Multiscalar Nations: Cartography and Countercartography of the Egyptian Nation-State
- Publication
- Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation
- Pages
- 252-283
Egypt · Version 1
1928Karen Culcasi examines the 1928 Atlas of Egypt as a national cartographic project shaped by Egypt’s nominal independence and its continuing relationship with Britain. Produced by the Survey of Egypt with the ministries of Public Works and Finance, it contains thirty-one color plates covering the country. Its five departmental sections differ in style, scope, scale, symbols, place names, and boundaries. Culcasi interprets its delineation of national territory, royal coat of arms, and presentation at the 1928 International Geographic Congress in Cambridge as assertions of nationhood and scientific capability, while noting that it contains no explicit nationalist or independence rhetoric. She also identifies continuing colonial ties: the text is entirely English, the principal cartographers were British, and only two Egyptians—the editor Hussein Sirry Bey and the binder Mohammed Amin Bahat Bay—were acknowledged as contributors. She suggests that its audience was non-Egyptians and Egypt’s small English-speaking elite. Drawing on Monmonier, she notes its attention to industrial development and plantation crops such as cotton, alongside its neglect of water resources and local agriculture that could have supported economic independence.
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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.
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