Egypt Archives - Not Even Past

October 1973: Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel

Note: This article was written and published before Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

“500 tanks!” exclaimed Henry Kissinger. The national security advisor-cum-secretary of state did not want to believe what he was hearing from the Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz as he recounted the losses sustained by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during a meeting at the White House on October 9, 1973. It had been three days since Egypt and Syria launched a two-headed assault against Israel, and now, it dawned on Kissinger just how serious the latest Middle East crisis had become.

Kissinger and the rest of Richard Nixon’s administration faced a decision with titanic consequences. Should they send a flagging Israel the tanks, jets, and other weapons it needed to win the war? Or let the belligerents duke it out as is? The president and his administration chose the former. For the Israelis, this was a deliverance that could have come from God himself. Simply put, America’s resupply saved Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir standing with president Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger outside the White House. — Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir standing with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger outside the White House. The photo was taken about ten months before the Yom Kippur War. Source: Library of Congress

The whole of the U.S. government was caught unawares by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, also termed the October War. As has been the case many times in American history, the intelligence was wrong. “Israelis do not perceive a threat at this time from either Syria or Egypt,” the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv reported to Washington on October 1. Yet the threat was all too real. The two Arab states, which Israel had trounced six years earlier in the Six-Day War, resolved to smash Israel and recover the territory they had lost: Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula(and Gaza), and Syria, the Golan Heights.

Egypt and Syria attacked at 2:00 p.m. on October 6, which that year fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The IDF scurried to beat back the onslaught. At first, its defenses were to little avail. Arab tanks, infantry, and planes ravaged the Israelis’ lines. They lost men and military assets left, right, and center.

To the northeast, Syria took the southern Golan and threatened to roll on into the Sea of Galilee and the rest of northern Israel. To the southwest, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and penetrated Israeli positions. Things took a grisly turn on October 8. Israeli losses kept on mounting while the country neared its breaking point. Celebrated general and future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon later called it “the black day” of the IDF.[1]

All the while, Washington debated how it should respond. Israeli requests for supplies came in earnest once it became apparent that, unlike in 1967, this would be no easy victory. Washington’s dilemma was not easy. It feared that a resupply would alienate the oil-rich Arab states. Another variable was the Soviet Union’s resupply of Egypt and Syria, both Moscow proxies. Should the United States respond in kind, the two nuclear-armed superpowers might stumble into war themselves. The stakes were immense.

Evacuating Israeli wounded from the southern front, 10.6.1973.
Courtesy of IDF and defense establishment archive, photo no. **8320/298**, by Avi Simhoni

Many in the administration favored withholding weapons. This was especially so of Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and the rest of the Pentagon. “Our shipping any stuff into Israel blows any image we may have as an honest broker,” argued Schlesinger.

So began a contentious back and forth between Schlesinger, who feared the consequences of resupply, and Kissinger, who feared the consequences of the reverse. Kissinger was fed up with the Pentagon’s resistance to resupplying the Israelis. “They are anxious to get some equipment which has been approved and which some SOB in [the Department of] Defense held up which I didn’t know about,” he groused to White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, also a proponent of a resupply, by phone.[2]

*Henry Kissinger visits President Nixon at the White House. Source: Library of Congress*

For his part, Nixon authorized providing all the military aid requested by Israel with one caveat. The U.S. government could not be openly complicit in the resupply lest the rest of the world find out. The Israelis would have to collect the weapons themselves from a base in Virginia. “The original order from President Nixon was,” Schlesinger recalled decades later, “‘Give them anything they want as long as they pick them up in El Al [the Israeli flag carrier] aircraft or chartered aircraft.’”

The Department of Defense did not like this one bit. Kissinger later wrote that Pentagon officials were happy “to drag their feet” and stop the Israelis from picking up the arms. “The Pentagon was not cooperative,” remembered Ambassador Dinitz, who said he could not get a meeting with Schlesinger until October 11, five days after the war started.[3] By October 8, the administration realized the existing arrangement was insufficient for the increasingly desperate Israelis. For the IDF to prevail, it needed vast quantities of American weapons. Nixon, who insisted that Israel “not be allowed to lose,” greenlit a major resupply plan on October 9 that he believed would ensure Israel’s survival.

Ambassador Dinitz and the Israelis were grateful. “All your aircraft and tank losses will be replaced,” Kissinger told him as he relayed the president’s decision. “We will get the tanks in even if we have to do it with American planes.” The resupply was on.

An M60 tank is unloaded from a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5A Galaxy in Israel during "Operation Nickel Grass" in 1973. — *An M60 tank is unloaded from a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5A Galaxy in Israel during “Operation Nickel Grass” in 1973. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

With his directive, Nixon came to the Jewish state’s rescue. The decision was not as clear-cut as it may seem in retrospect. He defied recommendations by his Department of Defense and many others in the Federal bureaucracy who were convinced that the resupply was not in America’s economic and political interests. Despite his own anti-Jewish prejudice, Nixon considered Israel a vital pillar of America’s global strategy. He could not forsake it. If Israel were to fall, the Soviets would chalk up another win in the zero-sum game of Cold War geopolitics. “We will not let Israel go down the tube,” Nixon vowed then.

Orchestrating the resupply proved difficult in practice. At first, the administration planned to airlift the materiel via civilian airliners. Yet no private insurers would assume the risk of sending them into a war zone. Richard Perle, then a chief aide to the ardently pro-Israel Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), remembered meeting with a teary-eyed Ambassador Dinitz when he heard by phone that there would be no chartered flights.[4] The resupply was in doubt again.

With civilian planes off the table and all other contingencies exhausted, the administration realized that it had no option but to provide military planes. The president was frustrated by his administration’s failure to get supplies to the Israelis, who were quickly running out of ammunition. “Do it now!” Nixon barked as he ordered the use of military aircraft.[5] In his memoirs, the president recalled urging his administration to “send everything that can fly” to Israel.[6] The airlift, alternatively called Operation Nickel Grass, was underway.

Over the ensuing month, C-5 and C-141 transport jets from the Air Force delivered 22,395 tons of supplies to Israel, stopping to refuel at Lajes Air Base in the Azores on the way. Thanks to indefatigable airmen, the planes would fly more than 500 missions over the course of the airlift. Navy ships and their sailors ferried more supplies by sea. The American resupply matched and surpassed its Soviet counterpart. One of the greatest operations of its kind in history, it was a herculean effort by the U.S. military to provide Israel with the tools to win the war.

Israeli airplanes are cropping supply. Courtesy of IDF and defense establishment archive, photo no. **891610/11**

The resupply was a godsend for the Israelis. American largesse helped them turn the tide of war, especially in the Sinai. Bolstered by the arms it so desperately required, the IDF repulsed the Egyptian offensive before launching one of its own. Egyptian resistance melted away as the Israelis crossed the Suez Canal and advanced within 99 kilometers of Cairo. On the other front, the Israelis retook the Golan. Israel had won when the war ended on October 25. It did not have to cede any territory to the Arabs. It nonetheless paid a steep price in the form of 2,656 dead and thousands more wounded.

