Subaltern Violence and the Spatialization of Class Relations in Interwar Alexandria

On May 20, 1921, widespread uprisings erupted in the mixed working class/petit bourgeois neighborhoods of Alexandria, Egypt. Native workers supported by low-ranking police officers attacked Greeks, Italians, and Levantine Christians, destroying homes, shops, and municipal infrastructure. In response, Greeks, Italians and high-ranking colonial police officers shot back at native crowds from the windows of buildings and cars. This paper looks at this episode of subaltern violence as a pivotal moment in the history of cosmopolitan Alexandria, arguing that the violence was a product of tensions between workers and the petit bourgeoisie sparked by the effects of wartime colonial exploitation. I use a variety of legal proceedings, statistics, and media reports from this period to show that these tensions formed at the intersection of race, class and religion as both unemployed native workers and foreign shopkeepers moved into these neighborhoods at an unprecedented rate during and after the war. This rapid pace of migration placed a strain on housing and resources, pushing native workers into makeshift homes on the outskirts of the communities. The spread of wage labor after the war, combined with growing linkages between the formal and informal economy, exacerbated these tensions. In the wake of the riots, British colonial administrators launched a new town planning scheme in Alexandria that mapped class relations onto the urban landscape. Middle class enclaves were created in the form of suburbs, parks, public gardens, theaters, and sporting arenas, and an emphasis was placed on increasing spatial visibility through the construction of wider streets and avenues. Through an analysis of the role of both local actors and colonial administrators in the processes of urbanization and suburbanization, this paper bridges the gap between a bottom-up and top-down analysis of class formation by theorizing class constituted by socioeconomic, political and spatial processes.