In the autumn of 2011, I waited to meet an acquaintance inside a pizzeria in Milan, Italy. Egyptian migrants had organised a demonstration against Egypt’s (at the time) temporary military rule.Footnote ¹ They planned to gather in Piazzale Loreto, the same site where Mussolini’s corpse had been displayed after his capture and death in 1945. One pizzaiolo, Sayyid, had arrived in Milan from Alexandria, Egypt, years earlier. He discussed the violence that had followed the ousting of Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring: a manifestation of endemic political oppression at the hands of the Egyptian military and police. Sayyid believed that systemic state violence, structural inequality, and political favouritism had driven many individuals and families from Egypt since the 1970s.Footnote ²

But his story ran deeper. He claimed that Italy and Egypt shared in a Mediterranean heritage that should not be ignored in the current debates about migration. He shifted the conversation to his arrival in Italy in the wake of Sarkozy’s 2007 proposal for a Euro-Mediterranean union, concurrent with a rise in anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric across Europe in the early 2000s. The sinking of vessels in the Mediterranean had begun to fill media reports as Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency, aimed to establish rigid control over the continent’s externalised borders.Footnote ³ Political figures on the Italian and European political Right embraced and fomented anti-immigrant rhetoric in their framing of national identity and belonging.Footnote ⁴ Sayyid abruptly interrupted his lament on the challenges of migration to describe an interaction he had had with an elderly Arabic-speaking Italian woman: ‘it turned out she was born and raised in Alexandria… there used to be a lot of Italians in Egypt, you know!? We’re here because they were there!’ It was the first time I heard such a formulation. In the months and years that followed, I filled my notebooks with similar stories. Egyptian migrants in contemporary Italy repeatedly conjured the past presence of migrants from Italy in Egypt.Footnote ⁵

When I began writing this book, I had planned to examine these overlapping Mediterranean ‘imaginaries’, what Claudio Fogu calls ‘configurations of mental, verbal, or visualized images that refer explicitly or implicitly to ideas of Mediterranean-ness’. Such imaginaries seemed to feature among many migrants, like Sayyid, travelling between Italy and Egypt, but also flourished among hopeful migrants in Egypt’s towns and cities. I assumed that such imaginaries would constitute part of a wider constellation of political-economic ties linking the two countries through migration.Footnote ⁶ More than ‘images’, I learned, such imaginaries were, and remain, attached to concrete historical processes. The contingencies to which they refer have contoured categories of legal, political, and social belonging in and across the Mediterranean. They are not merely part of an abstracted ‘liquid continent’ or a ‘liquid site of imaginary production’, as Fogu and others claim.Footnote ⁷ While they might be flexible, they are not as fluid as liquid metaphors present them to be. In the entanglement of escalating xenophobia on the political Right, (abstract) humanitarianism on the political Left, and the intensification of public discourse on migration in and beyond Europe, stories of an historical Italian presence in Egypt helped migrants to navigate exclusionary political hierarchies.Footnote ⁸ This became increasingly evident when I witnessed the extent to which Egyptian migrants in Italy debated the fate of Italians in Egypt: some claimed that Gamal Abdel Nasser had expelled them unjustly during the Suez conflict in 1956, while others maintained that Italians departed on their own accord once they no longer benefitted from colonial structures. These contested processes provided the basis for a historicisation of contemporary migration.

Migration at the End of Empire puts a microhistorical lens to the departure of over 40,000 Italians from Egypt after the Second World War as a starting point to understand how historical temporalities and political membership are connected. This case invites us to challenge assumptions about nation and empire in the Mediterranean. This is especially true because Italians in and from Egypt did not fit neatly within a category of ‘coloniser’ or ‘colonised’; they are part of the layered story of imperialism, colonialism, and decolonisation that adds nuance to the relationships between both metropole and colony and nation and empire.Footnote ⁹ Following Sayyid’s invitation to explore these connected histories, this book focuses on empirical level of conflicting temporalities.Footnote ¹⁰ It draws upon a range of sources and materials, using microhistory to interrogate ruptures and continuities in historical time.Footnote ¹¹

