ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how cultural theory has impacted on history and to evaluate its ambiguous legacy. One consequence of cultural theory identified by Nora is a new attention to the idea of reflexivity. The chapter examines the interaction of a variety of factors, including warfare, agricultural change, hydroelectric power and disease, in the technological modernisation of the Egyptian state and society in the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, the chapter focuses on the spread of malaria through the arrival of the gambiae mosquito from Sudan in 1942, resulting in an epidemic that killed over twice as many people as the battle of Al-Alamein, fought elsewhere in Egypt in the same year between the British and German armies. In the second part of his argument, however, Mitchell shows how the same systems that helped to spread the malaria epidemic also contributed to its cure.
