HUMS 131 Predicted Long-Essay Questions Final

Thesis: Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) was foundational for modern colonialism because it fused military occupation with knowledge production, inventing the template of the "civilizing mission" - the dynamic Said calls Orientalism: knowledge as a form of power.

Chronological evidence:

• 1774 - the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca and Ottoman decline leave Egypt a virtually autonomous, unstable Mamluk state - the opening Europe exploits.
• 19 May 1798 - the fleet leaves Toulon; July 1798 it lands at Alexandria, and Napoleon's Arabic proclamation frames conquest as liberation in God's name. He wins the Battle of the Pyramids, but the real aim is cutting Britain's route to India and controlling the Mediterranean.
• 1 August 1798 - Nelson destroys the fleet at the Battle of the Nile, stranding the army, which then turns to ruling "scientifically": the Institut d'Égypte, and later the Description de l'Égypte (1809–29) with Fourier's preface ("from barbarism to former greatness") = cataloguing-as-possession. Tie to Said and to Passion in the Desert (the commissioned sketches).
• 1801 - a British-Ottoman force evacuates the French.

Twist/limitation: the "scientific" mission was occupation in disguise; it failed militarily and even strengthened Britain - yet its discursive legacy (how the West imagines the Orient) outlasted the defeat.

Thesis: Industrialization built the economic foundations of European world power (Kennedy), but that power rested on the immiseration of the working class at home (Engels).

Chronological evidence:

• late 18th c. - preconditions: banks/credit, rising agricultural productivity, and the enclosure movement creating a landless labor force.
• 1820 → 1852 - the railroad takes off (Britain ~100 mi in 1830 → 6,600 by 1852), catalyzing investment and metallurgy.
• 1833 / 1834 - the human cost: Britain bans factory work for children under 9 (1833); the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) confines the poor to workhouses. Film: Oliver Twist ("asking for more").
• 1848 / 1854 - critics respond: Mill rejects the invisible hand; Dickens' Coketown in Hard Times.
• 1856 → 1914 - the Second Industrial Revolution (Bessemer steel, electricity) drives prices down, builds the City of London's global finance, and lifts population from 290M to 435M (1870–1914).

Twist/limitation: "modernization = progress" is a half-truth - Europe's global ascendancy and its internal misery were the same process.

Thesis: The Greek Revolution shows nationalism replacing religion with ethnicity as the dividing line, and a "nation" being constructed after the fact - enabled by the Eastern Question and Great-Power intervention.

Chronological evidence:

• 1774 - the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (Russian protection of Orthodox Christians) opens the Eastern Question and forces the Ottomans into Western diplomacy, raising the Phanariotes and Greek merchants.
• 1814 - the Philiki Etaireia founded in Odessa spreads Enlightenment-inspired nationalism.
• 25 March 1821 - revolt begins (Bishop Germanos); reprisals follow - Massacre of Chios (1822), the Patriarch hanged. Source: Greek Declaration of Independence (1822); Mazower.
• 1824–1827 - Philhellenism (Byron dies at Missolonghi, 1824) pushes the Powers to act; Navarino (1827) destroys the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet.
• 1830–33 - the London Protocol (1830) and King Otto (1832–33) make Greece independent but a Great-Power creation.
• 1837 → 1844 - the nation is manufactured: the University (1837), conscription, Paparrigopoulos's continuity myth, and the Great Idea (1844).

Twist/limitation: Greece was liberated by the imperial powers, the nation was built by schools and rewritten history, and it provoked a counter-Turkish nationalism.

Thesis: Faced with the misery Engels documented, workers built independent political struggle demanding equality in wealth, not just law - crystallizing in the Paris Commune (1871) and splitting into communist and anarchist strategies toward the state.

