2025/03/01 by Zachary Lockman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11521414
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/04
In recent decades the scholarly literature on the social history of modern Egypt—including working-class and labor history, though not necessarily in the ways those fields were typically studied back in the 1970s and 1980s—has advanced enormously, spearheaded by a younger generation of scholars deploying new paradigms and methodologies and utilizing rich new sources. One landmark recent contribution is Hanan Hammad’s Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt (2016), an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated study of life, work, and community in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, one of Egypt’s first centers of large-scale mechanized industry, from the 1920s into the 1940s. And now, in another step forward, we have Lucia Carminati’s excellent Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said.Port Said was an entirely new town, originally established in 1859 in a sparsely populated region on Egypt’s Mediterranean coastline as a camp for the laborers who would build the Suez Canal. By the time the canal was officially opened a decade later it had a population of some ten thousand and served as the main coaling station and provisioning terminus for ships traveling through the waterway. To construct and then operate the canal required a large labor force, and Port Said attracted migrant workers from across Egypt and around the Mediterranean basin. Most of those who actually dug the canal were Egyptian peasants dragooned into forced labor by the Egyptian state in collaboration with the Suez Canal Company; but a great many others, unskilled and skilled, migrated to this site in search of employment and, in some cases, to start a new (and hopefully better) life far from home. As Carminati puts it, in Port Said “everybody was a newcomer,” at least in the first decades of the town’s existence (4).Drawing on a broad range of archival and other materials in multiple languages, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said provides us with a lively and detailed narrative of the town’s growth, enriched by numerous micronarratives of the trajectories and experiences of some of the men and women who ended up living in it. For obvious reasons, migration and mobility are at the center of this study, and Carminati convincingly shows how “the differentiated mobility of a diversified workforce and the formation of an unequal migrant society produced Port Said and enabled the realization of the Suez Canal project” (6). The authorities—the company, the Egyptian government and after 1882 the British who had occupied Egypt—sought to impose their understandings of social order and proper behavior on the inhabitants of Port Said, but they were never fully successful; Carminati shows how people often found ways to at least partially evade social controls and pursue their own aims. At the same time, though Port Said was not linked by railway to the rest of Egypt until 1906—hence the end point of the book—its establishment reconfigured patterns of mobility both within Egypt and across much larger geographies, something that the book explores very effectively.Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said offers a rich portrait of work and life in Port Said in its first half century. It devotes close attention to how race and gender structured class formation, urban space, and much else in the town, and it explores what its inhabitants did in their leisure time, patterns of criminality and attempts to suppress it, social and economic interactions among its very diverse population, and much else. Along the way, labor struggles perhaps receive a bit less attention than some readers of this journal might prefer. For example, a number of scholars have cited strikes by coalheavers in the town beginning in the early 1880s as the first of their kind in modern Egypt, and they have debated whether the term guild, used in some contemporary accounts to denote the coalheavers’ mode of organization, makes sense for what actually seems to have been a form of labor contracting. Carminati mentions these strikes but does not delve into them, nor does she tell us what her extensive research leads her to conclude about these debates.But this is only a quibble, and there can be no doubt that the book makes important contributions to the historiography of modern Egypt, not least among them its very focus on a place like Port Said. Scholarship on Egypt has, generally speaking, been heavily Cairo-centric, with Alexandria garnering a lot of attention as well, whereas provincial cities and towns (including the cities along the canal), and the villages where the country’s peasant majority lived, were too often understudied. There has been a regional bias at work as well: Egypt has what some historians have characterized as its own Southern Question, with Upper Egypt (the Sa‘id) poorer than the Nile Delta in the north and its population often racialized and marginalized. Thus most of the coalheavers in Port Said were seasonally unemployed, often landless, peasants from the Sa‘id, recruited and often abused by labor contractors.These imbalances have slowly begun to change, and by illuminating the early history of Port Said, not well connected with the rest of Egypt yet a key node in regional and global circuits of transport, trade, migration, capital, and empire, Carminati has performed an important service to scholarship. Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said is a significant achievement, and it should be read not only by historians of modern Egypt and of the Suez Canal but by anyone interested in an innovative perspective on global mobilities, migration, and labor in the second half of the long nineteenth century.