‘Time’, in the subtitle, refers to a processual and unfolding (irreversible) historical time, on the one hand, and to two connected iterations of out-of-time-ness that were repeated in archival documents and oral histories, on the other. Firstly, before the Second World War ended, an Italian diplomat who had recently arrived in Egypt described the population of over 50,000 Italian residents as a ‘community’ that was ‘out of time’ (fuori tempo), concluding that their sense of belonging was out of sync with the transformations occurring around them.Footnote ¹² Secondly, being ‘out of time’ referred to the limited horizons of Italians in and from Egypt – before, during, and after their departures, by them and by representatives of state and international institutions. In other words, the projected ending of ‘the community’ contoured impressions of the past and understandings of the future. An imminent ending shaped many of the anxieties and prognostications that manifested in the voices which populate this book. Writings about an ‘existential crisis’ facing Italians in, and later from, Egypt began in the nineteenth century and continued through the fascist ventennio (1919–1943) and into the time of writing. This sense of an ending is underpinned by the fact that some historical temporalities – especially those linked to the state – have more power than others, a point to which I will return.Footnote ¹³

The story of Italian departures points to how these processes continue to inflect ideas about migration in the contemporary Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite its frequent invocation by Egyptian migrants like Sayyid, in Italy little is known about Italian migration to and departures from Egypt; some individuals sigh curiously when they learn that Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Dalida (Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti) were all born in Egypt. To many Italians from Egypt, theirs is a marginalised story. Beginning with the more ‘recent’ arrivals, Italians in Egypt included migrants who left Italy after the 1905 and 1908 earthquakes in Calabria and Sicily and during the period of mass emigration (1870–1914), Italian Jewish protégés from Ottoman territories in the Eastern Mediterranean, political exiles who had fled the peninsula during the Risorgimento (1815–1861), and merchants who had criss-crossed the sea since the time of the Maritime Republics, among others.

Until around the second half of the nineteenth century, a creole form of the Italian language functioned as a lingua franca in the Eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt, it attested to the political influence of an affluent, professional, and mercantile population that would begin to decline around the time of Italy’s national unification in 1861. By 1894, Francesco Santorelli, editor of Corriere Egiziano, an Italian-language newspaper published in Cairo, would write that ‘for some years now, the Italian colonies in the East, and especially in Egypt, are experiencing an acute existential crisis, a terrible and debilitating crisis’.Footnote ¹⁵ The idea of their decline in a world of intensifying imperial rivalry would propel Italy’s colonial ambitions.Footnote ¹⁶ In many ways, ‘the Italians of Egypt’ (gli italiani d’Egitto), as they came to be known, symbolised the intersection of national emergence and competing imperial ambitions in the Mediterranean.

This book employs concepts of temporality and membership to interrogate the periodisation of the Mediterranean, which conventionally charts the region’s demise around the time at the centre of this book – specifically, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956.Footnote ¹⁷ By using ‘political membership’, I aim to encapsulate the various manifestations of ‘community’ or shared forms of belonging that surface in the archives of this migration. Collettività, colonie, comunità, communauté, and al-galliya al-italiyya are all terms invoked by and about Italian migrants and residents in and from Egypt, and they often appear interchangeably in source material. Each of these terms is interwoven with the political constellations from which historical actors derived meaning, and each represents different forms of legal, political, and social structure. Together, they helped to articulate membership in terms of rights and in relation to (state) institutions.Footnote ¹⁸

As described by Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler, and Leo Lucassen, a ‘membership regime […] denotes the complex of rules, regulations, customs and values surrounding the entry and long-term settlement of migrants in a new polity’.Footnote ¹⁹ They argue that membership regimes reflect the power relations between ‘newcomers and receiving societies’. In this case, arenas of ‘newcomers’ and ‘receiving societies’ fluctuate across time as the parameters of nation and empire transform, shifting and redefining terms of community. Political membership, I claim, allows for a flexible understanding of how such rules, regulations, customs, and values structure and delimit experiences and expectations. Changes in membership regimes invite questions about historical temporalities.

