Railways as a developing form of infrastructure in Egypt necessitated operations of sufficient capital to meet the high costs of initial construction and equipment purchases, especially because of the fact that Egypt had no history of relevant railway industries in the second half of the 19th century. From a macro-economic perspective, external capital investment drove the rail network towards rapid expansion; and conversely, when capital depleted, the railway system fell into a series of structural difficulties and sought new sources of investments. Railways in Egypt, from the very beginning, relied almost exclusively on khedival government’s expenditures. Therefore, on the eve of the government bankruptcy, the colonial institutions of the Caisse de la Debt Publique and the railway administration transformed the state-owned railway into a venture that generated a steady return of profits for the fundamental purpose of repaying Egypt’s public debts. This chapter reviews how Cromer’s “machinery of government,” ironically by using government institutions and regulations, enforced a self-alleged liberal template of the railway economy, including a balanced budget and privatization, yet ultimately centralized administrative control over the railway’s finances for the benefit of European creditors. The article also reveals the double-dimensional impacts that resulted from the foreign intervention of the railway economy. On the one hand, the state-owned railway was restricted by a rigorous expenditure cap that forestalled the system’s development, including new line construction, equipment upgrade, and localization of technical knowledge. Although the state railway pushed towards more frequent traffic at full capacity, providing fare reduction for passengers and freight, and appeared on the surface to be prosperous in total revenue under the colonial administration, it was unable to keep up with the newest global trends of railway technology and to meet the growing demands from its local population. On the other hand, the stagnancy in the railway’s public sector provided full opportunities for European business magnates, who invested in the emerging transportation systems of urban tramways and agricultural railways. Their assets and influence, as will be discussed in the following chapters, raised competing visions and concerns within diverse groups in the Egyptian populace, who grew increasingly aware of their country’s colonial status.

In 1856, the Ottoman Empire granted a concession to a group of British entrepreneurs to establish a rail line between the city of Izmir and the provincial market town of Aydın, linking one of the major ports of the eastern Mediterranean with the fertile western Anatolian interior. Following the initial jubilation and excitement surrounding the establishment of the first railway in Ottoman Anatolia, early years of construction for this railway were marred by a succession of unrelenting failures. Ranging from allegations of land speculation and financial mismanagement to engineering ineptness, the mishaps of the Izmir-Aydın railway became a ‘most lamentable reflection on the British name,’ and resulted in a rebalancing of the power dynamic with the Ottoman hosts. The building of Izmir’s second railway, to Kasaba, in comparison, went well. Juxtaposing the early histories of these two lines – one characterized by failure while the other progressed smoothly– helps to lay bare the multiplicity of agencies manifested in the production of railway spaces within the Ottoman Empire.

How do the concrete materiality of infrastructures, and the gossamer web of legal and institutional arrangements in which they are enmeshed, shape infrastructure’s role in processes of capital accumulation? Scholars like Timothy Mitchell have recently contended that the physical durability of infrastructure is central to its role in capitalization over time. Yet as Mitchell and other scholars have long argued, the concrete materiality of infrastructures can derail the projects that they concretize. Moreover, the value that infrastructures embody is also contingent on much less concrete – but no less real – processes like real estate speculation and legal-institutional arrangements such as insurance. Therefore, while infrastructures often serve as sites of investment for long-term capital accumulation, and are sustained in this role by insurance policies designed to mitigate against risks to accumulation, infrastructures’ material qualities and legal-institutional entanglements can also render their value precarious and threaten capital’s ability to maintain and realize that value. This paper closely examines an insurance dispute over the Beirut Holiday Inn adjudicated at the Southern District Court of New York following that hotel’s destruction in the Lebanese civil war. Real estate projects like the Holiday Inn played key roles in the diversification strategies of oil-exporting states like Kuwait and mashriqi capitalists like ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Qattan, serving as sites for the reinvestment of oil wealth to provide stable long-term returns that were ostensibly guaranteed by their material durability and legal-institutional arrangements such as commercial real estate insurance policies. Such projects therefore served as important components of investment strategies for oil-derived capital, as investments in real estate constituted a hedge against oil price fluctuations and the anticipated depletion of oil reserves. Yet the materiality of the Holiday Inn also produced unintended crises for capital accumulation, pulling it into parallel military and legal battles. The hotel’s physical durability and scale – qualities that were central to its utility as a long-term investment – also rendered it strategically critical to warring militias at the opening of the Lebanese civil war in 1975-6. The Holiday Inn’s physical destruction, and the attempt to recover its value, produced a transnational legal controversy on which its value depended. Thus while the Lebanese civil war spurred capital flight from the built environment of Beirut, this capital was nonetheless entombed in the physical form of infrastructures like the Holiday Inn and entangled in the transnational webs spun by U.S.-based insurance companies and the U.S. legal system.

This paper aims to situate new research on Iranian state banks’ cybersecurity posture within the wider discourse on digital financial infrastructure in Iran, which has tended to link the security of financial institutions to social stability and has highlighted security as a central concern in the development of digital banking. This research is particularly relevant in light of the widely reported exposure of millions of Iranians’ bank card data in late 2019, which presumably had a major impact on trust in online banking. The Iranian economic ministry’s Deputy Director of Stock Exchange, Bank, and Insurance, Abbas Memarnejad, later commented, "Banks are facing challenges in the transformation to digital banking and the implementation of smart services, which vary between public and private banks, and between small and large banks, which ultimately make all aspects of this sector a necessity." Given the relationship between perceptions of security and customer adoption of digital banking, and in light of the state’s digitization efforts, I propose to complement the extant research on online banking in Iran by studying banks’ online security, comparing the security of the Central Bank of Iran and nine other state-owned banks to a control group of Turkish state-owned banks. I will base this assessment upon data furnished by cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant, which measures security across three categories: vulnerabilities and hygiene, threats, and compromises. Vulnerability and hygiene data will furnish information regarding devices on bank networks and enumerate domain and server vulnerabilities affecting the banks studied. I will use BlueVoyant’s adversarial observation dataset to assess threats to the banks in question, which highlights potential threats to the entities studied by recording potentially malicious inbound traffic to their domains. BlueVoyant’s malicious intersection dataset will furnish the data for compromises of bank systems, which could reveal if any bank IP addresses have been observed distributing spam or malware, engaging in phishing, or participating in a botnet. These results could offer particularly valuable insights when paired with the above-cited discussions of public opinion regarding online banking in Iran by offering data against which claims regarding bank infrastructure security can be measured.