Amr Khairy - Chimneys on the Horizon: Labour and nature in Upper Egypt's Sugar Factories of the 1870

This talk will be hosted on Thursday, 26 September 2024 at 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

Thirteen per cent of the collective Egyptian debts between 1863 and 1874 were spent on establishing some of the world’s most advanced sugar factories between Bani-Suef and Qina, and a similar percentage was spent on building infrastructures of irrigation and transportation for the factories to function.

In this talk we hear about their story and how inside their walls of brick, glass, and steel – and on the sugarcane fields – coerced labour turned into paid labour. This transformation passed through the workers resistance: strikes and production slow-downs, decades before the time historians identified as the moment of the formation of a working class in the country.

The process was extremely taxing for humans and nature alike, mainly because of the nature of the mass production of white sugar that these mega factories demanded. It ushered in industrial capitalism to the nature and people of Middle and Upper Egypt. Those cutting-edge edifices of steam-power modernity had their engines and furnaces ignited precisely at the moment when the state declared bankruptcy, a few years before the British occupation.

This presentation is part of a project that accounts for how industrialization – and by extension the age of global warming – arrived to pre-colonial nineteenth-century Egypt, by investigating the social history of energy and technology.

About the speaker:

Amr Khairy Ahmed holds a PhD in human ecology-environmental history (Lund University) and is a postdoctoral fellow at the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology (IFAO). He researches social and cultural histories of energy and technology in nineteenth-century rural Egypt, from the interdisciplinary perspective of Anthropocene History. His ongoing projects include questions of solar power for agriculture in contemporary arid environments, and the conceptual history of macroeconomics and engineering in Egypt.

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. We work on a first-come, first-served basis as the number of seats is limited. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier when the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.