Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth-century Egypt

Abstract

This chapter focuses on protests surrounding weighing and measuring in nineteenth-century Egypt. Such protests continued throughout the century and came mainly in the form of petitions to the authorities from merchants, retailers and buyers, as well as weighers and measurers themselves. My initial objective was to ask whether these protests represented a genuine form of resistance to forms of exploitation, or were they simply part and parcel of the hegemonic reproduction of Egypt’s ruling order. But it was impossible to overcome the difficulties attendant on defining genuine resistance. Authentic counterhegemony remains seemingly in the eye of the beholder, and depends on an observer’s prior commitment to a set of values or a historical metanarrative which can allow the specification of truly liberatory practice. The goal of this chapter therefore became how to continue to use the valuable concepts of hegemony and counterhegemony, which have allowed historians and others to understand the operations of power in far more sophisticated ways than models which speak simply of either oppression or legitimate authority, in default of some quasi-divine insight into human nature and social meaning. On this basis, the petitions and protests I studied became an illustration of a form of successful hegemonic articulation or hegemonic deepening, involving the identification — in a particular sense — of diverse social interests at specific linguistic and practical sites.