There is little doubt the resupply was essential to the Israeli victory. The IDF was shellshocked and depleted, its supplies dwindling perilously. American arms arrived at just the right time. “Without our airlift, Israel would be dead now,” Kissinger said amid the fighting. Golda Meir, the intrepid Israeli prime minister, wrote in her memoirs that “it undoubtedly served to make our victory possible.”[7]

Had Nixon and his people not come through, there’s no telling what would have happened to the Israelis. They had been staring at their defeat if not destruction. The Arabs were poised to recover the lands they had lost in 1967. Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, later acknowledged that before the resupply, Israel awaited a cease-fire solidifying the Arabs’ gains. “This would have meant that the Egyptians and Syrians had won the first round of the war,” he wrote.[8] The second round might have been even worse for Israel. A decimated IDF would likely not have been able to defend its territory. Arab leaders, who had a long track record of pledging to “throw the Jews into the sea,” could have had the opportunity to make good on their promise.

It turned out that the Israelis would not be thrown anywhere. They kept control of the Sinai and the Golan. Doing so allowed them to trade the former for peace with Egypt at the end of the decade, based on the land-for-peace formula. That agreement was also a diplomatic triumph for the United States. Once an ally of the Soviet Union, Egypt became a key American partner. Washington’s influence in the Middle East grew as Moscow’s weakened.

*Carter, Sadat, and Begin at the Peace Treaty Signing, March 26, 1979. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

To be sure, the United States incurred short-term costs because of the resupply. Most notably, Arab members of OPEC retaliated, embargoing the sale of oil to the United States and other countries backing Israel. They wielded the oil weapon in hopes of forcing Washington to back down. It did not work. Despite facing a quadrupling of the price of a barrel of oil, the Nixon administration and the American people would not be bullied. The resupply continued.

Nixon’s resupply was perhaps the greatest contribution any American president has ever made to Israel. His decision, which scholars and journalists to this day have not fully appreciated, was enormously consequential. To it, Israel likely owes its existence. Consider what has become of the Jewish state in the years since. Israel has come a long, long way since the Yom Kippur War. Today, it is among the wealthiest countries on earth and a global leader in advanced technology. It boasts a formidable conventional military and a nuclear deterrent to boot. It has full relations with six Arab countries, and that list may soon get longer. It is home to vibrant institutions that, whatever their faults, are the most democratic of any in the Middle East. Nixon’s resupply made all that possible.

October 1973 has much to teach us about our current moment. As malignant powers threaten their neighbors worldwide, Washington should follow the Nixon administration’s example. We should not stand by while our foes devour our friends. The resupply is also a reminder of the primacy of national interests. Nixon’s resupply was no act of charity. He may have, in his heart of hearts, wanted to help the Israelis, but he decided with his head. The resupply was what was best for American security and prosperity. Like all other countries, the United States pursued its aims and ambitions, not those of another.

This year, as Israelis commemorate the semicentennial of the Yom Kippur War, they are bound to remember the heroism and sacrifice of those who fought and died for their homeland. And well they should. Israelis are a proud, self-reliant bunch. They do not like counting on others to solve their problems. All the same, they ought to recognize that the United States rescued their country in its hour of greatest peril.

Daniel J. Samet is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and an America in the World Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is completing his dissertation on U.S.-Israel defense relations. Some of the material in this article has been adapted from Daniel’s upcoming dissertation.

[1]. Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, 2nd Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 303.

[2]. Transcript of Telephone Conversation, October 7, 1973, 9:35 a.m., Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts, Chronological File, Box 22, 7 Oct 1973, 8, Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

[3]. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 486.

[4]. Author interview with Richard Perle, May 10, 2023.

[5]. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 514.

[6]. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 927.

[7]. Golda Meir, My Life (New York: Putnam, 1975), 431.

[8]. Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes (New York: Putnam, 1992), 533.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Cotton, Coal, and Capitalism: Review of Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation and On Barak’s Powering Empire

Scholars of the modern Middle East have long identified the region’s integration into the global economy as one of the most dramatic processes of the nineteenth century. Two recent studies – Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism and On Barak’s Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization, draw on this tradition and push us beyond the traditional economic narrative to consider some wider cultural contexts. While different in scope, scale, and methodological choices, combining the two books together prompts readers to think more broadly about both the Middle East and the historical moment of the nineteenth century.

Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism

Powering Empire: how Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization

Aaron Jakes’ Egypt’s Occupation is a detailed study of the materiality of British colonialism in Egypt between 1882 and 1914. The book frames the British colonial project as one driven by economism – the assumption that certain societies are predestined to operate according to distinctive economic logic. Contrary to past narratives of modern Egypt that centered around large landowners, Jakes places the Egyptian peasant (fellah) as the main protagonist of the colonial story. British officials imagined the fellah as an economic actor that, while motivated by the pursuit of greater profits, remained inherently incapable of grasping the logic of the modern liberal economy. Materially, the logic of colonial economism unfolded in the creation of various financial institutions designed to support the individual fellah. This logic not only limited Egypt’s economic growth but also served as proof to the British that Egypt needed the occupation to move toward modernity. Needless to say, in the eyes of British officials, Egyptian modernity was ambiguously defined as it was inherently unreachable.

Jakes narrative concentrates on the Egyptian case to make a broader argument about capitalism. Unlike Jakes, On Barak’s Powering Empire stretches across and beyond the region and begins with an intriguing proposition: to understand our hyper-carbonized moment and begin imagining a carbon-neutral future, Barak suggests studying how fossil fuels – and especially coal – became a global commodity. Contrary to common narratives that focus on Europe, and especially Britain, as the epicenter of the rapid carbonization of the nineteenth century, Barak suggests the Ottoman empire as the space in which coal became widely consumed, traded, and utilized to various needs. Barak urges the readers to think about coal, and fossil energy more broadly, as one crucial element in a complex historical and cultural context. Coal was the driving force behind vast social changes. It allowed cooling systems that enabled better storage of meat and raised meat consumption popularity; it made trains faster and more common, changing in the process how people in the region moved; and it helped pump water and allowed new irrigation methods that transformed local agricultural techniques. Coal, in short, became popular because it was mobile, cheap, and efficient. Unfortunately, we all breath the results of this efficiency to this day.

While different in geographical focus, these two thought-provoking works complement each other while opening up important debates. One such contribution is their emphasis on the importance of the Middle East region to some of the global processes of the nineteenth century. Barak, for example, draws on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence to argue for the region’s importance as a bridge between Europe and Asia (p. 9-10). Jakes, for his part, suggests Egypt’s cotton market as another case study with which to rethink the spread and perseverance of capitalism. Bringing together the rich historiography that evolved around cotton production in Egypt with new studies of capitalism and nature, Jakes uses hyper-local developments such as irrigation systems and credit institutions to support Jason Moore’s call to see capitalism as a “way of organizing nature” (p. 12-13).

Men, moving from smaller boats, add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt — *Men add coal to a steamship in Port Said, Egypt, circa 1900. Source: Library of Congress*

Emphasizing the significance of the region to the global transformation of the nineteenth century, both scholars contribute to the decolonization of two contemporary conversations. Jakes’ work is highly influenced by the new history of capitalism – a relatively fresh interpretational framework that asks to rethink capitalism beyond traditional Marxist traditions. This new field usually revolves around the American capitalist experience, and as such is organized around challenging old perceptions regarding, among else, capitalism’s connection to slavery, American exceptionalism, and westward expansion. Jakes, for his part, uses the field’s preoccupation with financial institutions and commodities to place the Egyptian case not in comparison to the US but rather to India, where many of his colonial protagonists began their careers. This is a promising move that will potentially contribute not only to the inclusion of nonwestern case studies in this new tradition but also bring the latter into conversation with Middle East studies.

