Calculating Futures : Calculating Futures

This dissertation explores the social and material arrangements in which the cotton market emerged as an object of social scientific inquiry and liberal government in Egypt during the first three decades of the British occupation (1882-1912). This new figuration of the cotton market did not emerge as the natural unfolding of a universal modernity, economic rationality or the inherent logic of capital. Instead, as this study demonstrates, it was a much more earthly affair. In the wake of financial and ecological crises, the colonial elite allied themselves with economists to embed new technologies of calculation into the Egyptian countryside. In the process, they reconfigured what a market was.