Western Promises: Abbas Hilmi II’s Maryut Railway Project and Territoriality in Egypt, 1892–1914

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Egyptian Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II (r. 1892-1914), spearheaded a railway project that would connect the Nile Valley with Egypt’s western border with Ottoman Libya.  Unlike the expansive state railway network that was already in place in Egypt by this time, however, the Maryut Railway (as it became known) would be privately funded by the Khedive and constructed outside the purview of the British residency.

In this paper, I examine the political valences of the Khedive’s railway project.  I argue that the Maryut Railway ultimately serves to complicate our understanding of territoriality at a moment in which the political geography of the Egyptian nation-state was still fundamentally uneven.  Historians typically define territoriality as a set of norms that governed how modern states sought to control bordered political space under their sovereignty.  What I feel is missing in much of this literature, however, is an effort to expand the conception of territoriality in the crucially formative pre-WWI period to include alternate territorial sensibilities—to investigate how multiple notions of territoriality competed, overlapped, and transformed one another.

The Maryut Railway project serves as a crucial example of how the construction of a railroad (often held as the quintessential nineteenth-century metaphor for the expansion of state power) did not necessarily serve the territorial interests of the centralizing state.  Instead, I argue, the Maryut Railway functioned as one of several projects through which the Khedive sought to open up the Egyptian West in his capacity as a sort of “quasi-state actor,” whose modernizing vision for the region belies any easy dichotomy between public and private space.  In the process of building the railway, the Egyptian West was transformed into a more personalized territorial realm that the Khedive seemed to cultivate in competition with the state apparatus in Cairo.