num_pages: 224
description: At the turn of the twentieth century Alexandria Egypt was a bustling transimperial port city under nominal Ottoman and unofficial British imperial rule. Thousands of European subjects lived worked and died there. And when they died the machinery of empire had to negotiate for space resources and control with the nascent national state. Imperial Bodies shows how the mechanisms of death became a tool for exerting both imperial and national governance. Shana Minkin investigates how French and British power asserted itself in Egypt through local consular claims of belonging manifested within the mundane caring for dead bodies. European communities corralled imperial bodies through the bureaucracies and rituals of deathfrom hospitals funerals and cemeteries to autopsies and death registrations. As they did so imperial consulates pushed against the workings of both the Egyptian state and each other expanding their governments' material and performative power. Ultimately this book reveals how European imperial powers did not so much claim Alexandria as their own as they maneuvered manipulated and cajoled their empires into Egypt.
language: English
title: Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt
publisher: Stanford University Press