The emergence of nationalism in Egypt from the final quarter of the 19th century until World War I has recently garnered new scholarly interest, producing innovative studies on the subject. Basic questions include: When this national/protonational sentiment arose (on the level of waṭan and waṭaniyya)? Who pioneered these thought processes? How was the concept developed and disseminated, and how did it take root? Which social agents promoted and conventionalized it? And, what were the cultural and material conditions and forces that propelled it forward? All these factors have been reopened to rigorous research that is problematizing and deconstructing established paradigms. One of the more pronounced characteristics of this scholarly intervention is the successful attempt to reexamine the rise of patriotic sentiment from the bottom up: how Egyptian patriotism was engineered and advanced by subaltern populations, “ordinary Egyptians.” This is a significant challenge to the commonly held assumption that nationalism is a project of the elite, or the effendiyya, defined as effendi nationalism.

In this impressive book, Will Hanley has bolstered this trend, while adding an entirely new historical dimension. In his humble way, Hanley insists that his work is complementary to others; in reality, he offers an alternative approach for exploring and understanding the emergence and development of nationality. From this perspective, his study is groundbreaking theoretically, methodologically, and in his use of sources. First and foremost, Hanley sharply differentiates between nationalism and nationality, rejecting their oft-conflated synonymy. He views the latter as an altogether singular category, playing a role in an individual's formation of belonging. In his critical demarcation, Hanley stands out not only in Middle Eastern studies, but also in mainstream 19th-century understandings of nationalism as nationality, such as those of John Stuart Mill (a sympathizer), or Lord Acton (a rejectionist), both of whom identify nationality with nationalism. For Hanley, nationality is also distinct from other frameworks of affiliation, among them citizenship and residency. Thus, he defines nationality as a legal construct, a status of belonging to a state or other higher legal authority in order to achieve specific goals connected with international law. Nationality is personal and practical, tested by concrete circumstances. It's a novel phenomenon that appeared in modern times, and will also dialectically disappear. Nationality is colonial, a product of the categorization and classification of populations within the context of imperialist control and domination. It derives its legitimacy from an emerging universal legal order, but took root in a specific historical moment and a particular place. All of these insightful distinctions and definitions allow Hanley to undertake an in-depth study of the history of nationalities in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Hanley locates nationality in the period of 1880–1914, when Egypt was under British colonial rule.

In Hanley's Alexandria, nationality is a contested optional identity that competes with other affiliations. He focuses on showing why and in what ways nationality became essential to defining individual and communal identities. Although for him the evolution of nationality is not inexorable but rather contingent and circumstantial, the linear triumph of nationality over all other rival affiliations is clear. Through his systematic investigation, the new framework of identity in its social function reorganized the lives of Alexandrians. Hanley demonstrates how nationality became the dominant category of identification through the legal institutions’ daily practices. Alexandria was distinct in its cosmopolitan character: it was home to a diverse population of migrants, individuals, and groups from the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East. The city absorbed a mosaic of various religions, languages, and ethnicities composed of different classes. Hanley examines the emergence of nationality as a legal form of affiliation in the specific context of the establishment of a modern legal system by the colonial-Khedival state, “the settlement,” that took place between 1875 and 1885. This new system necessitated a grouping of the city's population into nationalities. For ordinary individuals, nationality was given or imposed upon them by police or legal instruments in the context of arrests, crimes, deportations, issues regarding property, money, finance, marriage, employment, and all other police incidents at the court. At the police stations and courthouses, the accused had to relinquish their old identities and grapple with their newly assigned nationalities, which promised them access to protection and communal defense, now their nationality, and through it, the bourgeoning state. Thus, according to Hanley, a regime of nationality was created in the daily routine, as courthouses and the legal mechanisms redefined the subject's and group's identity, confronting them with the question, “who are you?” and “what is your identity?” thereby implicating an answer. This imposition, be it individual or communal, was now an integral part of the very modus operandi of the court, and their ability to function within the colonial state. Membership to a new nationality assumed its role in the polysystem of other nationalities in the shared city. Thus, it sometimes functioned as a choice between life and death, as in Theodore Sava Joannides's situation; as indispensable protégés and protection, as in the case of Elie Simhun; or as a marriage to gain advantageous nationality, or the loss of this nationality in divorce, as in the case of Esther Gandour and Jacob Malca. Hanley, through his industrious archival research, pulls each of these cases from a trove of ten thousand individuals, four thousand cases in five languages and six countries. This impressive study of situations in which human beings found their nationality and their new identities is “history from below,” a microhistory of ordinary Alexandrians. Hanley extracts their voices and actions and listens to them, sensitively narrating their experiences, weaving together an explanation of why nationality became crucial to collective and private identity, indispensable to daily urban life and state function.

