Excerpt from The Cadastral Survey of Egypt: 1892-1907 The annual grant was increased to admit of additional staff being employed, as the work was greatly hindered in Upper Egypt, where the land lay under the waters of the inundation for nearly three months, and where measurements in the field were consequently impracticable from the middle of August to the middle of November. Only by working at high pressure and by adopting every device which might save time was the work completed Within the term specified. This period corresponded, too, with one of rapid expansion in many Government departments, so that no little difficulty was experienced in obtaining employees who possessed any but the most elementary education; in fact, ability to read and write Arabic and to do simple arithmetic were the only qualifications demanded of those who were recruited for training as land-measurers. All these were Egyptians, and several English inspectors to direct and supervise were the only Europeans employed in the work of the chain survey. A few Euro peans were employed in the Central Computation Office, and others in the Drawing Office, where the preparation of topographical maps on scales of l and l was carried on, but the whole of the cadastral field work, the minor triangulation, the autographic reproduction of the cadastral maps, and most of the computation was carried out by Egyptian employees under the English inspectors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

While the twentieth century’s conflicting visions and exploitation of the Middle East are well documented, the origins of the concept of the Middle East itself have been largely ignored. With Dislocating the Orient, Daniel Foliard tells the story of how the land was brought into being, exploring how maps, knowledge, and blind ignorance all participated in the construction of this imagined region. Foliard vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from “the East” or “the Orient.” In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today. As they reimagined boundaries, the British produced, disputed, and finally dramatically transformed the geography of the area—both culturally and physically—over the course of their colonial era. Using a wide variety of primary texts and historical maps to show how the idea of the Middle East came into being, Dislocating the Orient will interest historians of the Middle East, the British empire, cultural geography, and cartography.