Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands

This chapter opens with a brief overview of the historical geography of the Egyptian West, highlighting the diversity within the region’s human and physical landscapes. It then moves on to illustrate the uneven political geography of the Egyptian nation-state in the late nineteenth century by highlighting two salient themes: the persistence of legal exceptionalism in the western oases and other desert territories, even after Egypt’s state-wide judicial reforms starting in the 1870s; and the state’s fraught efforts to standardize its policy vis-à-vis Egypt’s bedouin population around the country. Both these themes illustrate the emergence of Egypt’s borderlands as enclaves of exceptionalism within the emergent Egyptian nation-state. Accordingly, the chapter questions prevailing notions of territorial sovereignty in the nineteenth century and argues against normative Euro-centric top-down frameworks for understanding the process of state-building in the period.