Similar to Jakes’ aspirational project, Barak clearly states that one of the main goals of his book is to rethink the European origins of energy history, or, in his words, to “provincialize thermodynamics” (p. 229). To do so, Barak offers some impressive geographical maneuvers: first, he situates Europe not at the center of his argument, but rather almost at the periphery of the greater drama of energy production and consumption that took over the Middle East. He elegantly intertwines large scale spatial changes in trade and commerce roots with micro-changes in urban development and coal-mine structures. In doing so, he reveals an interconnected world that exists outside of and independently from Europe. This is not to say that Barak neglects the global in favor of the local. On the contrary, transregional connections enable his narrative to move forward. For example, he takes on Timothy Mitchell’s now-famous argument about the positive correlation between fossil energy and democratic organizations, what Mitchell calls “carbon democracy.” Barak, on the other hand, stress how workers’ rights in Europe were achieved “on the backs of colonial workers” (p. 115), thus proving that carbon democracy in one place remains desperately dependent on the existence of carbon autocracy elsewhere.

Finally, both works’ unconventional intervention in commodity history makes them appealing to readers outside the narrow field of Middle East scholars. While both examine two of the most “popular” commodities of the region – cotton and fossil fuel – they successfully created narratives that places these two commodities in a deep cultural context rather than the “traditional” economic-oriented analysis. Some may argue that the authors often overlook the material qualities of these commodities. However, I see their attitudes as an opportunity for scholars to rethink their commodity-driven narratives. Barak, traces how the expansion of the coal trade and increased consumption habits altered the everyday lives of local communities. In his discussion of meat consumption and meat’s political role (chapter 2), he urges the readers to think about meat not only as a commodity or a cultural artifact but also as an energy source. Through this intervention, he helps bring food history and energy history to the same table in what is a promising conceptual novelty.

A man stands in a cotton field. — *Field of Egyptian cotton ready for harvest. Source: Library of Congress*

Similarly, Jakes leans on a rich historiographical tradition that underlines the importance of cotton cultivation to economic growth in nineteenth-century Egypt and links it with new conversations. His elaborate discussion about cotton (chapters 3 and 7) explores the commodification of land and the fight against the cotton-leaf worm and connects the debate about cotton to larger conversations about legal reforms, agronomy, expertise, and environment. While some environmental historians might criticize him for not delving more deeply into the complexities of the nature/culture dichotomy and the environmental consequences of expanding cotton production, other works address this issue. I direct readers especially to Jenifer Derr’s The Live Nile (2019), which can be read as a complementary work. In any case, they (and others) will appreciate Jakes’ impressive empirical achievements in documenting changing land tenures and credit systems.

What makes these works noteworthy is their ability to talk to a wide range of readers and be interesting and deep at the same time. Scholars of the modern Middle East will surely benefit from their empirical richness and from their unique contribution to rethinking the geography of the region. At the same time, readers from outside of the field will find two fascinating, accessible, and inspiring works. Their conceptual innovation and contribution will make them staple readings for environmental historians, historians of science and technology, and curious readers.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

The Curious Case of the Thomas Cook Hospital in Luxor

Cross-posted from Chris Rose’s blog, where he regularly tells us Important and Useful Things and makes us laugh along the way. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Chris is the brains and motor behind our podcast, 15 Minute History.

By Christopher Rose

Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded worldwide and searching for flights home.

A number of us Twitterstorians became particularly concerned about the impending demise of the company a few days ago when Ziad Morsy, a martime archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southampton tweeted that Thomas Cook’s historical archivist had lost his job.

https://twitter.com/ziad_morsy/status/1175998560178974720?s=20

The Thomas Cook company was 178 years old when it collapsed (just over a month before Britain may or may not exit the European Union–coincidences which have been commented upon elsewhere). Some of its history in relation to British imperial history was covered by another colleague in a Twitter thread yesterday:

Thomas Cook began leading tour groups to Egypt and the Holy Land 150 years ago in 1869. He was even present at the opening ceremoy of the Suez Canal in November that year. So began the history of modern Western organized tourism in the Middle East. pic.twitter.com/0pQjxNd60H
— Belated Antiquity (@afzaque) September 23, 2019

Inasmuch as it’s easy to point to the Thomas Cook Company’s early days as those of a commercial company essentially making money off of the expansion of the British Empire, there are occasional glimpses at a richer and more complicated role for the company in various contexts (@afzaque covers several of them in his thread, which is worth a read).

It’s these sorts of things that make the potential loss of the company’s archive particularly painful, as it is one of those out-of-the-box sources for material that can shed startling new light on historical periods.

And hence, I present …

The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital

I ran across the hospital while writing the first two chapters of my dissertation, which wound up comprising a comprehensive history of public health in Egypt between 1805 and 1914 as one did not already exist. (Wanna publish it? It’s not going to be in the monograph.)

The West Bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in 2010.

It was located in Luxor, a settlement that is notable mostly for what people were doing there thousands of years ago, as it is built on top of the ruins of what was almost certainly not known to its inhabitants as Thebes, but was one of the New Kingdom capitals of ancient Egypt. Across the Nile River, wide and lazily flowing at this point, is the pyramid-shaped hill that marks the location of the Valley of the Kings.

Given the numerous pharaonic sites that dot the landscape up and down the river from Luxor, Cook had the bright idea to utilize boat travel for wealthy tourists to visit them without the hassle of having to move constantly to new hotels every night. Luxor, at the epicenter, was the site of the train station from which Wagon-Lits and other operators operated sleeper trains to Cairo.

In 1890, Luxor was a small town — perhaps five thousand permanent inhabitants, which could swell as high as twenty thousand during tourist season when there was work to be had.

John Mason Cook–the son referred to in the company’s official name “Thomas Cook & Son” after 1865 — had the idea to open a hospital as early as 1887:

In 1887, he decided, driven by the reactions of rich foreigners–British, American, German–in the face of the unfortunate hygienic conditions of the local population, to construct a hospital. “Accomplished in 1891, inaugurated by the Khedive Tewfik Pacha, it comprised 26 beds (of which 8 were for women, 10 for men)*, the buildings well constructed, each isolated from the other, in a healthy and fortuitous position.”

*(no, this doesn’t equal 26).

Jagailloux, Serge. La Médicalisation de l’Égypte Au XIXe Siècle. Synthèse 25. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilsations, 1986. (translation mine).

The hospital was co-directed by a Syrian doctor and an Englishman (only the latter–a Dr. Saimders–is named). Given that neither were in residence in Luxor in the off season (April to November), a third doctor–an Egyptian–was appointed to see patients in the off-season.

It was estimated that over 120,000 patients were seen, with over 2,000 operational procedures performed, in its first twenty years of operation. The hospital was presumably built primarily for the treatment of visiting foreigners, with Egyptians working in the tourist industry as a secondary priority.