Throughout the book, Hanley undertakes a detailed mapping of the new groups of affiliation—nationalities—in Alexandria at the time. He explores this new terminology; specifies the identification documents, forms, and protocols involved; discusses the census, registries, and other practices of labeling. He further shows how individuals adjusted to their new identities and vocabularies. From here he continues to his impressive description of each specific group that received a nationality name tag, defining it as an entity distinct from the others. Within the spectrum of groups and subgroups, his discussion of high-status Europeans stands out. Hanley further offers an insightful differentiation between “European notables” and “poor Europeans” based in the privileges they enjoyed under colonial rule. Non-European foreigners, particularly Maltese, Algerians, and Tunisians, received special privileges through their nationality that would have been inaccessible to them in their home country. The Ottoman nationality, which included Turks, Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians, were another significant group with special rights. The overwhelming majority of Alexandrians are the “local subjects” (maḥallī, waṭanī, ahālī, ibn al-balad) who were defined as Egyptian nationals. Despite their status as the majority, they were the lowest on the totem pole with respect to rights, protections, and privileges. In most cases, Egyptian identity was imposed upon them from top to bottom in order to set them apart from other nationalities in the later part of the process. Hanley's comparative analysis between these nationalities and their statuses is excellent, as he identifies a variety of protégés and privileges that some enjoyed and others did not. Eventually, all of these groups were tagged with a particular nationality, because only through this framework was it possible to maintain the legal system and to live in the modern city within an international structure of identification. This also explains why nationality triumphed leading into World War I, and became a transitionary basis for the coming of full-fledged nation-state nationalism during the interwar era. For Hanley, then, it is not the intellectual elite who created this national imagining and from it the modern national subject, but rather police and court practices that implicated ordinary human beings in their efforts to survive within the modern urban landscape.

I have two critical comments: The first is that despite his efforts to clarify his work, Hanley seems to be bogged down by heavy, sometimes vague legalistic jargon, making reading difficult for those who are insufficiently versed in this vocabulary. Secondly, and more importantly, Hanley's argument that nationality is a legal mechanism created from the bottom up by ordinary men and women in their confrontation with new legal institutions, is not entirely convincing. His first assertion stands; the nationality of the overwhelming majority of Alexandrians became Egyptian: “the locals,” “the natives,” or the “fellahin,” who were assigned Egyptian nationality. However, Egyptian nationality is not a given historical phenomenon: it was a construct imposed upon ordinary individuals from the top down by a legal system. But who originally created this construct? It does not seem that this was the work of the courts, the police, or ordinary illiterate Egyptians. The legal machinery appropriated this identity from its original producers in the preceding 19th century; namely, the emerging Egyptian state of Mehmet Ali's dynasty, which peaked during Khedive Ismail's rule and the subsequent colonial state. Other contributing factors also existed: the expanding Egyptian bureaucracy, the flourishing press, the growth of a secular intelligentsia, and the maturation of the public sphere of print media and literacy. In other words, processes originating from certain elite groups. It appears that after all, there are some limitations to the present scholarly project purporting that nationality (or nationalism) emerged from the bottom subaltern populations to the top.

These comments aside, Hanley provides us with an extremely original and illuminating study. It opens up an entirely new field of historical research exploring the construction of modern human frameworks of identity in Egypt and the Middle East. It will inspire and encourage additional studies on the subject. Furthermore, Hanley's attention to both the particular and the global, to the national and the transnational/international, makes his book an indispensable work, not only for students of the Middle East, but also for anybody interested in the formation of modern nationality, nationalism, and citizenship.