“Port Said will remain for me the great crossroads of maritime routes where my heart has felt and recorded the pulsation of the arteries of the universal life of our planet. Here, I had the clear vision, the precise feeling of the diversity of human destinies, which snatches the husband from the wife, the son from his mother, the lover from the lover, and throws them violently in space.” No quotation could be more apt than that of Romanian “minor cosmopolitan” author Panaït Istrati (1884–1935) to open Lucia Carminati’s Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859–1906: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, a superb history of human mobility.
On the one hand, Istrati’s words perfectly render a main endeavor of Carminati’s work, that is, writing a “glocal” history of Port Said, bringing together “local, regional, and global variables in the formation of a new urban community” (p. 16). With its critique of a narrow scalar approach in the diachronic exploration of human mobility and rich discussion of scales, temporality, space, and human agency, this book promises to be a fascinating read for human geographers and historians alike. On the other hand, Istrati’s quotation serves as a counterpoint to one of the book’s great merits, its breaking with deep-seated representations of migrants as a monolithic category whose individual subjectivities, agencies, and politics are either romanticized or largely subsumed into a grand narrative of sweeping structural change. Contributing to a discreet historiographical corpus on modern trans-Mediterranean migration, Carminati’s rich and layered work is a must-read for several reasons: the important theoretical questions she raises in the broader context of the mobility turn, her contribution to the scant existing literature on the specific locale under investigation, and, above all, the sheer impressiveness of microhistorical materials Carminati was able to collect and combine with multiple governmental and institutional archives and published sources of disparate types (e.g., memoirs, travelogues, press) to write a ground-breaking subaltern history of the Isthmus of Suez.
Despite the relevance of the canal to modernist standard narratives of globalization, the city of Port Said and its heterogeneous migrant population has been quite neglected by scholars to date. The author presents a human history of the Suez Canal and Port Said that departs significantly from previous infrastructural or institutional histories of the area, in which the isthmus society and its complex system of power relations remain largely eclipsed by a preponderant technocratic emphasis. Carminati singles out a number of themes of the utmost importance: that access to mobility as an asset is class-specific and, therefore, that the physical reality of movement is socially constructed. She also argues that mobility and space are co-constitutive: “the differentiated mobility of a diversified workforce and the formation of an unequal migrant society produced Port Said and enabled the realization of the Suez Canal” (p. 6,italics mine) as much as Port Said provided the backdrop for the enactment of disparate sets of normative and disciplinary practices over a heterogeneous and elusive population. In the interstices between largely ineffective top-down order-making attempts and everyday subaltern forms of adaptation, contention, dissimulation, and avoidance, a peculiar social configuration was born.
In Carminati’s book, mobility, notably, is as important as fixity. Taking into account Valeska Huber’s important history of the role of the Suez Canal in global connectivity and circulation networks, Carminati makes a point of “staring at the Canal,” while simultaneously planting her feet “in the swampy Isthmus ground as solidly as possible” (p. 10). Accordingly, she depicts the canal area as an incubator of human experiences and a peculiar social fabric. Perfectly integrating larger theoretical assumptions and source methodology, Carminati deploys a modified microhistorical approach and interrogates a series of seemingly trivial archival cases to extrapolate and illuminate nonessentialist instances of ordinary people’s agency. With an enticing narrative style, the author takes us right to the middle of the port city, in the midst of an embodied vernacular modernity in which migrant workers engaging in an endless quest for subsistence were largely defined by and, in turn, redefined concepts of race, gender, and class crucial to the production of metropolitan and local orders.
Chapter 1 of Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said focuses on the construction of the canal, with its several overlapping labor regimes. In 1864, forced labor was abolished in Egypt and manpower started to be recruited from both shores of the Mediterranean, redirecting trans-Mediterranean labor flows to Egypt while consolidating previous circuits. Port Said, consequently, became a “universal meeting point,” both a terminus and a node in an extended mobility orbit, where Egyptian and European migrants mingled in what the coeval press referred to in a quite sensational fashion as the “new Klondike” (pp. 45–47). Carminati discusses migratory push factors, labor conditions, workers’ adaptive strategies and, especially, in relation to the increase in the influx of Europeans in 1865, the role of gender and age on the worksites. Chapter 2 zooms in on how various managements performed poorly in their attempts to control a quite diverse migrant society through various disciplinary projects at a time classed, gendered, racialized, and spatial. Although the sheer reality of physical proximity and the mundane imperative of everyday subsistence exposed the imaginary quality of biopolitical taxonomies and hierarchies, subalterns’ responses were far from unified, ranging from outright resistance to, more often, strategic obedience. As Carminati disentangles fine-grained details from hundreds of archival cases, subaltern agency emerges as a messy assemblage, defying the notion of unified teleological subjectiveness and class consciousness. By taking into consideration milestones such as the canal inauguration of 1869 and the Anglicization of the company after the British occupation of 1882, Chapter 3 offers an exploration of subaltern adjustment to unemployment and heightened governmental surveillance after 1869. More specifically, Carminati convincingly revisits some conventional state-centric understandings of the canal’s chronology and spatiality by adopting a subaltern perspective. As occupational prospects dramatically shrank after 1869, the opening of the canal was acclaimed by the international community, but surely workers had no reason to celebrate it. Chapter 4 describes Port Said’s leisure and drinking cultures. Although not discussed as such explicitly, Port Said’s nightlife scene is understood as a heterotopia, in which the forms of social interaction among disparate groups Carminati describes with great empirical richness defied, yet paradoxically reinforced, dominant notions of decorum and frail racial hierarchies and gendered norms. Broadly construed by the authorities as transgressive and unruly and, therefore, criminalized, nightlife in Port Said constituted a microcosm of what Istrati called the “universal life of the planet.” For all the “violent nature” of the structural forces shaping the lives and trajectories of subsistence migrants, the sociability of disparate peoples in taverns and drinking dens stood as a vivid illustration of the banal, ordinary human impulse to find solace even in the direst conditions and to make a home away from home.
Such lucid, passionate, and rhetoric-free meditation about the quintessential diasporic nature of the human condition remains one of the enduring achievements of Carminati’s book, together with her final exhortation to restore migrants’ lives and experiences, despite their usual fragmentariness and sparseness, to the center of global history.