“One of the Dahabeahs (sic) of Thos. Cook & Son Company (Egypt)”
Berlin: Cosmos art publishing Co., 1893.
Collection of the Brooklyn Museum

What is interesting is that, with Cook’s blessing, the hospital was opened to the public as well. In 1898, The Lancet enthusiastically reported that people were coming from over two hundred miles away to seek treatment at the facility. (“Egypt.” The Lancet 152, no. 3905 (July 2, 1898): 59.)

After the British occupation in 1882, funding for public health flatlined. Under Lord Cromer, the public health budget never exceeded 100,000 Egyptian pounds (at the time LE 1 = £0.95).

Hospitals in the provinces, which were already run down and developing a bad reputation among patients (most of them had been built in the 1840s), were frequently closed or moved to other, newer buildings that were not purpose-built to serve as hospitals.

The construction of private facilities was encouraged by the Anglo-Egyptian government; the government would not open new hospitals or dispensaries (a combination pharmacy/clinic used to supplement hospitals in smaller settlements) in towns that had “good” private facilities. Many of the hospitals were funded by local European communities to serve their own–Austro-Hungarians, French, Greeks, Italians, and Anglo-Americans all had their own facilities in Cairo and/or Alexandria, most of which referred their Egyptian patients to government facilities.

Hence, it is a point of curiosity for me as to what inspired John Mason Cook to open his hospital to the general public, especially given that his company did not lack for wealthy clientele to fill its beds.

It suggests that, even at the height of imperialism, with a company that can (and has) be considered an agent of an imperial power, things are never quite as simple as they might seem.

As I was writing this, Ziad tweeted me this tantalizing entry from the archival catalog:

https://twitter.com/ziad_morsy/status/1176877234487009281?s=20

Hence, the answer to my questions may lie in this box, whose future is now in doubt.

What you can do to help

If you’re one of us history types who has benefitted, or could benefit, from consulting the Thomas Cook archives, this thread has specific action items you can take to let people know that there is interest in saving the archive and not letting its contents be dispersed or destroyed.

People: you've seen the bad news about Thomas Cook. We *urgently* need to secure the archives, hugely important in the history of transport & mobility.

If you've used the archives, or have an interest, please help! Letters of support needed – pls contact Mike Anson: @BAC_Chair
— JTH Official (@JTransportHist) September 23, 2019

More by Christopher Rose:

You’re Teaching What?
Wrong About Everything
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement
Exploring the Silk Route

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past. Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)

Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008)

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

Wrong About Everything

by Christopher Rose

Originally posted on Christopher Rose’s blog on April 12, 2018.

I know, not the best title for my first blog entry, right?

A couple of months back, I presented some of initial findings on epidemic and epizootic disease in Egypt during the first World War at a symposium. (Ok, I’ll tell you the symposium was at Oxford. Yes, you may touch me.) I was flattered to be asked, especially since, as an ABD candidate, I got to be part of a two-panel session with speakers like Khaled Fahmy and Marilyn Booth (I’m still not entirely convinced I didn’t embarrass myself and everyone else, but that’s impostor syndrome for you).

The paper–which you can read here–is a short synopsis of human suffering during the war, especially among the poor, rural classes in Egypt, which are largely undocumented. It’s a works-in-progress presentation, very much based in preliminary findings, as one does at this stage in writing.

My dissertation focuses on breakdowns in public health during the war–the topic sentence could be summed up as “1918 was a deadly year for the Egyptian populace.” Even if one heeds Roger Cooter’s warning about reifying a positivist relationship between war and disease[1] –and I’ve compiled statistics for nearly a decade before and after the war–the demographic anomalies in Egypt between 1914 and 1918 are unmistakable. Four times as many Egyptians died of disease during the war than from military actions.

1918 also saw the birth rate decline to its lowest rate in a quarter century.

BirthDeath — source: Annual Reports of the Department of Public Health, Ministry of the Interior, 1911-1919.

I described a number of issues: food shortages that were documented as early as 1916. As residents complained about shortages of soap, eggs, cheese, and meat the Anglo-Egyptian administration, concerned with keeping the protectorate profitable, maintained a positive trade balance, exporting goods that were dearly needed at home. The cost of some basic household items rose over 200% between 1914 and 1918.

Likewise, relapsing fever and typhus cases increased substantially — both are louse-borne diseases, which can likely be tied to the increased movement of troops and support staff (including the men of the Egyptian Labour Corps). The war ended with the “Spanish flu” outbreak, which killed almost 140,000 Egyptians in just under three months.

There were also epizootics of both cattle plague (rinderpest) and foot-and-mouth disease that lasted over 18 months in large swaths of the country. Is there a relation between this and the soaring price of meat? It’s almost certainly the source of much of the protein that was sold on the black market in major cities.

As I said. Cheerful stuff.

During the break that followed my panel, a member of the audience approached me, identifying himself as a member of the landholding class from the Sharqiyya province in the Nile Delta (for the record, he is not an academic).

He insisted that I was completely wrong about nearly everything that I had said.

“We had hygiene!” he declared. “People didn’t die from these diseases in the 20^th century!”

He suggested that I extend the dates of my study by decades in each direction; for example, he inquired if I had I looked at the number of deaths incurred through the construction work on the Suez Canal (1863-69), or knew how many more people died of disease in Egypt in the 18th century.

I won’t lie. This was my first outing with this material, and this was … not the sort of feedback I had hoped to get. The more I tried to explain the nuance of my argument, the more pushback I got. Having spent 3 months mapping the country from cataract to Delta, I tried to change the subject and ask where he was from–meaning where, specifically, in Sharqiyya. He looked at me as if I might just be the stupidest man on earth and responded, “Egypt?!”

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose, featured in the blog Mapping & Microbes)

As you can tell, I’ve let this episode roll right off my back.

However, I think there is something significant in the greater picture about his defensiveness, one that pushed me to think about the puzzling collective silence in nearly every history book about what I’m looking at. Even the Spanish flu is described in only two medical reports from the time; I’ve seen it mentioned nowhere else.

The notion of Egyptians dying in elevated numbers from disease was clearly distasteful to him–largely, I suspect, for the reason that it was undignified. People—at least not those of his class—did not die from disease in high numbers in the early 20^th century.

In short, Egypt was modern. If it had not ascended, as the Khedive Ismāᶜīl had optimistically pronounced in 1869, to being among the ranks of countries which should be considered European, it had developed more rapidly than much of the Arab east, which languished in such a state that one scholar discussing the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic in the Arabian peninsula (1919) could legitimately wonder whether medical officials in central Arabia were capable of distinguishing the influenza apart from other diseases with similar symptoms, such as typhoid.[2]

Indeed, my interlocutor is correct about that hygiene and medical care had been introduced under Muhammad Ali Pasha in the mid-19^th century as part of a national campaign to improve public health. This has been described by LaVerne Kuhnke and Hibba Abuguideri (although the project had peaked in the 1850s and all but vanished under British administration).[3]

A market scene in Cairo during World War One (via Australian National Maritime Museum)

I struggled to explain in my response that afternoon that my interest was the significance of the war’s anomalous blip in the statistical record. The public health scheme in Egypt had, to a certain degree, brought epidemic disease under control, which is why the fact that infection and death rates soared during the war comprise a factor of interest. So, too, do the numbers of registered prostitutes in Egyptian cities, as well as the number of reported cases of venereal diseases, both of which increased substantially during the war and comprised their own crises in both medical and social health.

