On May 20, 1921, widespread uprisings erupted in the mixed working class/petit bourgeois neighborhoods of Alexandria, Egypt. Native workers supported by low-ranking police officers attacked Greeks, Italians, and Levantine Christians, destroying homes, shops, and municipal infrastructure. In response, Greeks, Italians and high-ranking colonial police officers shot back at native crowds from the windows of buildings and cars. This paper looks at this episode of subaltern violence as a pivotal moment in the history of cosmopolitan Alexandria, arguing that the violence was a product of tensions between workers and the petit bourgeoisie sparked by the effects of wartime colonial exploitation. I use a variety of legal proceedings, statistics, and media reports from this period to show that these tensions formed at the intersection of race, class and religion as both unemployed native workers and foreign shopkeepers moved into these neighborhoods at an unprecedented rate during and after the war. This rapid pace of migration placed a strain on housing and resources, pushing native workers into makeshift homes on the outskirts of the communities. The spread of wage labor after the war, combined with growing linkages between the formal and informal economy, exacerbated these tensions. In the wake of the riots, British colonial administrators launched a new town planning scheme in Alexandria that mapped class relations onto the urban landscape. Middle class enclaves were created in the form of suburbs, parks, public gardens, theaters, and sporting arenas, and an emphasis was placed on increasing spatial visibility through the construction of wider streets and avenues. Through an analysis of the role of both local actors and colonial administrators in the processes of urbanization and suburbanization, this paper engages with the work of critical geographers such as David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre to explore the relationship between the production of space and social formation in early interwar Alexandria. Using a combination of legal proceedings, statistics, media reports, and the 1921 Alexandria town planning scheme, this paper bridges the gap between a bottom-up and top-down analysis of class formation by theorizing it as a simultaneously socioeconomic, political and spatial process guided by both local and colonial interests.

The introduction of perennial irrigation in Egypt during the early nineteenth century, and its extension following the construction of the 1902 Aswan dam (khazān Aswan), transformed the environments comprising Egyptian agriculture. In perennially irrigated regions of Egypt, soil became waterlogged and increasingly saline; imports of artificial fertilizers increased dramatically; the cultivation of crops such as cotton introduced new calendars of labor and interactions with the material environments that comprised agriculture. The temporal frameworks, ecological changes, and intensified labor regimes of perennial irrigation also produced new experiences of disease, specifically pellagra, ancylostomiasis (hookworm), and bilharzia. By the early twentieth century, the incidence of the two infections that cause bilharzia – Schistosomiasis haematobium and Schistosomiasis mansoni – and that of hookworm well exceeded half of the population of the Nile Delta, meaning that environmental disease had come to constitute normative experiences of the physical body in some regions of Egypt. This paper considers the nature of colonial space and its production at the scale of the body, pursuing the following questions: First, what does it mean to think the production of agricultural space as both colonial and environmental? Second, how do we account for the (newly) diseased and spatially situated bodies of Egyptian cultivator-laborers in formulations of colonial subjectivity in Egypt? Finally, how does a serious consideration of ecology and its role in the production of space unsettle the historiographical narrative of Egypt’s colonial history? Historians of the Atlantic world have theorized that the arrival of a host of Old World diseases, including smallpox, that devastated New World communities predated that of invading Spanish and Portuguese forces. In Egypt, colonial economy and the environmental changes that it spurred began in the decades before the British formally occupied Egypt. Critical geographer David Harvey has argued that to think space in its complexity, one must consider the manner in which “space and time are internalized within matter and process.” Working from this observation, the paper explores the contributions of the non-human material world in the production of colonial spaces, including those of the body, in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt.

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.

The campaign of massive public works projects, initiated by Meḥmed (Muḥammad) ‘Alī with the construction of the Maḥmūdiyya Canal (1827), was continued throughout the long nineteenth century with projects like the construction of the Suez Canal (1869) and the First High Dam at Aswan (1902). Each step along the way, young men from the Egyptian countryside were recruited via contracting and corvée to do the actual work of construction. Based on the insights of critical geography, this paper argues that these seemingly discrete projects were actually part of the long-term process of “the production of logistical space” in Egypt. This paper analyzes this process in an effort to learn more about the functioning of the British colonial state in Egypt and the nature of subaltern agency, through a close study of the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians—many of them illiterate workers and peasants from the countryside—to serve as logistical laborers in the Great War (1914-1918). It investigates the following dimensions of this little-known episode in the history of Egypt: First, how were global trends and influences from throughout the British Empire brought to bear on the decision making processes of the British colonial state in Egypt? Second, how did the experience of (transnational) migration influence the formation of political subjectivity for workers, peasants, and their families? And finally, how can we shift the scale of our analysis of the social history of Egypt during this period to take into account these integrated, transnational fields in which rural Egyptians were operating? In answering these questions, this paper represents an effort to clarify two important issues that have been muddied by historiographical debates. First, it attempts to recoup a place for the military dimensions of colonialism and the mutual dependence of military and commercial personnel and ideologies in British colonial governmentality. Second, it builds on efforts to transcend the epistemological impasse facing studies of subaltern agency, which are alternately trapped between romanticizing the totalitarian state and the resisting subject, by examining the transterritorial politicization of rural spaces in the course of labor recruitment. This paper argues that looking at the relationship between the production of logistical space and formations of political subjectivity in rural Egypt provides us with an opportunity to revisit and reinterpret British colonialism, subaltern consciousness, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.