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.