Membership in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Egypt and in the wider Mediterranean incorporated early modern ideas of belonging as well as modern ones (post-1800) related to the emergence of the nation-state.Footnote ²⁰ Conflicts within and between membership regimes challenge us to think critically about the mutual constitution of migrants, communities, and state power.Footnote ²¹ Early modern forms of legal protection in the Mediterranean, many of which set standards for membership, have received a great deal of scholarly attention in their immediate contexts.Footnote ²² Few scholars, however, have extended their analyses into the twentieth century.Footnote ²³ Still fewer have sought to comprehend how failed, cancelled, or superseded membership regimes endured. The complex of membership regimes detailed in this book meant that Italians in and from Egypt, as part of a transimperial community, never quite settled anywhere as they lived multiple, overlapping, and at times conflicting temporalities.Footnote ²⁴ This dilemma prompts questions about how to approach the relationship between individual and collective itineraries, and about the contexts in which migrants moved.

Nancy Green argues that migration history since the transnational turn (which she situates after 1989) has fostered notions of ‘unfettered’ movement across borders, emphasising migrant agency while downplaying the role of state interference in mobility. Such an approach, she claims, elides the many frictions encountered by mobile subjects as they negotiate their surroundings, particularly those frictions provoked by what she calls the ‘stubborn state’.Footnote ²⁵ I agree that it is time to reassess the transnational framework. The state’s absence or its conceptual separation from migrants’ experience flattens our knowledge about how and along what paths mobility occurs. The same is true of rigidly defined top-down or bottom-up framings. Green proposes that we concentrate on two aspects: first, how states conceived of subjects who lived elsewhere and, second, how mobile subjects deployed citizenship in different ways in their movements.Footnote ²⁶ This microhistorical study of migrant Italian subjects and state institutions does not intend to reify any particular national form of identity, but rather seeks to comprehend how the politics of departure came to shape the encounter between migrants and the state, an aspect that recent decades of anti-immigrant nationalist (and nativist) rhetoric has demonstrated is more necessary than ever. By embracing Green’s approach to understand departure at the end of empire, then, I repostulate the connections between migrants and the state and illustrate how national, imperial, and colonial forms of membership are bound together in temporal hierarchies.Footnote ²⁷

Prior to 1861, ‘Italy’ as a nation was yet unformed. In Egypt, individuals from the Italian peninsula occupied a variety of positions under the authorities of their respective consuls, but these relationships were neither strictly regulated nor necessarily based on claims of national belonging. An 1840 estimate counted around 2,000 ‘Italians’, but this number expanded rapidly after Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882.Footnote ²⁸ Like destinations in the Americas and Europe, many Italians arrived in search of temporary or seasonal employment. The population rose from 18,665 in 1882 to 24,454 in 1897, to peak at 52,462 (from 1927 onwards most of the growth has been attributed to ‘natural’ growth, that is, Italians born locally).Footnote ²⁹ By the late nineteenth century, many ‘Italians’ living in French Algeria or in the French Protectorate of Tunisia had been naturalised as French citizens or lived with limited rights under colonial authorities, yet in Egypt, Greek, Italian, French, and other ‘foreign’ nationals lived under extraterritorial jurisdiction, linked by nationality to their (mostly) autonomous national consuls, courts, and institutions. This unique relationship between territory and membership would be phased out between 1937 and 1949 as Egypt’s nationalists sought to redefine the terms of national sovereignty.Footnote ³⁰

The population of Italians in Egypt was heterogenous in ethnolinguistic origins and social status. While members of the wider community cut across all social strata, around three quarters of the population was considered working class. Most individuals and families shared in a form of citizenship that oscillated from ‘thin’ to ‘thick’ dependent upon when they had acquired nationality and which political rights they had been entitled.Footnote ³¹ They embraced shifting political perspectives, ranging from internationalist anarchists to monarchists, staunch nationalists, and later to devout fascists and communists. All these categories were complicated by the end of empire. Many Italians resided in the urban centres of Cairo and Alexandria. Another, smaller population lived in the Suez Canal cities of Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez.Footnote ³² In all of Egypt, Italian residents were the second largest ‘foreign’ (i.e. non-Egyptian) population after Greeks.Footnote ³³ Within each city, some neighbourhoods housed larger concentrations of Italians, yet nowhere did they supersede ten percent of the total population. They tended to reside in areas distinguished by class: lower- and middle-class districts of Shubra (Rod al Farag) and Bulaq in Cairo, and in Alexandria, the working-class area of Attarin and the city’s emergent middle-class neighbourhoods of Camp Cesar and Ibrahamiyyah. Elite Italians lived farther east in Alexandria, in Roushdy or Bulkeley, or in Cairo in Heliopolis, Zamalek, and Ma’adi.Footnote ³⁴ Institutions linked to the Italian state were similarly dispersed: Italian hospitals operated in Alexandria (until 1967) and Cairo (until the time of writing); schools in Alexandria (until 1945) and Cairo (until the time of writing); and cultural clubs and centres in Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez Canal Zone (all closed). Especially relevant to this book was the presence of Italian consulates in Alexandria (closed in 2014), Cairo, Port Said (closed after the Second World War), and Chambers of Commerce in Alexandria (est. in 1911) and Cairo (est. 1920).Footnote ³⁵ Debate about the decline and eventual end of extraterritorial jurisdiction between the 1930s and 1945–1949, which underpins this book, demonstrates the crucial roles these institutions played for Italian – and other foreign – residents. Moreover, it helps us understand how migration entangles processes across time and space.

