This paper asks how the management of death enabled the British in Alexandria to negotiate an everyday role as both local residents and a foreign community after the 1882 occupation. It demonstrates how regulations surrounding the bureaucracy of death helped delineate boundaries of governance and belonging immediately following the British occupation of Egypt. Using the records of postmortems performed on British subjects from 1882-1914, my paper shows that the postmortem process simultaneously included the British community under Egyptian governmental control while excluding it within a separate, specifically British domain. Moreover, by focusing on the management of death, I challenge historiographic understandings of the British occupation and subsequent decades as a time of rupture in Egypt. Instead, I uncover the continuity of Egyptian government encroachment on and control of the lives (and deaths) of all residents of Egypt, including the British, even after the 1882 occupation. The bureaucracy of death served as a luminal space through which the living population could demonstrate loyalty and belonging. Although the colonial ruling community, British court records show that British subjects included a large, mostly poor Maltese community as well as Britons from all social classes. Rather than rely on Egyptian governmental surgeons, the British community – both before and after the 1882 British occupation – performed its own autopsies and issued its own death certificates. While the British consular surgeon reported to the British consulate, he also reported to the Egyptian national and Alexandria municipal governments. Through the consular surgeon, the British community both fulfilled the public health requirements of the Egyptian government while accounting for and processing their dead in specific communal space. I argue that these processes and choices were not self-evident. The handling of the post mortem was of the utmost importance, not only in terms of the medical or criminal knowledge gleaned from the corpse, but also due to the living left behind. Having the postmortem handled by members of one’s community was a guarantee that the community would continue to provide for its members, both in the case of helping to bury one’s loved ones and in burying oneself. At the same time, the post mortems were often at the request of and always under the regulation of the Egyptian government, ensuring that the population at large, whether considered foreign or local, fell under the same rules and regulations in the state’s monitoring, processing, documenting and preparation of its dead.