Infrastructures of the Semicivilized Available to Purchase

The chapter turns attention from infrastructure writ large to channels of mobility and finance that are key to the semicivilized condition and to the making of the social infrastructures and embodied commons of Cairo. Global financial markets in the East predate nineteenth-century capitalism in the West. Drawing on ethnography, history, and critical financial studies, the author tracks shifts in channels of finance and mobility in Cairo and the region during the Ottoman Empire and its demise, the building of a “public sector” in Egypt in the 1960s, and the military-led financialization of property in Egypt in the 2020s. The chapter offers a stark picture of accelerating debt crisis, hyperinflation, and the financialization of national wealth quietly transformed into assets controlled by the military and outside investors.