Identifying with Nationality

Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria

Will Hanley

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth or naturalization determines where he or she can and cannot be and what he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal, even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In Identifying with Nationality, he uses the Mediterranean city of Alexandria to develop a genealogy of the nation and the formation of the modern national subject.

Alexandria in 1880 was an immigrant boomtown ruled by dozens of overlapping regimes. On its streets and in its police stations and courtrooms, people were identified by name, occupation, place of origin, sect, physical description, and other attributes. Yet by 1914, before nationalist calls for independence and decolonization had become widespread, nationality had become the defining category of identification, and nationality laws came to govern Alexandria's population. Identifying with Nationality traces the advent of modern citizenship to multinational, transimperial settings such as turn-of-the-century colonial Alexandria, where ordinary people abandoned old identifiers and grasped nationality as the best means to access the protections promised by expanding states. The result was a system that continues to define and divide people through status, mobility, and residency.

PART I

Settings

1

Vulgar Cosmopolitanism

In the high heat of July 1886, two young British navy men set out to enjoy a free afternoon in Alexandria. They followed the usual path of sailors on leave, walking from their boat to the nearest busy spot, a street called al-Sabʿ Banat (the Seven Girls) in Arabic, Rue des Soeurs in French, and Sisters’ Street in English. Even under occupation, Alexandria was one of the most lively ports in the world. Like counterpart streets the world over, al-Sabʿ Banat was set up to deal with the rising human tide arriving on steamships, offering them supplies, beds, and work, as well as grog shops and brothels—and special detention rooms in its police stations.¹ Ground-floor shops lined the sidewalks of al-Sabʿ Banat, selling food, alcohol, and everyday goods and services. The sidewalks were crowded, and the roadway’s ceiling was a thicket of tram cables. Most of the two- to four-story brick buildings along the street were built during a cotton boom twenty-five years earlier. The debt crisis and revolution that followed that boom led to a British occupation, which brought these two sailors to the city.

During brief stays in this port of call, sailors would often indulge in alcohol and violence. As they appear in the court records, these visits usually followed a set pattern: disembarkment, a walk to al-Sabʿ Banat, drinking, drunkenness, return to ship. Sometimes: fighting with police, falling off the quays, falling asleep on railroad tracks. On this afternoon, the men stopped first at the German Bar, where “there was a lot of skylarking going on amongst merchant seamen and girls.” They crossed the road, looking for somewhere quieter, and paused to chat in front of another bar. A man sitting nearby overheard their conversation and believed himself to have been insulted. He said something to the sailors, who in turn became angry. A brief fight followed, chairs flew, and men ran from the bar into the street. Both sailors were stabbed.²

The dossier of evidence for the criminal prosecution that ensued is a cosmopolitan dream. It contains transcripts in four languages, with the testimony of almost every witness recorded in a language not his or her own. Evidence given by Maltese men was written down in Italian; the accused, Guglielmo Farrugia, signed his deposition with the name “William.” The testimony of four Englishmen was taken in French, even though their interrogator bore the distinctly un-Gallic name of Percy Bagwell (Lieutenant in 2nd Essex Regiment).³ The testimony of an illiterate twenty-four-year-old Austrian barmaid was recorded in Arabic. The police scribe took down her oath in two Islamic formulas: “I testify by God (Praised and Exalted be He) that what I witnessed was…” opens her account, and it closes with “This is what I witnessed, and God (Exalted be He) is the Best of Witnesses.”⁴ The charm of this evidence derives from its incongruities: a man named Percy Bagwell should not speak French, Austrian barmaids should not speak Islamic oaths. But our sense of surprise (and indeed pleasure) at such incongruities is based on a series of assumptions about identifiers, the implications of which go beyond historical inaccuracy.

The golden image of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cosmopolitan Alexandria depends on reflexive reference to a vocabulary of categories—cosmopolitan, foreign, native, European, citizen, subject, national, Levantine, protégé, local, and others—that act as distorting abstractions because their significance is implied rather than explained. The cardinal sin of histories of fin-de-siècle cosmopolitanism is pleasure in the anachronistic use of present-day categories, especially those of modular and indelible nationality.⁵ This book offers a different pleasure: corrective precision concerning the legal force, historical circumstances, and global context in which individuals and groups came to be labeled by nationality and its rival categories. Unlike twenty-first-century readers, residents of late nineteenth-century Alexandria were not fluent in the vocabulary of nationality. For them (like us), social categories were a shorthand of convenience. Naturally, their use was contingent, temporary, and subject to error. Those most prone to err were outsiders (like us) clinging too closely to overdetermined categories of their (our) own choosing. Vocabularies of description legible in one context do not necessarily carry over into other contexts, and they can fail—as the British navy men attacked at the bar discovered—when they organize description and action unsuccessfully.

The police were slow to make arrests, in part because the details reported by the stabbed sailors were so unclear. One victim said his assailant “looked like a Frenchman [avait l’air d’un français], with a little mustache and a Napoleon-style beard.” The other victim testified that the attackers had spoken in French to each other. These descriptions were of little use to the police, who knew that the clientele of the bars in question were not French speakers. A patrol of British soldiers was sent from bar to bar to determine where the attacks had taken place. Here too ethnic and national coding were misleading. The “German” grog shop, part of a notorious cluster of three trouble spots, was frequented by British soldiers. The “Union Jack,” in the same knot, was run by an Italian woman. If taken as identification categories, these labels were poor guides, crutches for outsiders.

