The Animal in Ottoman Egypt

Moreover, the increasingly strict definitions of social spaces in Egypt that began with the removal of garbage and dogs from Cairo and Alexandria would be further refined in the nineteenth century to enclose criminals, the infirm, and the conscripted in various state institutions. Thus through parallel technologies of rule, conceptions of life, and state practices, certain humans came to be treated in the same ways nonhuman animals had before them.

replacing animals with humans in the economy of rural labor in Ottoman Egypt made possible, both conceptually and materially, the later replacement of humans with machines.

Second, animal histories offer new insights into the global transition of early modern rural societies into state bureaucracies—a development that occurred throughout the world between approximately 1750 and 1850.