News, Leaks, and Propaganda in Modern Egypt

with Chloe Bordewich

hosted by Maryam Patton

| In times of conflict, state governments can be especially sensitive about protecting secrets. When new technologies are involved, like the telegraph, confusion over how exactly it functions and whether it is secure invite new debates over the nature of knowledge and what the public has the right to know. In this episode, Chloe Bordewich discusses her research about news, leaks, and propaganda in modern Egypt. By highlighting a particular court case around the turn of the 20th century involving leaks of sensitive military information and telegraph operators, Bordewich shows how Egypt was at the center of a global story involving the Egyptian public's right to knowledge, new technologies, and the pressures of colonialism.

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In times of conflict, state governments can be especially sensitive about protecting secrets. When new technologies are involved, like the telegraph, confusion over how exactly it functions and whether it is secure invite new debates over the nature of knowledge and what the public has the right to know. In this episode, Chloe Bordewich discusses her research about news, leaks, and propaganda in modern Egypt. By highlighting a particular court case around the turn of the 20th century involving leaks of sensitive military information and telegraph operators, Bordewich shows how Egypt was at the center of a global story involving the Egyptian public's right to knowledge, new technologies, and the pressures of colonialism.

Contributor Bios

	Chloe Bordewich is a postdoctoral fellow in public history at Boston University. Her research focuses on empire, technology, and the control of information in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt.
	Maryam Patton is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. She is interested in early modern cultural exchanges, and her dissertation studies cultures of time and temporal consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Credits

Episode No. 543

Release Date: 6 May 2023

Recording Location: Cambridge, MA

Sound production by Maryam Patton

Music: Aḥmad al-Ajamī - Tawshīḥ yā ghazālā

Bibliography and images courtesy of Chloe Bordewich

Further Listening

	Arthur Asseraf	295 1/23/ 17	The Politics of News in Colonial Algeria
	Ahmet Ersoy	309 3/30/17	Everyday Life and History in Ottoman Illustrated Journals
	Aaron Jakes	475 9/7/20	Nationalism and Capitalism in British-Occupied Egypt
	Hoda Yousef	247 7/11/16	Literacies and the Emergence of Modern Egypt
	Khaled Fahmy	180 12/20/14	Law and Order in Late Ottoman Egypt
	Eve Troutt Powell	283 11/25/16	Narratives of Slavery in Late Ottoman Egypt
	Pascale Ghazaleh	449 2/11/20	The Language of Protest in 19th Century Egypt

Images

Masthead of the newspaper al-Mu'ayyad at the time it printed the leaked telegram from Sudan in July 1896 

Morse receiver from the book Telgrafçılık (1895) by Mehmet Ali.

Select Bibliography

ʿAbduh, Ibrahim. Tarikh bi-la Wathaʾiq. Cairo: Muʾassasat Sijill al-ʿArab, 1975. 

Asseraf, Arthur. Electric News in Colonial Algeria. Oxford: University Press, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Barak, On. On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. University of California Press, 2013

Bayly, C. A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Blair, Ann, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, eds. Information: A Historical Companion. Princeton: University Press, 2021.

Douin, Georges. Histoire Du Règne Du Khédive Ismaïl: L’empire Africain, vol. III, pt. 1-3. Cairo: L’Imprimerie de L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, for La Société Royale de Géographie d’Égypte. 

El-Ariss, Tarek. Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age. Princeton: University Press, 2019.

Jamal, Shawqi ʿAta Allah, ed. al-Wathaʾiq al-Tarikhiyya li-Siyasat Misr fi al-Bahr al-Ahmar, 1863-1879. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Lajna al-Bayan-al-ʿArabi, 1960.