Serious studies of the provinces as important centers of education, knowledge, culture have only recently emerged in American academia. Generally, Egyptian history has overly represented Cairo’s role in the modernization project and has cast the Delta and Upper Egypt as rural space or defined provincial Delta cities as subsidiary to the core in Cairo. Delta cities such as Tanta played an important role in urban development, the global economy, national politics, religion and public health, but has remained largely unstudied. In fact, from the 1850s to the 1890s, Tanta, the largest city in the Egyptian Delta appeared in print media throughout the world outside of Egypt as an epicenter of Cholera. Medical journals, periodicals and missionary tracts reproduced the death tolls from the 1848 Cholera epidemic that killed 3000 in Tanta. Collectively, colonial administrators, missionaries and physicians pigeon-holed Tanta as an epicenter of Cholera that threatened to spread the disease westward. While the 1848 cholera outbreak shaped how the many outside of Egypt understood Tanta, the government in Cairo response to the 1848 epidemic changed over the course of the 19th century. Initially, the Cairo-based government appointed a chief medical examiner, made changes to the streets that surrounded the mosque and made public health a priority. The changes to the arterial streets and provisions to make Tanta a safer city fit within the larger objective of urban development in the city. What followed was the development of a public health system that sought to compete with a local system that blended both “folk” healers and modern medical practitioners such as physicians, pharmacists and nurses. This paper will explore this period of development and examine the ways that locals embraced, negotiated and changed modernization efforts at the local level. It hopes to show that the relationship between Cairo and Tanta was dynamic and local realities affected public health efforts in a much greater way than has been previously understood.

Biographical dictionaries have long been a part of Arabic culture. For reasons to be discussed, there are more of these for modern Asyut than there are for most other Egyptian cities. The paper to be presented revolves around these books and how they should be read and around the larger implied question of why Asyut produced more of them than other cities did. This last part of the paper relies on what is called in geography “secondary city” theory. Cairo is of course the primate city. An early example of a biographical dictionary tied to Asyut is the 1917 Kinz al-thamin lil-`uzama’ al-Misriyin . It was composed by Faraj Sulayman Fu’ad, a journalist, who was born in Asyut and worked later in Cairo. The work contains information about many people in Asyut and Upper Egypt, bits on Asyuti politics as seen by someone rooted there but who was drawn to Cairo after WW 1 but curiously not to the Wafd. Faraj Sulayman Fu’ad admired Muhammad Farid, and he worked with Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Kinz al-thamin is to be contrasted with a series of biographical dictionaries put out in more recent years by the former Asyut governor, Muhammad Raja’i al-Tahlawi. These appear to be more directed toward the nation and the world and less toward activities in Asyut per se beyond the recording of various individuals births. By the 1960’s, many people from Asyut had reputations from their careers in Cairo. The paper offers another rationale that in the Asyuti elite thinking following our single best- known source, `Uthman Fayd-Allah, Madinat Asyut (1940)(2010) combined with what we know of the migration of the elite in the interwar period, the 1920’s was the city’s golden age and so more recent achievements there are not looked at in the same way. A third genre of biographical dictionaries which cover Asyut are those spinning off the more recent Cairo-centered reference works such as Al-Dhahab al-manqut fi ta’rikh a`yan Asyut (2008 )by Muhyi ad-Din al-Tu`mi. The paper builds on earlier scholarship by MESA scholars Reiker and Whidden, who have worked with some of the same materials, but argues for a different kind of reading based on the use and adaptation of Secondary City theory.

This paper provides a historical analysis of violence and riots that broke out in the Egyptian town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra in 1925 and how the riots were represented in the nationalist narratives. What became known as the al-Mahalla Intifada, al-Mahalla Revolt, started with a protest against the wide scale fraud of the parliamentary election. The protest grew violent and caused destruction to the commercial and the upper scale residential neighborhoods where candidates lived and where the commercial interests of the rising Egyptian bourgeoisie and foreign businesses were located. A group of men, including the Wafd candidate and his middle-class and working-class futuwwat supporters were jailed. For two years, people of al-Mahalla and nationalist activists in Cairo worked tirelessly until the Wafd afandiyya were released, leaving behind in jail many working-class rebellious and futuwwat. The Cairo-based contemporary press misleadingly considered the Revolt peasantry riots, while the local nationalist narrative focused on the role of male educated afandiyya in the Revolt. Tracing the social and geographical origin of those who were involved in the riots, I provide a gendered and classed construction of the revolt. Rather than treating that incident of urban violence as a spontaneous reaction to the election battle between two elite candidates, I argue that the Revolt was a protest of the townspeople against the enforced integration of the town into the global economy which led to the decline of its traditional handloom industry, the deterioration of the traditional quarter, the exclusiveness of the emerging Europeanized commercial and residential area. Examining the Revolt of al-Mahalla in both local and national contexts problematizes the political instability that Egypt experienced for the three decades between the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1922 and the Free Officers’ Revolution in 1952. Contending the existing literature that discusses the dynamics of instability and protests from the Cairo-based politics as struggles between elite political parties and the Royal Palace, I show that the political troubles and riot in the Egyptian locality were the ultimate culmination of tension between the inhabitants of the traditional quarters and the emerging Egyptian capitalists that allied themselves with the global economic forces. The paper benefits from a wide range of sources including court records, ‘Abdin Royal Palace archive, and contemporary memoirs and periodicals.

Construction of the Suez Canal, from 1856-1869, required the dredging and reshaping of marshes and arid desert land into multiple new cities changing the environment, forever. Focusing on the 19th and early 20th century, I argue that the Suez Canal port cities were important nodes to a global economy and were central to connecting Europe to colonies in the East. Using an interdisciplinary method, I examine both urban development and environmental history on the periphery in Egypt, through the case studies of Port Saïd, Isma’ilia and Suez, decentering Cairo and Alexandria as the exemplars of modernity. The building of canals, dikes and their maintenance for irrigation were to control water with the aim to grow foodstuffs, reclaim land and in the case of the new Suez Canal towns, provide clean drinking water for the growing populations. Water, also, became a new symbol in urban squares and gardens of the burgeoning towns of Port Saïd and Isma’ilia, representative of its’ powerful nature. Water and irrigation have been carefully studied in Egyptian historiography with a concentration on the Nile Valley. Studying these provincial cities opens up new avenues of research on towns outside of Cairo. In Port Saïd, Isma’ilia and Suez the creation of the Isma’ilia canal, connected to the Nile near Cairo, was essential to the development of these growing centers of global transportation, trade and commerce. In addition, the new canal fed the dream of massive land reclamation that would green the landscape adjacent to the Ismailia canal, as well as around the new urban centers on the Suez Canal. My sources include Ministry of Public Works and Department of Agriculture reports on irrigation and works projects in Egypt, as well as travelogues, travel guides, periodicals, photography, and town plans. Through these sources I show the centrality of water, like in the Nile valley, to the building processes of the new provincial urban fabrics of Port Saïd, Isma’ilia and Suez.