Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906

by Lucia Carminati

Overview

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520385504
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/08/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lucia Carminati is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments 
Note on Transliteration 
Map of Cited Departure Points and Stepping Stones of Suez Canal Migrants 

Introduction 
1 • A Universal Meeting Point on the Isthmus of Suez 
2 • Like a Beehive: Race and Gender on the Suez Worksites 
3 • A Semilawless Borderland: The Presence of These People Could Bring Evil 
4 • Entertainment in Port Said, a Sink of Immoral Filth 
Conclusion: It Would Be Wonderful If It Were Not Unhappy 
Postscript 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index