That ’modernity' is not simply a Western export to the rest of the world has been much noted recently. Only rarely, though, has the relationship between local and global, colonizers and colonized, and the West and ’the rest' in the production of modernity been so rigorously explored as it is in Timothy Mitchell's new book, Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. With precise, careful analysis of such phenomenon as the economy, capitalism, and expertise, Mitchell illuminates how the world in which we live came to acquire its particular shape.

Perhaps the best way to describe the contents of the book is by way of the subtitle, as each of these terms is a focus of Mitchell's investigation. As a book about Egypt, Rule of Experts offers tremendous insight into the forces that have shaped its modern conditions, both colonial and post-colonial. Mitchell traces transformations in Egypt's property regimes, in its agricultural production (and related food consumption), and in its market structures. Central to this narrative is an investigation of capitalism that, as Mitchell suggests, seeks to “take more seriously the variations, disruptions, and dislocations that make each appearance of capitalism . . . something different” (248). In tracing this appearance in Egypt, the book provides new understandings of the conditions of globalization.

Rule of Experts is an important contribution to the literature on modernity. Its most forceful aspect is the discussion of the place of ’the real' within this configuration. Mitchell develops arguments from his earlier book, Colonising Egypt, to argue that modernity is distinguished by new ways of dividing up the world into the real and the representation, and that this division enables new ways of governing and living. He takes issue with a purely constructivist view of this production and urges us to take both sides of the division seriously, to see them both as crucial to a new politics of “techno-science.”

Mitchell's analysis of techno-politics, “which claimed to bring the expertise of modern engineering, technology, and social science to improve the defects of nature, to transform peasant agriculture, to repair the ills of society, and to fix the economy” (15), is a particularly impressive part of the book. He details how new forms of expertise, new modes of knowledge, and new styles of intervention into the natural and social worlds reconfigured Egypt. Rule of Experts is, then, an investigation of the social sciences, and an important one at that. At the heart of this line of analysis is Mitchell's claim (contra Foucault) that “the economy” is a product of the twentieth century. He argues persuasively that it was not until the 1950s that the economy as a discrete object, “the realm of a social science, statistical enumeration, and government policy” (81) was fully realized.

These themes are traced throughout the nine connected essays which make up the book (some of which have been previously published). In each essay sophisticated theoretical analysis is developed through consideration of detailed empirical material. Due in part to this careful intertwining, Rule of Experts is not only enlightening, but also a pleasure to read. This book will be an important one both to students of Middle Eastern history and society and to critically-minded historians and social scientists more generally.