Chapter 10 Legal Chameleons and Jurisdictional Borderlands in Nineteenth Century Egypt

In: Transforming Empire: The Ottomans from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean
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Ziad Fahmy
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Abstract

This chapter highlights the role of thousands of nineteenth century Alexandrian residents with multiple extraterritorial legal identities. The manner with which extraterritoriality was practiced in Egypt effectively gave Western consulates legal jurisdiction not only over their citizens but also over all those able, through whatever means, to acquire protégé status. Many Alexandrians acquired legal protection from multiple consulates, shifting their legal identities to maximize their immediate social and economic interests. Realizing that the heart of Egypt’s borderland society was legal has led me to consider the concept of “jurisdictional borderland” as a productive method for examining the complexity of Egypt’s nineteenth century heterogeneous population. Without an allegiance to any single government – be it Egyptian, Ottoman, or Western – and living in a peripheral environment with multiple, separate, and often competing “national” and legal institutions, these borderlanders thrived in the jurisdictional spaces created in between multiple authorities.

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