Multiscalar Nations: Cartography and Countercartography of the Egyptian Nation-State

Summary

The visible opening introduces Karen Culcasi’s examination of how maps constructed and contested Egyptian national identity after the country’s nominal independence in 1922. The chapter proposes a critical reading of official and unofficial maps and atlases produced and used in Egypt, tracing nation-building processes across intersecting supranational, national, and local scales. The introduction observes that Egypt’s early postcolonial national discourse emphasized modern anti-imperialist, pan-Arab, and pan-Islamist movements, while its Pharaonic past and Ottoman connections received less prominence. It treats scales as spatial frameworks produced through competing, changing discourses and processes, and explains how boundaries, place names, territorial symbols, and administrative knowledge help define, legitimize, and govern nations. The opening also states that early postindependence map production largely emerged from established British cartographic institutions in Cairo. As Britain’s neocolonial relationship weakened in the mid-twentieth century, subsequent maps altered Egypt’s national narrative; the chapter announces an examination of how pan-Arabism affected representations of Egypt and neighboring Arab countries. The supplied ending consists solely of references and does not reveal the detailed case analyses or chapter conclusions.