Chronological evidence:

• 1840 - Proudhon, What Is Property? ("property is theft!") seeds the anarchist tradition.
• 1868–1870 - the late Second Empire revives socialist organizing (1868 meetings, 1870 strikes); the Franco-Prussian War brings the Republic (4 Sept 1870).
• 18 March – May 1871 - the Paris Commune: social legislation (secular schools, labor exchange, women's unions), symbols (red, the Vendôme Column). Film: Germinal (strike + repression).
• 21 May 1871 - Bloody Week crushes it (15,000–25,000 killed) down Haussmann's boulevards.
• 1882 / 1892 - anarchist theory matures (Bakunin, Kropotkin); communists (Marx/Engels) want to seize the state, anarchists to abolish it.
• 1892–94 - anarchist bombings (dynamite, Nobel 1868, "weapon of the weak").

Twist/limitation: the Commune failed but became the Left's founding myth and the Right's nightmare - and the course notes that "terror" began as state terror, which killed far more than the anarchists.

Thesis: The Haitian Revolution exposes the limit of revolutionary universalism: the "Universal Man" of 1789 excluded the enslaved, and equality came only through a slave revolution, against France's own resistance.

Chronological evidence:

• 1685 / by 1789 - the Code Noir (1685) and a racial order of up to 128 gradations of whiteness make race the structuring principle; ~500,000 enslaved face ~40,000 whites, all bound by property.
• 1788–1790 - the Society of the Friends of Blacks (1788) and its 1790 Address press for abolition against the Club Massiac.
• August 1791 - the slave uprising (Boukman) begins; Toussaint joins.
• 29 Aug 1793 / 4 Feb 1794 - Sonthonax abolishes slavery in Saint-Domingue; the National Convention abolishes it in all colonies.
• 1801 - Toussaint's near-independent constitution and "Final Proclamation."
• 1802–1804 - Napoleon sends Leclerc, re-authorizes slavery (20 May 1802), and arrests Toussaint (dies 1803); Dessalines wins → independence, 1 January 1804.

Twist/limitation: France abolished slavery only under armed pressure and tried to restore it - the universal was never universal until the enslaved seized it.

Thesis: Across the long 19th century Europe cast domination as liberation, science, and progress - an ideology that ran from Napoleon's Egypt outward and even inward into its own schooling.

Chronological evidence:

• 1798–1809/29 - Napoleon "regenerates" Egypt: the Arabic proclamation of liberation, the satellite-republic idea, the Institut d'Égypte and the Description de l'Égypte, whose Fourier preface frames occupation as a gift of civilization. Tie to Said (knowledge = power) and Passion in the Desert.
• 1837 - the same logic builds nations: Greece's University trains teachers in "national values," ranking cultures on a scale of progress absorbed from the Enlightenment.
• 1879–1881 - the ideology turns domestic: the Ferry Laws make schooling free, compulsory, and secular, with the explicit aims of instilling "imperial pride and racial superiority over indigenous peoples."

Twist/limitation: the rhetoric of civilizing and enlightening consistently masked conquest and control - "knowledge" and "progress" were instruments of power, not neutral goods.

Thesis: Industrialization reorganized European society top to bottom - creating new classes, a schooled and nationalized population, and segregated cities - even before it produced organized labor politics.

Chronological evidence:

• late 18th c. → 19th c. - enclosure and mechanization create a landless working class and draw people into cities; urbanization brings spatial segregation (the poor pushed to the periphery) and epidemics (a third of British deaths, 1848–72).
• 1834 - the Poor Law / workhouse reframes poverty as moral failure; a new "respectability" ties status to hard work, not birth - bankruptcy becomes a stigma. Film: Oliver Twist.
• mid–late 19th c. - the Second Industrial Revolution swells the middle and lower-middle classes (clerks, accountants, teachers, state officials) - roughly 15–25% of Western Europe.
• 1879–1881 / 1905 - education reforms (Ferry Laws; British 1880 compulsory schooling; 1905 French secularism) feed industry, cultivate nationalism against socialism, and break the Church's hold.

Twist/limitation: these transformations served the state as much as the economy - schooling and respectability disciplined the new society as much as they uplifted it.

Thesis: The course's pointed answer is that the label "terrorism" originally described state action, and that state violence against popular movements vastly exceeded anarchist violence - so the question reframes who the real "terrorists" were.

