Nothing but Scum Jettisoned on the Edge of the Desert: Crime and Urban Space in Late 19th-Century Port Said

Founded in 1859, the Egyptian and Mediterranean city of Port Saʿīd was a bustling stopover for goods, laborers, migrants, and travelers. The city grew up with the construction of the Suez Canal and the emergence of new trade routes linking the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. In 1865, the city had 7,000 inhabitants;  by 1869, when the Suez Canal was officially inaugurated, that number had grown to 10,000. In the late 1880s, the coastal dwelling was famous as an odious, dreadful, and sad “sand-bordered hell.” Strangers passed through in search of amusement in its many houses of ill-repute and gambling dens. Crime and the legal responses to this crime were central elements in the production of urban space in the city. Drawing on Egyptian, British, French, and Italian archival sources, my paper explores notions of criminality, legal rationales of regulation and surveillance, and the lived experiences of vice and the attempts of authorities to discipline that vice. I use primary documents to understand Port Saʿīd's physical spaces and social layout, and the urban arrangements of “crime” and “immorality” in the city. Through the lens of “vice,” I unearth the ways in which authorities including Egyptian public officials, French investors, and British occupiers attempted to control the urban space and its denizens and the city's inhabitants vied to preserve and assert their relative positions of influence within this port-city. Overall, my paper demonstrates how the production of urban space in a turn-of-the-century Middle Eastern port-city was explicitly centered on the regulation of public spaces, social control, and racial exclusion.