During the First World War, Egypt was a nation at war. Its citizens were recruited into the war effort, and many of those citizens faced bodily harm and death fighting for the Union Jack in far-off lands. Those who remained at home suffered from shortages of basic supplies–although production rates decreased slightly, they dropped nowhere near as much as consumption rates. They were forced to eat tainted meat that they purchased at high prices. They died of disease whose effects were exacerbated by malnutrition. Some turned to prostitution or other illicit activity to make ends meet.

There is nothing heroic about the fight against a virus, perhaps. As the First World War and the 1919 uprising became enmeshed together in the national historiographic project celebrating the nationalist movement and Egypt’s strive for self-determination, there was no space for sympathetic portrayal of poor women desperate to feed starving children and elderly relatives, and those who, in sheer desperation, turned to extreme measures to support themselves.

The commemorations held in Egypt from 2013 onward to celebrate the nation’s contribution to the First World War recognize only one of these groups.

I’m hoping to recognize the second.

[1] Roger Cooter. “Of War and Epidemics: Unnatural Couplings, Problematic Conceptions.” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 16, no. 2 (2003): 283–302

[2] LaVerne Kuhnke. Lives at Risk. Vol. no. 24. Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990; Hibba Abugideiri. Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2013.

[3] Guido Steinberg. “The Commemoration of the ‘Spanish Flu’ of 1918-1919 in the Arab East.” In The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, and Stephan Dähne. Beiruter Texte Und Studien 99. Würzburg: Ergon-Verl, 2006, 159–60.

Also by Christopher Rose on Not Even Past:

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)
Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey
Exploring the Silk Route
Review: The Ottoman Age of Exploration (2010) by Giancarlo Casale
What’s Missing from Argo (2012)

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

by Christopher Rose

Can the microbe speak?

It’s 5:30 pm, and I’ve been staring at my computer screen for over eight hours. There’s a crick in my neck, my breathing is shallow, my blood pressure has elevated, and the entire Giza governorate has just disappeared off of the map the instant that I finished tracing its borders—for the third time. I take a deep breath, utter a few choice unpleasant words under my breath, make sure to save my work, and turn off the computer. Today, the dragon has won.

I am two weeks into what I had originally, and naively, thought would be a one-week project to map the outbreak of epidemic and epizootic diseases in Egypt during the First World War, which comprises a subsection of my dissertation project. It’s not a great time to be working on Egypt, as it’s become nearly impossible to get research clearance from the Egyptian government. Funding has also become a near impossibility: my optimism at being named a finalist for a Fulbright in early 2016 was short lived; the program was suspended due to security concerns before awards were announced.

While online resources are scarce, I did find that the Egyptian government’s official gazetteer has an online index of its entire run since the 1870s. Over the course of several days, I discovered that the gazetteer was a virtual treasure trove of exactly the sort of data I’ve been looking for: reports of disease outbreaks in detailed locations up and down the Nile Valley. Over a week, I compiled a spreadsheet of almost 800 records for the period between late 1914 and mid-1919.

The question, of course, was what to do with this data. I was certain the diseases would tell me something, if I could just figure out how to get them to speak.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)

It was Julia Gossard, a UT alumna now teaching at Utah State University, who pointed me in the direction of the Programming Historian, a website dedicated to helping historians use digital tools to process data through modeling, mapping, and other methods. I didn’t have time to learn a programming language, but mapping was an idea I liked. The site has several columns about creating maps, using open source mapping software. While I’m a big fan of open source, especially when it replaces costly technical software, I was a bit uneasy about the lack of support for the platform – in short, I foresaw the ability to get myself into trouble, but not out of it.

A little digging around led me to the unexpected find that UT has an institutional subscription to ARCGIS, which is the (otherwise very expensive) industry standard mapping platform. Using UT’s institutional subscription to Lynda.com, I started training myself to use ARCGIS.

Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably wouldn’t have dived right in.

Mapping the data required me to tag each record with the latitude and longitude of the reported location. This led me to one of the key stumbling blocks for all scholars of the Middle East who’ve dabbled in the digital humanities—so much data is out there on the web, but much of it is transliterated from the original language. There is no universally recognized Arabic-to-Latin transliteration method, and the potential inconsistencies are well on display in the web’s largest open-source geographic database, Geonames.org. While some of its Egyptian entries contained the original names in Arabic script, most did not, leaving me to guess—frequently incorrectly—how they might have been rendered. Since Geonames is open-source, I added the names both in Arabic and one of the more commonly recognized transliteration systems to Geonames’s database as I went, which will hopefully make someone else’s life a little easier.

People fleeing a cholera outbreak at the port of Boulaq (near Cairo) in 1883 (via Wellcome Collection)

Finally, it was time to start mapping, and herein lay another challenge. ARCGIS has an expansive built in library of open source data, which included, as I had hoped, administrative maps of Egypt. I very quickly realized, however, that the administrative borders of the early 21c did not correlate directly to those of the early 20c. At least one governorate has since been split into three and there were a lot of unfamiliar names on the maps. I discovered that the UT Libraries has a copy of the 1917 Egyptian census, which has a big fold out map of the country. I scanned it, brought it home and compared it to the current maps … and realized that it was probably going to be easier to draw the 1917 map in ARCGIS rather than try to adapt the contemporary maps.

The process took nearly two weeks, employing long forgotten Photoshop skills (yay for bezel curves!), tracing a century old map and rendering it onto a satellite image of contemporary Egypt. The resultant map is, as they say, “good enough.” It’s probably got a distortion of around 2 miles, but it’ll never appear in print at that level of detail. Maybe when my monograph becomes a best-seller, I’ll hire someone to re-draw it.

I learned that ARCGIS has some quirks. It has a tendency to freeze up every 60-90 seconds. I quickly learned to save my work every time I did anything, a lesson that came in handy when, for some reason, the entire Giza governorate vanished inexplicably … three times … after I drew it. (The following morning, I discovered that the governorate hadn’t vanished, it was just invisible. I still don’t actually know why).

Finally, the big day came. After the blood, sweat, tears, swearing, and yelling at the cat, the map was finished. I overlay my disease data, and sat back to look at the results.

Children playing in a poor neighborhood of Alexandria under quarantine during an outbreak of typhus, sometime around WWI (via Wellcome Collection)

Have the microbes told me a story? They have. As I set forth on the next phase of my project, I have clusters of locations and specific dates to look for. But the maps have also given me more questions—Is there a correlation between a two-year outbreak of cattle plague and the rampant inflation in the cost of food during the war? Does the death of 139,000 Egyptians due to influenza at war’s end have anything to do with the eruption of a populist uprising just six weeks later? And why is this most deadly epidemic absent from the press and the pages of the official gazetteer?

I also realized the importance of presenting my data in this visual form. No one is going to go through all 800 records on my spreadsheet, but the map provides a clear snapshot of my subject and the questions it raises, and it makes a visual case for the argument I’m laying out in my dissertation. In this form, it will make my modest contribution to this field of study more convincing and accessible.

The New Archive series highlights various uses of digital tools in humanities research. More from the series:

Charlie S. Binkow explores Honest Abe’s Archive
Joseph Parrott highlights the digitalized political posters collected by archivist and artist Lincoln Cushing
Maria José Afanador-Llach discusses her experience at a Digitilization Workshop in Venice
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Our featured author this month, Hanan Hammad, received her PhD in History at UT Austin in 2009. She is now Assistant Professor of History at Texas Christian University and we are proud to introduce you to her excellent new book.