Chronological evidence:

• "The Terror" - the word originally named the French Revolution's state terrorizing of opponents; most victims of terror are victims of state terror.
• 18 March – 21 May 1871 - the Paris Commune and its crushing: in Bloody Week the state killed 15,000–25,000, women first, down Haussmann's boulevards built to suppress revolt. Film: Germinal (the strike crushed by troops).
• 1880s–1894 - anarchists, having "seen up close what state terrorism did," turn to "propaganda by the deed" (Kropotkin) and dynamite (the "weapon of the weak"); some target state symbols, loners like Émile Henry target anyone.
• the 1890s - anarchist attacks killed at most ~60 people; state terror killed 260 times that number.

Twist/limitation: anarchist violence was real and sometimes indiscriminate, but framing only the weak as "terrorists" obscures the far greater violence the state deployed to defend the social order.

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) was not merely a failed military venture but the foundational episode of modern European colonialism in the Middle East, because it fused military occupation with systematic knowledge production and invented the ideological template — the "civilizing mission" — that every subsequent colonial project would reproduce.

The campaign's military aim was strategic: cutting Britain's communication route to India and controlling the Mediterranean. But from the outset it carried something unprecedented — roughly 160 scholars, artists, and engineers alongside the 40,000 soldiers. When Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile (1 August 1798), stranding the army in Egypt, this scientific retinue became the campaign's real legacy. Napoleon founded the Institut d'Égypte in Cairo, whose scholars catalogued everything from Nile sediment to hieroglyphics, producing the monumental Description de l'Égypte (1809–1829). In its preface, Fourier framed the occupation as restoring Egypt "from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness" — disguising data extracted during military conquest as a neutral gift to learning. The Rosetta Stone, seized by the French and later taken by the British to the British Museum, is the iconic symbol of this process: the Orient's own past carried away, decoded, and displayed by the West. In Passion in the Desert (Currier, 1998), the artist commissioned to sketch Egypt's monuments literalizes this dynamic on screen — the Western gaze converting the Orient into an object of knowledge and aesthetic possession, exactly as Said describes.

Edward Said's argument in Orientalism is that this marriage of scholarship and conquest was not incidental but structural: to catalogue and represent the East is to control it. Napoleon's Arabic proclamation — claiming to act in God's name, framing the Mamluks as foreign oppressors, and offering "liberation" — became the prototype of every later colonial rhetoric of civilizing and liberating. The satellite-republic concept (colonies remade as France-modeled republics) generalized this logic. Lord Cromer's decades-long rule of Egypt after the British occupation of 1882 — justified by the same claim that Westerners understood Egypt better than Egyptians did — was a direct descendant of Napoleon's 1798 template. The French campaign thus established the essential pattern of 19th-century colonialism: military dominance wrapped in the vocabulary of science, progress, and liberation, making knowledge itself an instrument of empire.

Muhammad Ali (Mehmed Ali, r. 1805–1848) came to power in Egypt in the vacuum left by Napoleon's campaign and the British-Ottoman evacuation of 1801. An Ottoman Albanian military commander, he seized the governorship and systematically eliminated the Mamluk order that had ruled Egypt for centuries. His modernization project — documented in Khaled Fahmy's All the Pasha's Men — was the most ambitious non-Western attempt to match European power on its own terms, and its ultimate failure carries profound implications for understanding modernization and state-making in the 19th century.

The foundations of Muhammad Ali's program rested on three pillars. First, a modern conscript army — the central thesis of Fahmy's work — built by drafting Egyptian peasants (fellahin) rather than relying on enslaved or mercenary soldiers. This was revolutionary: it required a census, a bureaucracy, military schools, and medical infrastructure, meaning the army itself became the engine of state-building. Second, economic monopolization: Muhammad Ali seized control of agricultural production (especially cotton), eliminated intermediary merchants, and directed surpluses toward industrialization — textile factories, shipyards, and an arms industry. Third, educational and technical missions sent to Europe (especially France) to acquire Western expertise, producing a generation of Egyptian engineers, doctors, and administrators.

