My House and Yours: Egyptian State Servants and the New Geography of Nationalism (page 15) 2. Inside Egypt: The Harem, the Hovel, and the Western Construction of an Egyptian National Landscape (page 48) 3. Domesticating Egypt: The Gendered Politics of the British Occupation (page 73) 4. The Home, the Classroom, and the Cultivation of Egyptian Nationalism (page 100) 5. Table Talk: The Home Economics of Nationhood (page 132) 6. Reform on Display: The Family Politics of the 1919 Revolution (page 166) Conclusion: It's a Girl! Gender and the Birth of Modern Egyptian Nationalism (page 205) Notes (page 213) Bibliography (page 257) Index (page 277) Focusing on gender & the family, this text reconsiders the origins of Egyptian nationalism & the revolution of 1919 by linking social changes in class & household structure to the politics of engagement with British colonial rule