Mistaking Maltese for French was only one aspect of a confrontation that turned on misunderstanding and misidentification. The sailors (bold enough to curse in a police report) claimed that before the attack, they had been complaining to each other about the “bloody noise” at the first bar. Somehow, they said, their French-looking, French-speaking interlocutors had misunderstood their English words. They reported that one of the men said to them “sacré bleu” or “sacré bousse [buse?]” or “sacré boof.” One of the sailors, confident of his comprehension, told his companion that this phrase meant “bloody bugger.” On this basis, the fight was on.⁶

Instead of a contest between British, Greek, French, and Maltese nationals, the fight and the charges that followed it can be read as a contest between those possessing local knowledge and those who lacked it. Alexandria’s population grew rapidly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Long-term residents shared the city with newcomers and sojourners, and the social distinctions between them constitute a major social boundary that does not map onto received legal or ethnic schemas. The seamen did not know who was who or where they were. They walked along a few key avenues, leaving the rest of the city alone. They did not know the name of the bar where they were attacked, or if it had a name, or what language was spoken there. These sailors were true outsiders, in the sense that their stays in Alexandria were very brief, and their conduct in the city was often obnoxious to its society. But even peaceable newcomers experienced the geography of the city in a different way from residents. They worked, slept at hostels, and cobbled together a social life based on language, acquaintances from their homeplace, religion, and money. They operated despite a lack of knowledge about the places where they were living, the company they were keeping, or even the name of the street in which they stood.

Long-term residents were very different kinds of social actors. The Maltese assailants, when pursued after the attack, escaped by ducking around corners and out back doors in a neighborhood that they knew well. And their neighbors certainly made better witnesses in court; some of those who appeared seemed to know every actor in a crime or crowd personally. Certainly they recognized outsiders, such as sailors and soldiers, immediately. In the end, the police were able to identify Maltese suspects thanks to the help of “native” witnesses.

Length and nature of residence were critical categories of identification in turn-of-the-century Alexandria. Every police interrogation record began with the same protocol of identification: name, occupation (sinaʿa), residence (sakan), the name of the neighborhood headman (shiyakha), and place of origin (balad).⁷ For anyone whose place of origin was other than Alexandria, their length of residence in the city was noted.⁸ In a relatively rootless society filled with newcomers, protection became a major social distinction. As we will see in chapter 3, the purpose of identification was to determine which authority could protect or control an individual. Traditional forms of protection—family, friends, neighbors, wealth—served this purpose, but so too did newer kinds: employment (in the army, for example), officialdom, and nationality.

The most powerful protectors were able to impose a reordering of hierarchies of knowledge and power. Although they were outsiders, the British victims possessed an important advantage over their assailants: they belonged to a military occupying force that offered them maximal protection. The power of their patrons compensated for their lack of local knowledge, and colonial officialdom intervened to settle the two sailors’ case and impose its own legal categories, which did not “privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge.”⁹ When he learned of the attack, the captain of their ship immediately wrote to the three centers of official power: the governor, the general commanding the British garrison, and the British consul. The governor arrested the perpetrators, and the Maltese men (who were British subjects because of the British military occupation of Malta) were charged before the British consular court. Legal proceedings were hurried, as the captain was anxious to set sail. The navy paid the wages of a prosecuting lawyer, who won a conviction.¹⁰

The same vocabularies of identification that hindered the investigation were essential to prosecute the case in Alexandria’s patchwork of complementary jurisdictions, which depended on nationality to assign litigants to the proper tribunal. Modular nationality made the incident “legible,” in James Scott’s convincing sense.¹¹ Legible nationality is equally essential to a particular vision of cosmopolitanism operating in many retrospective accounts of turn-of-the-century port cities: it is elitist, grieving, nostalgic, and privileges label over content.¹² This vision varies from site to site, but it is particularly prominent in the memory of Alexandria. The conventional image of cosmopolitan Alexandria ignores locals, just as it fails to tell an accurate story of Alexandria’s foreign community. Instead, this field of writing amplifies the experience of a tiny group of elites and broadcasts it across the whole of a heterogeneous social past. Informed above all by the modern-day context of the secular nation-state, this cosmopolitan fable serves certain presentist political agendas but fails history.¹³

In this study, I wish to move beyond that critique to propose a revised view of the social history of cosmopolitan Alexandria. One might call this picture “vulgar cosmopolitanism,” in contradistinction to the conventional image of gilded, cosmopolitan Alexandria. By “vulgar cosmopolitanism” I intend not obscene but low, unrefined, plain, common, ordinary cosmopolitanism.¹⁴ “Ordinary cosmopolitanism” is something of an oxymoron, but that is part of my point: the conventional image of cosmopolitanism depends on (usually unacknowledged) conditions of wealth and the vocabulary of difference authorized by privilege. The sources on which most historians of Alexandria depend—books, newspapers, letters, and memoirs—announce and record social interactions of the wealthy and privileged and reproduce and normalize their category vocabulary. Parallel processes in the much larg...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Nationality Grasped
• Part I: Settings
• Part II: Means
• Part III: Other Nationalities
• Epilogue: Egyptians in a World of Universal Nationality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index