By Hanan Hammad

Millions of Egyptian men, women, and children first experienced industrial work, urban life, and the transition from peasant-based and handcraft cultures to factory organization and hierarchy in the years between the two world wars. Their struggles to live in new places, inhabit new customs, and establish and abide by new urban norms and moral and gender orders underlie the story of the making of modern urban life—a story that has not been previously told from the perspective of Egypt’s working class.

Reconstructing the ordinary urban experiences of workers in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, home of the largest and most successful Egyptian textile factory, demonstrates how the industrial urbanization of Egypt transformed masculine and feminine identities, sexualities, and public morality. Coercive industrial organization and hierarchy concentrated thousands of men, women, and children at work and at home under the authority of unfamiliar men, intensifying sexual harassment, child molestation, prostitution, and public exposure of private heterosexual and homosexual relationships. Juxtaposing these social experiences of daily life with national modernist discourses shows us that ordinary industrial workers, handloom weavers, street vendors, lower-class landladies, and prostitutes—no less than the middle and upper classes—played a key role in shaping the Egyptian experience of modernity.

Factory culture and organization were sites where male workers and supervisors negotiated traditional and modern masculinity. Men often used violence and aggression on the shop floor as expressions and performances of the contestation, ambivalence, and changing of men’s fluid masculine identities. Men negotiated the coercive, industrial hierarchy by oscillating between docility and violence. In an attempt to strike a balance between personal pride in making a livelihood and protecting their own integrity, workers evaded authority and developed male associations and bonded among themselves.

Peasants in their traditional galabya dress in the convulsive factory shop floor

Outside factories, workers coming from rural areas had to partake in urban traditions and manners, despite mutual hostility with townspeople. Violence broke out as a result of the division between the urbanites and the factory workers. In that context masculine gender identity, the performance of masculinity, and the construction of manhood were important elements in adapting to industrial urban life. In their competing and fluid loyalties, working-class men developed their notion of the ideal masculine identity and created social locations for peer bonding and friendship.

Blue-collar workers under the eyes of the afandiyya supervisors

Textile factories opened more opportunities for rural women to venture into urban life and to assume an industrial working-class identity. Female industrial workers in both handloom and mechanized factories went through a multifaceted process of proletarianization while being subjugated to the coercive industrial hierarchy and facing both capitalism and patriarchy inside and outside the factory. Factory work subjected women to sexual harassment and social stigma. They acquired skills to operate modern machinery, rose in the social ranks of the salaried urban population, and gained experiences in dealing with a factory system. Yet they had the lowest status and payment among the workers in the male-dominated industrial hierarchy and their morality became subject to communal suspicion and mistrust.

Taking advantage of unprecedented growth in the demands for cheap accommodation, women of the popular classes invested in workers’ lodging and set up their own businesses to provide workers food, drink, and other cheap commodities and services. Entrepreneurial women contributed immensely to shaping the socioeconomic transformation and labor history. These new patterns of economic investment and work allowed lower-class women to assume powerful positions in their households and enabled them to challenge patriarchal norms. These lower-class landladies played an important role in shaping new workers’ experiences with urban life, undermined the agricultural economy in favor of real-estate investment, and challenged the power of the state in the spheres of urbanization and urban control.

Thousands of workers leaving factory gates under guards’ surveillance

With the lack of privacy and increasing sociocultural differences among individuals sharing limited spaces, sexual life became vulnerable to public exposure, and exposing sexuality was a way to negotiate disputes in one’s own favor. Children and adults from different geographical origins often shared living and sleeping spaces. Unmarried female and male strangers shared houses with urbanite families and individuals. In living and work environments marked by anxiety, jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion, it was not unusual for ordinary disputes with neighbors, roommates, housemates, and coworkers to slip into judging one another’s sexual behaviors. By examining the social arguments and controversies over sexual practices, such as women’s harassment, child molestation, sodomy, sex outside wedlock, and homosexuality, people in this transformative urban milieu constructed fluid and intricate, rather than rigid, social norms of licit and illicit sexuality.

The largest labor strike in the history of modern Egypt took place in 1947. Striking workers exposed horrific work and living conditions and shattered the idealistic, nationalist image of industry as a banner of nationalism and economic independence. Prostitution was blamed for the deterioration of workers’ health, which exposed all workers’ sex lives to public scrutiny. Religious and nationalist discourses against sex work that had been a part of the urban landscape made the morality and sexuality of the working classes a target of bourgeois anxiety. Invoking morality against sex workers resonated with the nationalism and the state’s effort to medicalize, control, and stigmatize the lower class’s sexuality, but these discourses also served to overlook tuberculosis, malnutrition, and other diseases that preyed on the poor urban population and triggered strikes and urban unrest.

Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt, The University of Texas Press (2016)

Further reading on the history of gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011)

In Policing Egyptian Women, Liat Kozma traces the effects of nineteenth-century developments such as the expansion of cities, the abolition of the slave trade, the formation of a new legal system, and the development of a new forensic medical expertise on women who lived at the margins of society. Kozma outlines the complicated manner in which the modern state in Egypt monitored, controlled, and “policed” the bodies of subaltern women. Some of these women were runaway slaves, others were deflowered outside of marriage, and still others were prostitutes.

Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (2001)

Inspired by the Indian Subaltern Studies school, this social history offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East. Beinin illuminates how their lives, experiences, and culture can inform our historical understanding. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of the peasants and the modern working classes across the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states.

Judith E. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (1985)

Focusing on lower-class women, this study traces changes in the work role and family life of peasant women in the countryside and craftswomen and traders in Cairo during the rapid social and economic change in the nineteenth century. Brought about by the country’s developing ties with the European economy, the effects of capitalist transformation on women are studied in detail, using material from the Islamic court records.

Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (2007)

Focusing on Egyptian national and gender politics between the two world wars, Baron shows how vital women were to mobilizing opposition to British authority and modernizing Egypt. Egypt as a Woman explores the paradox of women’s exclusion from political rights at the very moment when visual and metaphorical representations of Egypt as a woman were becoming widespread and real women activists–both secularist and Islamist–were participating more actively in public life than ever before.

Films on gender, sexuality and the working classes in Egypt:

I’m suggesting few Egyptian films, mostly from the social realism genre, that discuss issues of gender and sexuality in the intersection with class, social morality, urbanism and rural exploitation.

Youssuf Chahine, Cairo Station, 1958

In the hustle and bustle of Cairo Station, this movie tells a story of romantic infatuation, frustrated sexual desires, and labor struggles in the newly-independent Egypt. A physically-challenged peddler coming from Upper Egypt falls for a gorgeous lemonade seller who is engaged to one of the station’s workers. That fiancé is a strong and respected porter struggling to unionize his fellow workers to combat their boss’ exploitative and abusive treatment.

Muhammad Khan, Factory Girl, 2013

Through the ordinary life of a 21-year-old female worker in a Cairo textile factory, the movie engages with class aspiration, female desires, and moral hypocrisy. When the impoverished factory girl becomes attracted to the factory’s new supervisor, she discovers the glass ceiling of class and gender hierarchy inside the factory and the moral hypocrisy of the larger society that divides the urban working and middle classes.

