The Egyptian and Mediterranean city of Port Saʿīd, founded in 1859, soon became a stop-over in the global trajectories of goods as well as of laborers, migrants, and travelers. By 1865, 7,000 people were living there. In 1869, when the Suez Canal was officially inaugurated, it could already count on 10,000 inhabitants. By the late 1880s, the coastal dwelling had gained the fame of an odious, dreadful, and sad “sand-bordered hell” where strangers passed by in search of amusement. Many houses of ill-repute and gambling dens could be found in its alleys. While the dramatic growth of this maritime town lays bare a number of historical processes -the presence of migrant labor, both Egyptian and foreign, the vehemence of Europe’s commercial and strategic interests, and the role played by “technological imperialism” (Headrick 1981; 1988)- my paper will specifically focus on the 1870s and 1880s. It will describe the ways in which laws and crime were tied to this burgeoning urban space. It will search for whatever and whomever was criminalized or deemed “out of place.” It will explore the rationale for regulation and surveillance as well as people’s responses to them. Thanks to Egyptian, British, French, and Italian archival sources of various kinds, I will analyze the physical settings and the urban arrangements of “crime” and “immorality” in Port Saʿīd as primary documents to understand the city’s social layout. Through the lens of “vice,” I will unearth the ways in which authorities of various kinds attempted to control the urban space and its denizens. By spanning the time before and after the British occupation in 1882, my paper will include a host of locally, nationally, and internationally-based actors: Egyptian public officials, French investors, and British occupiers. At the same time, I will bring into view the ways in which inhabitants vied to assert or preserve their relative positions of influence within this port-city. Overall, my paper intends to show how the production of urban space in a turn-of-the-century Middle Eastern port-city was explicitly centered on the regulation of public spaces, social control, and racial exclusion. It aims at providing a nuanced approach to empire in late-19th-century Egypt. And it strives to de-center and displace Egyptian history by situating a provincial center in the reach of the historical spadework.