Scholars looking to produce a “history from below” narrative of late nineteenth-century Egypt have interrogated court, police and other institutional records. The research has begun to cast a light on what non-elites, the poor, women and other marginalized groups went through daily. Yet, there is a glaring lacuna when we approach the scale of the built environment and how individuals used space. This study applies a unique methodology by using consular court records from the British consulate in Port Sa‘id in tandem with Suez Canal Company (SCC) archival material on street inspections, hygiene and health and general policing in the Suez Canal cities. As others have shown the consular court records offer a new view of the subaltern and their interaction within the urban environment, which move the scale of analysis from empire to the street. Individual interactions with the consular court came about primarily because of a criminal complaint that led to the involvement of police and then subsequently consular officials, because either the defendant or both were a subject of the British empire. These documents demonstrate the various ways in which residents interacted with one another on the street. The mention of specific public spaces or streets allows the urban historian to locate these cases on the urban landscape. For instance, a street fight between an Egyptian and a Maltese resident at a prominent promenade offers us a sample into how the physical environment was used. Furthermore, the repetition of popular locations supplies the historian insight to which areas were popular with residents, tourists and passersby, as well as locations which received the gaze of the police authorities. Additionally, the documents from the SCC detail the policing of the urban to curb the shopkeepers, café owners and fruit-sellers from further impinging on the streetscapes of the city. This was an intentional attempt to restrict, control and order the physical appearance of the roadways. The disciplinary vantage point of maps etch clean lines and make sterile urban environments, yet both sets of documents, consular court and SCC archival material, offer exciting new ways to complicate our understanding, and moves us towards a more nuanced, urban history.

“The stenches make you feel bad,” a visitor quipped about Port Said in 1871. The Egyptian port-city, the Suez Canal’s northern harbor, had been hastily erected on reclaimed land after the excavation of the Canal had taken off in 1859. A number of different Egyptian and “foreign” communities led supposedly separate lives in its “Arab village” and its “European quarter.” Not only did technical difficulties affect the development of the town’s sewage system, but Port Said’s urban segregation also obstructed the system’s functioning. In the early stages of the town’s development, I argue, perceptions of dirt were contingent on ideas of social worth. Smell became yet another instrument to socially engineer the urban space. I approach Port Said as a site where local and global expertise and experience converged and at times clashed (cit. Gamal-Eldin). On the one hand, I examine the decade-long discussions and negotiations between the Suez Canal Company and the Egyptian administration, in their search for a solution to the town’s growing quantity of refuse. On the other hand, I take into consideration the lived experience of those dwelling in the port-city, dodging its trash, and skipping its filthy puddles. Overall, I explore the ways in which Port Said figured conspicuously within the Egyptian eco-system of smells. And I argue that the filth associated to some of its inhabitants depended on the class, “race,” and gender they seemingly belonged to. In sum, I write a social history of the technology uncoiling above and below the ground of Port Said. I rely on both archival and published sources gathered in my multi-sited fieldwork. On the heels of other historians’ lead, I question the role of vision and privilege olfaction in assessing changes in urban history. I thus hope to contribute to debates about sensory history that are mounting within and outside modern Middle East history. Moreover, by connecting the history of refusal disposal in Port Said with the history of sewage elsewhere, I approach Port Said and the Canal region comparatively.

Ismailia is an Egyptian modern city situated midway along the Suez Canal, the renowned waterway linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. It is considered to be the eastern gateway of Egypt connecting the African and the Asian continents. The city was developed in the nineteenth century, following a French archetype, in collaboration with the French, who were in charge of the operation of the Suez Canal, to serve as the headquarters of the Suez Canal Authority and to house its mainly French and European staff. With the passing of time, the city was transformed, due to the gradual increase of the local population and the relentless encroachment of public housing, into an amalgam of “French” and “Egyptian” urban schemes. More recently, due to the 1973 war, the reconstruction of the city extended to include new districts. These post-war sporadic developments adopted a different planning scheme that didn’t follow the original colonial plan of the city and that reflected the policies which were employed at that time by the Egyptian government. This paper is an historical study, which tracks the urban transformations that took place in Ismailia, from its formation in 1863 as a colonial city and until the turn of the twenty-first century with a special emphasis on the post-war developments. The study will analyze how the city identity had been shaped by the evolution and transformation in its urban morphology. It also explores the changing demographics of the city corresponding to this urban change. It uses literature review, historical cartography and historical and contemporary photography as a study method to map how the city expanded from its original French plan to its recent urban extension. Since, Ismailia has rich layers of historical context, it serves as a good example in which the evolution and cultural transformations of urban spaces can be traced and understood.

This paper examines the history of primary education in Suez in the late nineteenth century within the broader context of schooling in Egypt. I focus on the case of the Italian primary school in Suez, attended by Egyptian and Italian students, as well as pupils of other foreign nationalities, and compare it to those of Zagazig in the Delta, and of Alexandria. In doing so, I aim to account for the local specificities of educational institutions in the Suez area, while simultaneously locating it within broader regional trends that both connected it and distinguished it from schools in other Egyptian industrial and urban locales. Education, I maintain, offers a unique entry point to account for the different modes of interaction and tension between local and foreign communities in Egypt at the turn of the century, as dependent on their geographical location, the longer histories of these locales, and their role within the broader context of political and cultural relations across the Mediterranean. Drawing on consular archives and correspondence, statistic records, and Arabic and foreign press, I examine how practical, pedagogical, and political exigencies shaped the life of the students of the schools. On the one hand, I detail how daily life in the schools unfolded, and the rationale behind their specific pedagogical choices. I look at the organization of the classes, and how schooling and social provision varied due to the communities’ different socioeconomic standing – for example, for the families of “sailors and factory workers” in Suez, of blue collars in Zagazig, and those more affluent of Alexandria. On the other hand, I document key differences in the schools’ curricula, and specifically with respect to language education – such as the importance given in Alexandrian schools to education in French and English, rather than to Arabic in Suez and Zagazig – and in the different ratio of Egyptian and foreign pupils within their student bodies. Ultimately, by looking at the history of these communities through the prism of education, my paper aims to uncover the multiple experiences and multidirectional modes of interaction, privilege, and economic and cultural discrimination experienced by Egyptian and foreign children, along with their families and local communities. I thus seek to position the case of Suez locally and within broader regional realities of ideological promotion, overlapping political sovereignties, and social and legal hierarchies, as these were crystallized in the case of primary education.