Of Merchants and Nations: Foreign Trading Communities and Economic Nationalism What happens to foreign trading communities when economic nationalists come to power? Foreign merchants, differentiated in my study from citizens of colonial powers and political refugees, have travelled the globe in pursuit of economic opportunities for millennia. The question is: what happens to these foreign trading communities once economic nationalists, seeking to enhance the economic positioning of the majority national population, come to power? It is very important to study this question in an age of globalization with large numbers of foreign trading communities around the globe coupled with the current rise in popularity of economic nationalist leaders. To shed light on this question, I conduct a controlled case-study comparison. I compare the fate of the Greeks in Egypt in the aftermath of the 1952 Free Officers take-over, ending British colonialism in Egypt, and the fate of the Jewish community in Turkey at the dawn of the formation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, marking the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Nasser's policies led to the expulsion of the Greeks from Egypt whilst Ataturk's policies welcomed the Jews. In this study I rely on archival material, newspapers from that era, and a wealth of material from secondary sources. Although these two cases are historical they shed light on the actions of economic nationalists more generally within a historical moment in which economic nationalists came to power with clear policies towards foreign trading communities. Analysis of these cases has led me to the conclusion that economic nationalists will decide whether or not to expel a foreign trading community depending on that community's capital structure. A community's capital structure is determined on two dimensions: the amount of capital the community controls, and the class structure of the community. I argue that economic nationalists have the dual goals of seeking economic development through the acquisition of actual material capital and raising the general nationalist ethos through humiliating the once superior foreigners. In light of these goals, communities that are superior on both dimensions of the capital structure relative to the majority national population are more likely to be expelled than those inferior or equal to the majority nationals on both dimensions. Further research will explore what happens to communities who are superior on one dimension but inferior on the other, and test the validity of these conclusions in other cases.