On the Semi-Civilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo

This book provides a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped sovereign futures for those deemed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire.

Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance, it rethinks catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo.

Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and violence.

Looking at the world from this perspective allows a shift to embodied infrastructures and collective lives.

It offers a new vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized/primitive” divide.