Between 1945 and 1961, at least 40,000 Italians left Egypt. During those years of ‘exodus’ – a term Angelos Dalachanis employs critically to refer to the sociopolitical dynamics of mass departure of Greeks from Egypt during the early 1960sFootnote ³⁶ – most Italians from Egypt ‘returned’ to Italy as ‘repatriates’ or ‘national refugees’. Others departed once more as ‘emigrants’. In postwar Europe, these terms had imprecise socio-legal implications, but they all shaped welfare regimes, experiences of departure, expectations of arrival, and both national and European processes of political integration.Footnote ³⁷ Some scholars have gone so far to argue that the articulation of these categories ‘made’ postwar Europe (or postwar worlds more generally).Footnote ³⁸ As Italian departures were channelled increasingly through state institutions, they challenged the multiple, and often contested, meanings implied by these categories.

Power and time serve as an important metrics when considering the connections between macrohistorical processes and micro-temporal experiences.Footnote ³⁹ Temporal asymmetry has informed studies of the French Revolution, and of revolutionary time in general, but rarely has it been applied to processes such as the breakdown of empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁰ Post-1945 Mediterranean worlds looked differently for Italian residents in, and recently departed from, Egypt than they did for diplomatic actors in the region.Footnote ⁴¹ Contested impressions of historical time radically altered perceived and real courses of action. For some individuals, they made the future increasingly uncertain. Historian Rhys Jones has referred to similar dissonant moments, when large-scale processes collapsed into micro-temporal experiences, as ‘time warps’.Footnote ⁴² Many Italian residents perceived themselves as ‘constrained’ to depart from Egypt due to diminishing possibilities to remain there. They would no longer be able to be Italian and in Egypt as they had before. But they would not be able to reconcile these forms of membership. Their expectations for reception in postwar Italy, and their changing attitudes towards regional politics, rested on this perceived discord between experience and expectation. Diplomatic actors, too, worked within such configurations, at times seeing Italian residents as valuable ‘assets’ for geopolitical strategy in the Mediterranean and at other times seeing them as obstacles to national recovery. These conflicts in temporality, and their fluctuation between macro- and micro-levels of historical action, invite us to question the emergence and stability of categories through which we apprehend the past.Footnote ⁴³

Microhistorical interactions between state institutions and migrant subjects are at the centre of this book. Migration at the End of Empire does not aim to reconstruct the quotidian lives of migrants from the bottom up, and I make no pretension to describe a ‘whole’, coherent, or bounded community in cultural historical terms. I argue, instead, that by concentrating on the interactions between migrants and state actors and institutions, we can capture the ways that historical temporalities have been experienced and mobilised. Italians in this story appear within competing and changing membership regimes first as migrants, and then as residents, and eventually as refugees, repatriates, and migrants anew. Each of these terms carried particular legal, political, and social valences, and none was mutually exclusive. Moreover, Italians surface as members of both a physical community, whose quotidian realities were filtered through and often determined by state institutions due to jurisdictional contexts, and an idea of community, one that was deployed strategically to make claims of political membership in a changing world. That tension runs through their story.

