This paper will examine efforts to abolish the practice of legalized prostitution in Egypt immediately after World War 1, the 1920s, and early 1930s, with particular attention to the works of European benevolence societies whose raison d’etre was the so-called White Slave Trade. Prostitution had been legal in Egypt since the late 19th centuries and during the war had been subjected to emergency regulations made possible under the declaration of martial law in November 1914. Martial law was lifted in 1919, and, despite considerable public opposition, prostitution remained legal. A legal complication presented itself through the continuation of the complex series of extra-judicial privileges for European citizens known as the capitulations regime, which remained in place even after Egypt’s nominal independence in 1922. European prostitutes and souteneurs were of particular concern to Egyptian authorities as prosecution, conviction, and deportation of European nationals accused was nearly impossible under the capitulations. Hence, much of the work undertaken rested in the hands of private and non-governmental organizations, many of whom were concerned with the so-called White Slave Trade, through which unsuspecting young women were supposedly lured away from Europe only to find themselves trafficked abroad and forced to work as sex slaves via a worldwide criminal network extending from Gibraltar to Japan. Here, I follow the work of Jean-Michel Chaumont, who has documented the ways in which the League of Nations task force set up to investigate the white slave trade inadvertently (or, perhaps, somewhat deliberately) manufactured its existence through a series of leading questions and misleading reports. As part of its attempt to demonstrate its role as a newly independent nation, Egypt became a prominent member of the League of Nations task force on the White Slave Trade, belying its own internal struggle to maintain public order and establish effective control over legalized prostitution in its own major cities. This paper will examine how Egyptian authorities attempted to deal with questions of public order, public health, and the jurisdictional complications involved with sex work, and introduce some of the myriad individual and community actors—each with their own slightly different goal—who helped and hindered efforts to regulate and eventually abolish prostitution in the country.

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s an opiate epidemic swept through Egypt, claiming nearly four percent of its population and precipitating a local response that shaped the development of global drug policy, control, and treatment. The Egyptian medical establishment reacted to this public health emergency by conducting a number of groundbreaking studies on addiction and rehabilitation, which uncovered, for example, the previously unknown connection between intravenous drug use and the spread of disease. Likewise, Egyptian security agencies approached the epidemic as a crisis in public order, developing a wealth of innovative anti-narcotics strategies and pioneering the use of new technologies to combat drug trafficking, such as metal detectors and tire deflation devices. As the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia all responded to similar, though less dramatic, increases in drug trafficking and consumption during the interwar period, this research spread across the globe, informed national security and public health discourse, and transformed Egyptian officials into narcotics experts. In recent decades, historians have challenged the centrality of the United States and Western Europe in the narrative of drug history. This paper adds to a growing body of scholarship focusing on the contributions of non-Western states in defining the trajectory of drug control and treatment in the twentieth century. Alongside the global influence of Egyptian narcotics expertise, this work also examines its local impact. In particular, it demonstrates how the prominent role that Egyptian research and representatives played in drug policy debates at the League of Nations fueled the country's growth as a regional diplomatic force. Simultaneously, this participation strengthened the position of Egyptian bureaucrats and politicians in their efforts to overcome the stringent fiscal austerity of the semi-colonial Egyptian state, build enforcement institutions like the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, and provide public health services such as treatment for drug addiction. This work draws on Egyptian police documents, League of Nations archives, and US State Department records, as well as the memoirs of administrators, doctors, and public health officials involved in the exchange of narcotics knowledge. Using these sources, it follows the diffusion of drug addiction, suppression, and rehabilitation research from Cairo to Geneva, New York, and beyond. Combining global and local approaches to modern Middle Eastern history, this paper illuminates the profound impact of Egyptian narcotics expertise on international drug policy, regional diplomacy, and national institutional development in twentieth century Egypt.

In October 1949, the Coptic Communal Council, al-Majlis al-Milli, failed to run elections as scheduled in the midst of conflict with the clergy. The following April, the Egyptian government intervened by dissolving the Majlis in favor of an appointed body and by amending its bylaws to allow for the Coptic Patriarch and the state to intervene in the case that future elections were delayed. This prompted controversy in the community, as supporters of the Majlis criticized the intervention for depriving the body of its democratic nature. However, opponents of the Majlis used the legislation to criticize the body for its aggressive posturing and to assert the authority of the clergy over the laity in communal affairs. This paper will consider the 1949-50 Majlis electoral crisis alongside the anxieties of late liberal era Egypt. Growing fears over Islamism, discrimination, and declining Coptic presence in government led many Copts to look to communal institutions for representation, and in turn articulate evolving interpretations of those institutions and the community itself. Based on the conversations that occurred in Egyptian parliamentary minutes and the communal press, I argue that the election crisis served as a flashpoint for various parties to lay claim to their own visions of community, in particular by focusing on communal representation, spheres of sovereignty, and the maintenance of order. While Coptic factions articulated competing civic and spiritual visions of the nature of the community, the Egyptian state used the crisis to draw communal governance further into its orbit of control and to construct its own preferred hierarchy of authority within the increasingly fractured community. My analysis of the electoral crisis complicates the predominant narratives in modern Coptic historiography that understand the 1952 Revolution as a historical rupture that broke the influence of the laity in communal affairs in favor of the clergy. The circumstances of the 1949-50 Majlis electoral crisis reveal that this process was already occurring in the pre-revolutionary state, and crucially, rather than a purely exogenous shock, proceeded in conversation with intracommunal debates. Ultimately, I reveal the critical role that Coptic institutions played in defining the nature of the community in a period of anxiety, as well as the ways in which communal tensions fueled state policies towards the Copts on the eve of revolution. These developments point to a continuous tendency to regulate communal structures in the name of order that transcends manifestations of the Egyptian state.