Introduction

The Introduction lays out the book’s central argument about territoriality. I argue that Egypt constitutes an important case study given that it assumed more territorial definition as a modern nation-state in the late nineteenth century despite the absence of demarcated borders or clear-cut cartographic evidence. I seek to challenge prevailing historiography on territoriality that emphasizes the salience of border treaties and authoritative representational practices such as mapping, by showing instead the range of mechanisms that undergirded the projection of centralized territoriality in the nineteenth century. This argument has implications well beyond Egypt: territoriality as practiced—which we can glimpse by uncovering the lived experience of territoriality across the variegated domains of state space—was always a multilayered process of negotiation between an array of state and nonstate actors.