Book contents
- The Nile Delta
- The Nile Delta
- Copyright page
- For Mona Abaza
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Call Me by My Names
- 3 The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
- 4 The Khetem-Border-Posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
- 5 New Land amongst New Rivers?
- 6 The Mareotis Area
- 7 From Memphis to Alexandria
- 8 Growing with the Empire? From Village to Town
- 9 Mapping the Cult of Christian Saints in the Nile Delta from the Fifth to the Ninth Century CE
- 10 Alexandria
- 11 Imperial Power, Tribal Settlement and Fiscal Revolts in the Early Islamic Delta (Seventh to Ninth Century CE)
- 12 The Nile as Nexus
- 13 Water and Prices
- 14 Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
- 15 The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200–1800
- 16 Just Passing Through?
- 17 Reclaiming the Archive
- 18 Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (ʿIzba) in the Nile Delta
- Index
- References
18 - Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (ʿIzba) in the Nile Delta
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
- The Nile Delta
- The Nile Delta
- Copyright page
- For Mona Abaza
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Call Me by My Names
- 3 The Nile Delta before the Pharaohs
- 4 The Khetem-Border-Posts in the Delta during the New Kingdom
- 5 New Land amongst New Rivers?
- 6 The Mareotis Area
- 7 From Memphis to Alexandria
- 8 Growing with the Empire? From Village to Town
- 9 Mapping the Cult of Christian Saints in the Nile Delta from the Fifth to the Ninth Century CE
- 10 Alexandria
- 11 Imperial Power, Tribal Settlement and Fiscal Revolts in the Early Islamic Delta (Seventh to Ninth Century CE)
- 12 The Nile as Nexus
- 13 Water and Prices
- 14 Water Development in the Medieval Western Delta
- 15 The Nile Delta in European Cartography, 1200–1800
- 16 Just Passing Through?
- 17 Reclaiming the Archive
- 18 Short Commentary on Accounting Documents from a Vanishing Cotton Estate (ʿIzba) in the Nile Delta
- Index
- References
Summary
Alarming decreases in cotton production have been reported over the last three decades due to neoliberal agrarian policies, agribusiness and shrinking areas of cultivatable land, among other factors. These changes underline the importance of creating an archive of knowledge about the production of cotton. Its history, the role of the state and the forms of hierarchical and exploitative divisions of labour need to be reconstructed and recalled as an exercise in nurturing the collective memory, for they are currently suffering a pervasive process of memory erasure by the powers that be. This short chapter is, in a way, an appendix to my book The Cotton Plantation Remembered (2013). It focuses on some ten documents derived from account books of the Fuuda family’s ‘izba located in Balamun in the Nile Delta, which accumulated wealth by acquiring massive tracts of agricultural land during the second half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is an attempt at attesting and reviving the significance of these account books for an alternative historical reading of such estates, as well as for rethinking what constitutes an archive.
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- The Nile DeltaHistories from Antiquity to the Modern Period, pp. 611 - 634Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024