Mediterranean Temporalities

While historians have addressed many of the teleologies that, until recently, shaped our knowledge of budding nation-states in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, a similar revaluation of twentieth-century history has not yet occurred.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, as critical scholars of the Mediterranean have observed, the presumed ‘ending’ of the Mediterranean is often drawn in relation to the rise of non-European polities.Footnote ⁴⁵ Migration at the End of Empire rethinks regional teleologies by considering how historical time, as both universal and lived, multiplies and layers social and political histories of empire, nation, and migration.Footnote ⁴⁶ Scholars have long studied cultures of time. Indeed, cultural perspectives on time have dominated scholarship, producing studies on how technological or mechanical changes transformed measurements of time and global temporal regimes.Footnote ⁴⁷ This book diverges from those approaches by questioning the pervasiveness of political and diplomatic time in the relationship between migrants and the state. As Matthew Champion has argued, the history of temporalities opens possibilities that have yet to be explored to the extent of other analytical approaches.Footnote ⁴⁸ Champion calls for a polyphonic temporality in his reappraisal of what Jacques Le Goff describes as a transition from church to merchant time in medieval Europe.Footnote ⁴⁹ The ‘fullness’ of time argued for by Champion is not unique to the fifteenth century; nor does it vanish as we approach the present. I embrace this temporal fullness in order to debunk myths of rupture which partition the Mediterranean into ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’ seas or portray a transition from ‘cosmopolitan’ to ‘national’ categories. In place of such rigid frameworks and categories, I examine how historical temporalities overlap, coexist, and compete in the anticipated, experienced, and remembered departure of Italians from Egypt.

Reinhard Koselleck’s historical theory underlies much of the approach I take in Migration at the End of Empire. In elaborating a conceptual history, he suggests that we seek to understand the unfolding of historical time in the balance between experience and expectation.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Koselleck, experience and expectation ‘embody past and future’, allowing us to apprehend concrete, empirical processes of historical time.Footnote ⁵¹ Within this dynamic, he argues, the future is open and indeterminate, but it is not always surprising: ‘there are gradations of greater or lesser probability with which future reality can be predicted’.Footnote ⁵² Koselleck claims there are ‘enduring conditions within which what is new appears’. These conditions, which he calls ‘structures of experience’, influence our ‘prognostic certainty’, or our capacity to imagine the future. On the basis of those possibilities, then, time can be seen as multiple and layered.Footnote ⁵³ But pasts and futures are not evenly distributed in historical time.Footnote ⁵⁴ When they collide or conflict they foster the sense of anachronism, contradiction, or progressive directionality that demarcates alterity or imposes one temporal regime over another. As much as the injunction of temporal resonance – that is, being in or of time rather than out of time – could signify active participation in imperialist modernity, as it did when the Mussolini’s fascist government sought to incorporate Italians in Egypt in the regime’s imperial projects in the Mediterranean and East Africa, temporal asymmetry exposes how power structures historical time.Footnote ⁵⁵ After the collapse of the fascist government in 1945 and the loss of most of Italy’s colonial possessions by 1947, imperialist modernities continued to shape the expectations of many Italians in Egypt, even while their institutional buttressing crumbled.Footnote ⁵⁶ For these reasons, the scope of this book cuts across conventional periodisations of modern history in order to reveal how futures of departure were anticipated (and feared), but also how conflicting expectations animated outcomes before, during, and after the Second World War.Footnote ⁵⁷

Koselleck’s multiple and layered time, while crucial to articulating a more complex edifice of historical temporalities, is thus only a springboard to asking how power shapes competing ‘regimes of historicity’, as Francois Hartog defines conventions about the arrangement of past, present, and future.Footnote ⁵⁸ Temporal processes do not unfold in a uniform fashion, nor are they detached from their contexts. To move beyond simple readings of time’s multiplicity or plurality, Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley propose ‘chronocenosis’ as a model to understand ‘the mutual constitution of power and time’. They contend that a consideration of how power operates ‘by arranging, managing, and scaling temporal regimes and conflicts’ remains understudied despite a so-called temporal turn in the humanities.Footnote ⁵⁹ Following their call for a discord-based model of temporality, in Migration at the End of Empire, I resist breaking time into discreet conceptual units. This book’s reliance on voices from archival documents and oral histories shows how arrangements of pasts, presents, and futures invariably conflict with one another and resist conventional categorisation. Rather, these voices speak to and highlight the polyphonic nature of legal, political, and social landscapes of migration in the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean has long been marked by entrenched imperial and geopolitical projects.Footnote ⁶⁰ Due to the imbricated relationships between states, their formal structures, and migrant subjects, in Migration at the End of Empire, I refer often to migration diplomacy. By ‘migration diplomacy’, I draw attention to the methods and strategies by which migration is used to influence foreign policy. In her study of transnational lives and the making of US–Chinese relations during the Cold War, Meredith Oyen shows how ‘policy makers used migration policy to benefit foreign policy’.Footnote ⁶¹ In other words, migration was not a consequence of, nor was it simply acted upon by, foreign policy, but rather it was an integral part of it. Migration diplomacy, in this book, is intended in a wider meaning. As much as migrant subjects and citizens were interpellated by membership regimes, state actors frequently responded to migrants’ needs, demands, and expressions of support or discontent.Footnote ⁶² In this back and forth exchange, historical temporalities became entangled. From the attempts of a newly unified Italy to influence the Khedival policy in 1870s Egypt to the fascist regime’s support of Egyptian nationalists, to the postwar Republic’s purported mission to act as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, the ‘stubborn state’ – to which Green refers – was present in all departures to and from Egypt and built upon experiences and encounters with Italians in and from Egypt. By focusing on these points of interaction, ‘migration diplomacy’ brings historical actors frequently separated into dialogue with one another precisely at the point where historical temporalities conflict.