Henry Barakat, al-Haram (Sin), 1965

This masterpiece portrays the cruel reality of itinerant rural workers. The newspaper Le Monde wrote: “we have been attracted to this movie due to the true picture that reflects the suffering of this village, the picture is not about a problem for one individual; it’s about the reflection of everything surrounding her, from people to culture.”

A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, by Stewart Gordon (2015)

By Cynthia Talbot

The world’s attention was captured in 2012 by the disaster that befell the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship that ran aground off the coast of Italy leading to 32 deaths.

This shipwreck is the most recent one covered in A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks, whose expansive gaze covers much of the world from 6000 BCE to the present. Like several other books containing the words “A History of the World in ..” in their title, Stewart Gordon’s work attempts to encapsulate world history through the close study of a set number of things. Other examples of this approach include A History of the World in 100 Weapons, A History of the World in 12 Maps, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, and the very successful A History of the World in 100 Objects, a collaborative project between BBC Radio and the British Museum. Focusing on a few cases as a way to illustrate global trends is both entertaining and effective – the reader can acquire interesting details about specific things and learn about the broader context at the same time.

800px-a_costa_concordia_kiemelese — Recovery operations on the Costa Concordia (via Wikimedia Commons).

Shipwrecks are dramatic occurrences that are often tragic for those involved, but they can also lead to the preservation of artifacts that can be studied and analyzed, sometimes centuries or millennia after the events themselves. The Bremen cog from German, considered the best surviving specimen of this type of vessel, sank in 1380 but was not discovered until 1962.

Remains of the Bremen Cog (via Wikimedia Commons).

The cog was the dominant ship in northern Europe between about 1200 to 1450 CE. It was a bulk carrier of beer and wool and also served as a warship. Another ancient type of ship is the Khufu barge, featured in the second chapter of A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks. This boat was buried in the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2600 BCE and was not discovered until 1954. The Khufu barge, like several of the ships featured in the book, was not destroyed at sea but Gordon uses a broad definition of shipwreck because his chief goal is to examine the varieties of ships that have existed in human history and the maritime worlds they helped shape.

399px-gizeh_sonnenbarke_bw_2 — Khufu barge after discovery (via Wikimedia Commons).

The shipwreck is therefore just an entry point for Gordon into the far larger topic of maritime history. Each shipwreck allows the author to understand the various ways ships influenced the human societies that utilized them. He explains how each type of vessel was built, the purposes to which it was put, its strengths and weaknesses as a ship, and the maritime network it created. He begins the book with the dugout canoe, a variety of boat found in several parts of the ancient world. The chapters then follow a chronological sequence from the dugout to the modern cruise ship with a variety of stops along the way, including the famous seventh-century Sutton Hoo burial, the Intan shipwreck from Indonesian waters, a Spanish galleon, an American clipper ship, and the Exxon Valdez.

At times, Gordon uses literary evidence to launch his discussion, instead of an actual physical relic. His chapter on the Arab dhow that plied the waters of the western Indian Ocean, for instance, relies on twelfth-century letters preserved at a synagogue in Cairo. We learn about the Barbary war galley from the sixteenth-century memoir of an Englishman who described the ordeals of slavery that he faced after his ship was attacked and boarded in the Mediterranean. Another chapter covers the attempted invasion of Japan by the Mongol leader Khubilai Khan in the thirteenth century, known to us from many sources of information, including Japanese picture scrolls painted soon afterward. Above, we see Mongol warriors shooting arrows from a ship on the left hand side, while Japanese samurai board a Mongol ship on the right.

takezaki_suenaga_ekotoba3 — Japanese samurai boarding Yuan ships in 1281 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Although Gordon makes a concerted effort to examine ships from many areas of the world, the coverage shifts more and more to vessels from Europe and the United States as we get closer to the present. The case of the HMS Victory, sunk in a storm after breaking a blockade in the Mediterranean in 1744, sheds light on the rise of British naval power. The radical reduction of transport time resulting from use of the steam engine is illustrated by means of the Lucy Walker, a sidewheel steamboat that plied the waters of the Mississippi River. Its engines overheated and blew the boat apart one day in 1844, with at least 43 casualties resulting.

lucy_walker_explosion — Lucy Walker explosion, as depicted in an 1856 woodcut (via Wikimedia Commons).

The horrible scene of this explosion, a common problem for steamboats, was depicted by an artist in 1856. The transporting of large numbers of people, rather than cargo, became the rationale for large passenger ships such as the Lusitania. Almost 1200 people died when it was struck by a torpedo from a German submarine in 1915, while en route from New York to Liverpool – a depiction of which adorns the cover of A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks.

Going well beyond the topic of shipwrecks, this enjoyable and educational book exposes the reader to diverse seascapes, social terrains, and political developments, as well as considerable information about trading patterns. In its geographic breadth and temporal length, it provides an admirable example of history writing on a world historical scale. Overall, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks is an engaging introduction to maritime history that explores the impact of specific types of ships in their regional economies and the gradual emergence of a globally connected maritime world by the twentieth century.

Stewart Gordon, A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2015)

More by Cynthia Talbot on Not Even Past:
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor (2011)
Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

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Che in Gaza: Searching for the Story Behind the Image

On June 18^th 1959, dressed in full army fatigues and accompanied by several comrades exhibiting an equally imposing revolutionary appearance, Che Guevara landed in Gaza. Considering his reputation today, one might have expected the 31-year-old Che to, perhaps, instruct the Palestinian resistance fighters (the Fedayeen) in the ways of guerrilla warfare, tell them in detail about his grand foco tactics, or take notes on their then-decade-long battle of resistance against Israel. Indeed, upon first learning of Che’s first – and only – visit to Gaza, I myself was filled with such questions. Was such an exchange of revolutionary tactics the legacy of his visit? Did he come there on purpose in order to build long-term relationship with Palestinian fighters? Was he attracted to Gaza as a hotbed of universal resistance to colonialism? What exactly came of this visit and who did he meet there? I was curious to know.

The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959." Via Wikimedia Commons — The handwritten text reads- “With Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution. Mansion of the Governor General, Lieutenant General Ahmad Salim. Gaza, 1959.” Via Wikimedia Commons

I first heard of Che’s intriguing visit about three years ago. The random person I met in the archives could not tell me much besides the fact that he read somewhere (but where?) that Che visited the Shati refugee camp and was warmly welcomed by its Palestinian inhabitants. That was not much. Searching the web yielded the image above which shows Che and other dignitaries with Ahmad Salim, the powerful Egyptian governor of Gaza. Che’s trustworthy biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, added a few more details and a date but nothing else. So, with this modest beginning, I ventured into the archive to find the story behind the visit and the photo. I started with the Israeli State Archives. From the end of the 1948 war until 1956, and again between 1957 and 1967 (when it was conquered by Israel during the Six Day War), Gaza was under Egyptian rule and their army controlled every aspect of Palestinian life, including their resistance to, and infiltration of, Israel. The Israeli State Archive seemed promising because of how closely they had monitored Gaza throughout this period and into the period of Israeli occupation. I thought that the Israelis could not possibly have missed such a high-profile visit by one of the chief theoreticians and practitioners of guerrilla warfare. To my surprise, it turned out they did. In fact, Che’s visit to Gaza left no impression whatsoever in the Israeli archives. Thus, in the absence of evidence from the Israeli archive and the absence altogether of an Egyptian archive, I turned to the Arab press. What I found was somewhat surprising. Che, it turned out, was a Cuban nobody that the Egyptians mostly ignored.

