Colonial migrants and the making of a British Mediterranean

Abstract

This article examines the concept and colonial reality of the British Mediterranean through the imperial network of trade and migration from and to areas under British political and/or economic control. The hybrid identities of many citizens in the colonial Mediterranean can best be seen in the perception and reality of the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean as cosmopolitan. The article also argues that the role and experience of these migrants as intermediate groups was determined by the form of rule British colonial authorities imposed in each dominion.

Power and music in Cairo: Azbakiyya

“…In these port cities, a Mediterranean coastal sociability resulted from incorporation into the world economy, economic and political migration, the fulfilment of maritime needs and colonial interests. 58 A crucial question, which cannot be tackled here, is the extent to which this coastal social hybridity, often labelled as cosmopolitan, affected the hinterlands. During Said Pasha's rule one may see in Cairo's Azbakiyya an inland development of a precolonial site of cosmopolitanism.…”

Suez: A hollow canal in need of peopling. Currents and stoppages in the historiography, 1859–1956

“…Finally, cosmopolitanism in Egypt was neither automatically produced nor enabled by the expansion of British rule in the Mediterranean. Imperial rivalries indeed facilitated the mobility of people, goods, ideas, and practices (Gekas, 2012, pp. 75–76; Starr, 2009, pp.…”