Continuities of state policies and actors figure prominently in setting limits on membership for Italians in and from Egypt. Any facile periodisation into political blocks (liberal, fascist, and post-fascist in Italian historiography; colonial and postcolonial in Egyptian historiography) fails to adequately account for change. Scholars have examined how emigration sustained Italian state- and empire-making from the 1880s until the First World War, making out of Italy an ‘emigrant nation’. By focusing on notions of sovereignty and citizenship, they have also considered how settlement policies on Italy’s borderlands during the liberal and fascist periods demarcated Italy as a nation-empire. Others have looked at how migrants and refugees uprooted from Italy’s former colonial possessions ‘made’ postwar worlds in Italy and Europe.Footnote ⁶³ Each of these positions has contributed to our understanding of nation formation (and deformation), yet by working within the confines of the rise and fall of political regimes they have also reinforced binaries (and analytical separations) between subjects and the state. A critical approach to the temporalities of political membership complicates these analytical categories and the periodisations to which they refer.

In Migration at the End of Empire, I argue that national and imperial processes reconfigure political membership in the contexts of Mediterranean decolonisation, but they do not necessarily eclipse already existing ones. Here, we see an awkward coupling of Wilsonian ideas of self-determination and territorial sovereignty with what Elizabeth Buettner refers to as the ‘coming to terms with the loss of the colonial order that had benefitted many Europeans’ connected to decolonial processes.Footnote ⁶⁴ Buettner’s Europe after Empire and Andrea Smith’s Europe’s Invisible Migrants are perhaps the most eloquent considerations of the links between decolonisation and postcolonial migration. Similarly, Todd Shepard demonstrates how the French state ‘invented’ decolonisation in seeking to historicise and transform its relationship with Algeria in the context of the Algerian War. In doing so, this state-administered invention of decolonisation circumscribed the outcomes of many displaced colonial subjects.Footnote ⁶⁵ The pieds noirs arriving to France during and after the Algerian war for independence and the repatriates from Italy’s former colonial possessions after the Second World War, however, fall squarely within national projects of decolonisation (even if complex ones).Footnote ⁶⁶ Many historical analyses, even comparative in scope, are locked within similar binaries of formerly coloniser and colonised polarities, a prolific bias in post-1945 history.Footnote ⁶⁷ Furthermore, scholarship on population displacements at the end of empire is often distinguished from the European policies that emerged in response to the needs of populations uprooted by the events of the Second World War. The subjects of these studies are all linked to displacements stimulated by war; the longer durée of anticipated, experienced, and remembered departures from Egypt both elaborates and challenges these scholarly conversations.Footnote ⁶⁸

By examining the frictions between migrant subjects and the state since the late nineteenth century, we see how colonial and postcolonial communities were homogenised and differentiated in relation to other communities. If it is true, as Fredrick Cooper maintains, that only in the 1960s did the nation-state become ‘the generalized form of sovereignty’, then taking the Second World War as a starting point for our understanding of the sociopolitical undercurrents of displacement from the colonial territories of North Africa fails to adequately depict the extent to which political mobilisation conjured earlier historical processes.Footnote ⁶⁹ A chronological trajectory that incorporates Italy’s national unification, fascist imperialism and its collapse, European integration, anti-imperialism, and Egypt’s gradual decolonisation, sheds light on how frictions, contradictions, and resonances encountered by migrant subjects can transfigure ideas about the emigrant nation, the nation-empire, and the world after the Second World War. In this way, the departures of Italians from Egypt resemble the transient legal, political, and social conditions of migrants living at the end of empires past and present.