The implications are twofold. On one hand, Muhammad Ali's project demonstrates that modernization was not an exclusively Western phenomenon: an Egyptian ruler could adopt European methods — conscription, centralized taxation, industrial policy — for his own sovereign purposes, producing what the course calls an "alternative to Western dominion." On the other hand, his project ultimately failed. European powers (especially Britain), alarmed by his military expansion into Syria and Arabia and his threat to the Ottoman balance of power, intervened diplomatically and militarily to limit his autonomy. The 1838 Anglo-Ottoman trade convention and the 1841 Treaty of London stripped Egypt of its industrial protections and forced it into a raw-materials export economy. By the time his grandson Khedive Ismail borrowed massively to build the Suez Canal (opened 1869), Egypt was trapped in the debt cycle that led directly to the British occupation of 1882 — the dynamic that the film Suez (Dwan, 1938) dramatizes, albeit from a Eurocentric perspective that glorifies de Lesseps and erases Egyptian agency. Reading Suez against the grain alongside Fahmy reveals the course's deeper argument: that 19th-century "modernization" was not a neutral process but a field of power, and that state-making outside the West was systematically undermined by the very European powers whose model it imitated.

The 18th-century promise of "universal" rights was never truly universal — it was structured by property. The French Revolution's 1789 Declaration proclaimed the "Rights of Man," but the 1791 Constitution immediately divided citizens into "active" (property-owning men who could vote) and "passive" (everyone else). Property was the threshold of political personhood. The Haitian Revolution and the Paris Commune, separated by seven decades, each exposed this contradiction from a different angle — race and class respectively — and together they reveal that the struggle for genuine universalism required not just legal reform but the forcible overturning of property relations.

In Saint-Domingue, the collision was explosive because enslaved people were themselves property. Extending property rights to the enslaved would destroy the plantation economy. The racial hierarchy — codified into 128 gradations of whiteness — was not incidental but structural: it determined who could own and who could be owned. Free people of mixed heritage (mulattoes) occupied a contradictory middle position — they could own property (and enslaved people) yet were denied full political rights. Vincent Ogé's mulatto revolt of 1790 demanded inclusion in the property-owning franchise, not abolition. It took the mass slave uprising of August 1791 — led by Boukman, then shaped by Toussaint Louverture — to force France toward abolition (Sonthonax, 1793; the Convention, 1794), and even then Napoleon tried to reverse it in 1802. Haiti's independence (1 January 1804) proved that "universal rights" would not be granted — they had to be seized by those whom the property system excluded. 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013) gives this argument visceral force: Solomon Northup, a legally free Black man, is kidnapped and sold, demonstrating that property logic could override even recognized legal personhood.

The Paris Commune (March–May 1871) shifted the axis from race to class and gender. The Communards were working-class Parisians who, after the Franco-Prussian War, took power and proposed a society of equals not just in law but in wealth. Their social legislation — a labor exchange, abolition of night baking, nurseries for working women, recognized women's unions — directly challenged bourgeois property relations. Women's political participation was especially radical: women publicly voiced demands, organized clubs, and made the National Guard's uniforms. This is precisely why the backlash was so savage — during Bloody Week (21 May 1871), troops pouring down Haussmann's boulevards killed women first, because bourgeois ideology held that a politically active woman had ceased to be "respectable." The repression, which killed 15,000–25,000, was itself enabled by Haussmann's urban redesign under Napoleon III — wide boulevards built to suppress exactly this kind of popular revolt. Germinal (Berri, 1993) dramatizes the same logic in the mining north: the striking workers' demand for dignity is answered by military force defending the owners' property.

Together, Haiti and the Commune demonstrate the course's central argument: "universal rights" as proclaimed in 1789 were bounded by property, and the extension of those rights — to the enslaved, to the propertyless, to women — required revolutionary action that the existing order met with overwhelming violence.