“Ma'adi was a utopia,” Samia Zeitoun recalled during an oral history interview in November 2009. She went on to describe a life of cross-confessional harmony in the elite Cairo suburb, where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women breastfed one another’s children. Then, she continued, “our whole life was overturned with the creation of Israel.” Zeitoun then related the departure of her friend Carol Adas — “I’m never going to see you again,” she recalled saying. “What’s going to happen to us?” The emotion attached to the memory of Israel’s creation was potently real for Zeitoun and other Ma'adi residents who grew up in the neighborhood before and during World War II. The actual reason for Adas’s and other Ma'adi residents’ departure, however, was likely far more complex and perhaps far less political than adolescents could have comprehended at the time. Interpreting the memories of this period is particularly challenging because the creation of Israel and the 1952 Revolution have proven such potent flash points in Egyptian social memory. What has gone largely forgotten, however, is the reordering of Egypt’s economic relationships with the rest of the world, which also went on at this same time when the Capitulations were abolished in 1949. Because the Capitulations shielded foreigners from local taxes and the jurisdiction of local courts, their dissolution meant the emigration of large numbers of residents carrying foreign nationality, a disproportionate number of whom were also Jewish. My paper uses Ma'adi as a lens for identifying this other narrative of migration and border creation during the mid-twentieth century. Founded in part by members of Egypt’s elite Jewish community, Ma'adi became home to a well-to-do society of Europeans, Levantines, and Egyptians. As Zeitoun and others recall, the events of the postwar era transformed Ma'adi. I argue that transformation took place on terms that have been largely forgotten. Drawing from oral histories, immigration records, and other personal accounts, I argue that the end of Capitulations reordered Egypt’s upper middle-class society, helping to change the very meaning of the nation long before the establishment of Israel or the Free Officers Movement. By connecting the history of economic policy to the larger political events of the period, my paper addresses the importance of considering the impact of commercial relationships on migration, identity formation, and border creation.