In his study of the emergence of border controls and identity documentation, Adam McKeown claims,

This more nuanced history is made clear when linking anticipated, experienced, and remembered departures of Italians from Egypt.Footnote ⁷¹ Within these changing contexts, migrants made decisions and articulated political membership (often opportunistically) in ways informed (and constrained) by unfolding events that conditioned possible outcomes. They did so in dialogue with institutions and individuals directly (diplomats, schools, and consulates) and indirectly (newspapers and charity organisations) linked to the state. Attending to the discord of temporalities, I show how forms of political membership coexisted, competed, and shaped the worlds in which communities formed, lived, and moved. In this sense, neither iteration of ‘community’ – the physical and the ideological – was ever quite realised. Rather, they were both caught up in the processes of homogenisation and differentiation that constituted the horizons of the changing Mediterranean since at least the 1870s.Footnote ⁷²

Decolonisation did not abrogate older forms of membership, but rather multiplied and entangled them with evolving ones.Footnote ⁷³ In Sayyid’s words, with which I began, connected migrations had been concealed by the lack of public awareness about an Italian presence in Egypt. This sentiment expressed a repudiation of the idea that Italy transitioned from a nation of emigrant departures to one of immigrant arrivals around the 1990s.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some scholars aim to combat the representational politics of the present by comparing them with the past. To weave coherent narratives about the links between Italy’s history of empire and migration, this scholarship uses metaphorical devices that advocate for an ontological humanism framed around the idea that Italy’s (past) emigrants share with today’s immigrants the experiences of migration.Footnote ⁷⁵ These comparisons, I contend, rest on an ahistorical notion of migration; they see migration as an abstracted process shared across time despite the asymmetrical contexts affecting different migration histories.Footnote ⁷⁶ This approach obscures our knowledge of the past and the present, and these neat literary devices perpetuate a bifurcated relation between politics and history. Such a framing masks how past departures from the peninsula transform and intervene in the politics of the present.Footnote ⁷⁷

Today’s anti-immigration sentiment cannot be decoupled from longer durée histories of migration; sometimes, it emerges from them.Footnote ⁷⁸ Scholars of the Black Mediterranean Collective propose a rethinking of the hierarchies that articulate the Mediterranean and its (temporal and spatial) borders.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ida Danewid, for example, claims that recourse to an ‘abstract humanism’, an ontological humanity which conflates past and present into one category of shared experiences, has in turn masked the connected yet uneven histories of migration, empire, and decolonisation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Likewise, in his exploration of the links between Britain’s migration politics at the end of empire, Ian Sanjay Patel contends that stories of immigration evince histories ‘connected to empire’.Footnote ⁸¹ As Patel observes, the histories of contemporary migration and empire are inextricably bound to one another. Egyptian migrants like Sayyid evoked the past presence of Italian subjects in Egypt while describing their own experiences of anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia in contemporary Italy and Europe. In doing so, they threaded processes that had engendered post-1945 Mediterranean geopolitics into their current predicaments. Sayyid and others claimed to belong to a Mediterranean from which they had been expelled. This was the same Mediterranean to which many Italian ‘repatriates’ from Egypt claimed to belong. In Rome, roughly one year after I spoke with Sayyid, an Italian from Egypt explained how political membership had worked for Italians in colonial Egypt: contrasting Italians in Egypt to migrants in today’s Italy, he said ‘you see, an [Italian] immigrant [in Egypt] was not an immigrant’.Footnote ⁸² This inverted rendering of Sayyid’s statement distinguished the two experiences of migration, but it invites us to study their connection.