Indeed, as it turned out, Che’s visit to Egypt – then known as the United Arab Republic – was a brief, low-key event that was tightly controlled by Egyptian authorities reluctant to acknowledge competing revolutionary projects such as Cuba’s. His trip to Gaza was even further played down. The press contingent was kept to a minimum, no iconic photographs were published and – so it seems – only a single image survived. Though Che and the Cubans visited several refugee camps, by day’s end, they dined not with top leaders of the Palestinian revolutionary Fedayeen, but with the Brazilian contingent of the UN Emergency Force. In fact, not a single member of the Fedayeen was present, and there was no talk about revolutionary theory, neo-colonialism, Zionist imperialism, or any of the other 1960s sub-categories of global resistance. Twenty-four hours after Che arrived in Gaza, he was back in Cairo. The newspapers the next day buried the story.

Back in Cairo, the theme continued. The Cubans were far from the talk of the town, and Egyptian attention was visibly elsewhere with the more important visit of Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie. While Selassie received heavy press coverage, the Cubans, except for a few back-page reports, got hardly any. It was not that the Cubans were ignored. Though he was apparently too busy to officially greet Che in the airport upon his arrival, the following day, Nasser awarded him the United Arab Republic’s Decoration of the First Order in a quaint, sparsely-attended ceremony. The rest of the visit was characterized by a paternalistic tone, wherein the Egyptians lectured the inexperienced Cubans on methods of engendering an agricultural revolution in the interest of social equality, and various theories and suggestions were provided as to how the Cubans ought to approach the industrialization of their country. Thereafter, the Cubans left to Damascus, visited the tomb of Salah al-Din (Saladin), a renowned symbol of resistance and sacrifice, and continued on their journey to other locales in Africa and Asia.

This visit to the revolutionary heartland of the Arab world tells us in no uncertain terms that the bearded, cigar-smoking Che was not yet an international icon of global resistance and that that iconic revolutionary decade, the 1960s, had not yet truly begun. In fact, the point of his visit appears not so much to have been to launch an international revolutionary movement but to launch instead a three-month tour to the Third World so Che could introduce himself to the various countries’ progressive elites and, perhaps, along the way, forge commercial ties and hopefully sell some sugar. Yes, that’s right: sugar took precedence over guerilla warfare. But with this tour, Cuba also began a search for its revolutionary role in world affairs. Three years later, Che would emerge the universally recognizable Third World icon of the New Man, worthy of front-page coverage even in Egypt. Indeed, in his future meetings with Nasser, the tables were turned and Nasser presented himself as Che’s attentive and modest acolyte. By this point, of course, the global resistance culture of 1960s was already an integral part of daily Arab politics.

Che Guevera shakes hands with Gamal Abul Nasser. Via the Middle East Institute Journal blog.

As for Palestinians, the Fedayeen fighters of the 1950s had little to do with the guerrilla culture with which they are now anachronistically associated. But this too was about to change, as during the 1960s Che forged a close relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a new generation of Palestinian fighters were heavily influenced by his example as well as by the global culture of resistance. Their moment to act came after 1967 when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, settled in, and began making itself comfortable. In response, left-wing Palestinian guerrillas launched a sustained campaign that reached a zenith under the leadership of Muhammad al-Aswad, known at the time as the “Guevara of Gaza.”

A Commemorative poster by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine marking the death of Guevara of Gaza (1978). Via Palestine Poster Project

Al-Aswad proudly carried Guevara’s legacy all the way to his tragic end, which came during a battle with Israeli soldiers in 1973. A few years later, due to a sustained Israeli campaign, Gaza’s left-wing Palestinian resistance movement was in ruins, and a decade later, the revolutionary left did not have much to offer. Indeed, by then, military opposition to Israel was organized along Islamic lines with organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad taking a central role. Today, after two popular rebellions (intifadas) and after a score of other bloody skirmishes, all that is left of Che’s Gazan legacy is a few middle-aged Palestinians who, back in the 1960s, were given the name Guevara by their idealistic parents. So goes the history of Guevara in Gaza, an engagement that began modestly with a visit by an anonymous, cigar-smoking Cuban but ended, famously, with the making of an icon of resistance for Palestinians, one who sought to liberate his country as well as the world.

Visitors of the Nile: The New Archive (No. 13)

By Charley S. Binkow

For centuries Egypt has inspired awe in the West. From Napoleon to Anderson Cooper, westerners have found an intrinsic fascination with Egypt’s rich culture, history, art, and politics. Since they first arrived, Egypt’s visitors have tried to capture its incredible landscape and document its complex beauty. The Travelers in the Middle East Archive gives us a comprehensive collection of what these visitors saw and what they chose to record one hundred years ago.

Postcard entitled, “Egypt – Native Women” (Lehnert & Landrock Egypt – Native Women (81) (n.d.).
From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/5521)

Between the late 19^th and early 20^th century, explorers took photos, stenciled pictures, and documented all they could see in the Nile Valley. And while these travelers captured grandiose or exceptional images for their catalogues, they were also fascinated with the real, day-to-day life of Egyptians. In this collection, we can see what these explorers saw as noteworthy, what they wanted the world to see, and how they portrayed Egyptian life. This archive is just as much, if not more, about those who documented Egypt as it is about the Egyptians themselves.

Postcard entitled, "Entrance to an Old Native House," 1906 (Lekegian, G. Entrance to an Old Native House (1906). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

Postcard entitled, “Entrance to an Old Native House,” 1906 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/20913)

The archive has assembled these primary sources and divided its massive collection into thematic subjects. One can peruse Art & Artifacts, History & Politics, and a lot more with exceptional ease. There are beautiful pictures, high quality photographs, and vivid paintings that bring the land to life. I especially like the photographs of the Egyptians doing daily routines, such as women carrying pots or boys and girls on the street. And while there are some stunning portraits of foreign dignitaries, like the British general Sir Reginald Wingate, the best images are of the people whose individual lives often don’t make it into the history books. This collection shows the workers, the poor, and people in mourning. Historians can access photos portraying how ordinary people lived—what they wore, how they walked, who they associated with. But they can also better understand the Westerners who visited. Was the land more than a spectacle to them? What do the drawings say about their creators?

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Sladen, Douglas Egyptian Boys And Girls. (1911). From Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

Photograph of Egyptian boys and girls walking down a road, 1911 (Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). http://hdl.handle.net/1911/21592)

In addition to the pictures, the archive has digitized certain key writings. My favorite is E.W. Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians from 1836. Just skimming through the pages brings a whole new world to life. You can read about the Egyptian process of child naming, their various beliefs, and their relationships between religion and law. The preface is a worthy read by itself—especially Lane’s account of the serpent eaters!

This archive is incredibly rich and rewarding, filled with a gold mine of primary documents. Click around and discover Egypt for yourself. The more you traverse the website, the more you’ll want to.

The latest from The New Archive:

A database that preserves the sounds of 1920s New York City

And the American Civil War, as drawn by Harper’s Weekly

The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital

What you can do to help

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