Teleologies of Departure

Part of the problem shaping periodisation of the Mediterranean is that we have been told that Egypt and the wider region was once cosmopolitan and that its cultural landscape was disrupted by (Arab) nationalism. Historical accounts such as David Abulafia’s The Great Sea and Philip Mansel’s Levant, two books hailed as popular histories of the modern Mediterranean, convey this progression from a cosmopolitan sea to a nationalist one, lamenting the loss of the former.Footnote ⁸³ In these accounts, nationalism overwhelms cosmopolitanism during the ‘long 1950s’ – a period claimed to have stretched roughly from 1945 until the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser as a formidable figure in antiimperialist movements after 1956 and into the 1960s. It is a period that overlaps with the history of decolonisation.

In the case of Egypt, noteworthy writings in this genre include André Aciman’s Out of Egypt (2007 [1995]) and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2008). Taking issue with historical fabulation in what is perhaps the most widely read account of Egypt’s colonial past, researcher Samir Rafaat has challenged the veracity of Aciman’s Out of Egypt, which won the 1995 Whiting Award for non-fiction. Rafaat claims that the characters in Out of Egypt are not, in fact, Aciman’s relatives, but rather are composites of eminent figures of colonial Egypt, expunged from their specific historical contexts.Footnote ⁸⁴ Here, I do not mean to focus on the accuracy of Aciman’s book, but rather on how the categories through which we view (and write) history presuppose narratives and conceal the dynamics of historical process, engendering what Frederick Cooper has called ‘ahistorical history’.Footnote ⁸⁵

This is not unique to Aciman’s book. With relative ease, a reader can pass from one account to another, finding little difference (apart from authorial styles) in the tropes used to colour social and political life during the long 1950s. Almost ubiquitously, Egypt’s cities prior to the long 1950s are described as cosmopolitan, liberal, and abundant in wealth, character, and social activity.Footnote ⁸⁶ Literary genres, beyond the scope of this book’s analysis, follow a similar formula.Footnote ⁸⁷ All present an unravelling from the ‘cosmopolitan’ worlds of empire, populated primarily by European protagonists and elite populations, to the strictly bordered realms of the nation-state.

As Kathleen Davis argues, periodisation has the potential to ‘impose homogeneities’ on history.Footnote ⁸⁸ The periodisation described above marks a fissure in historical experience triggered by anti-European Arab nationalism (or by xenophobia, depending on its polemical slant) and the crumbling of a prior epoch of cosmopolitan utopia. Rafaat understood that Aciman was able to play with characters because they were emptied of the complexity of historical time and placed within categories defined by a fixed periodisation. In the context of departure, the ‘long 1950s’ are portrayed as concluding one of the ‘brief lives’ of a cosmopolitan Mediterranean in which a seemingly idyllic pluralism among religious, ethnic, and national groups thrived.Footnote ⁸⁹ Social harmony comes to an end with the purportedly ‘sudden’ arrival of nationalism and notions of national sovereignty. These writings apply far less scrutiny to the processes of European nationalism and imperialism that contributed to the supposed unravelling.Footnote ⁹⁰ Lagnado, for example, writes, ‘[s]uddenly, ‘foreigners’ weren’t welcome in the very place where most of them had felt so profoundly at home’.Footnote ⁹¹ Her ‘suddenly’ refers to the early 1960s, by which point Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government had enacted a series of nationalisations of large companies and institutions. The politics of nationalisation, however, had been well underway since at least the 1920s. By the 1960s, over 40,000 of Egypt’s Italian residents had departed or had long anticipated doing so (as had many other non-Egyptian populations and Egyptian elite). A categorically driven periodisation distorts the dynamics of departures, while it also imposes understandings of political membership that obfuscate the fullness of processes connecting past to present.

Although the ‘nostalgic’ mourning of the worlds lost that characterises this periodisation has received due critique, many scholars frame their critiques within the same analytical categories.Footnote ⁹² Anouchka Lazarev, for example, contends that after the Second World War, both Italy and Egypt ‘turned their backs on the Mediterranean’, abandoning the ‘ambiguity and vagueness’ of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan identity.Footnote ⁹³ Lazarev does not consider the contiguous relations between the two nations during the postwar period that, as I show in Migration at the End of Empire, built upon these so-called cosmopolitan imperial worlds. Some scholars propose to resolve this divergence by placing the two analytical categories in the context of colonialism and global empire, arguing that cosmopolitanism was, and continues to be, a facade behind which hierarchical colonial relations thrived.Footnote ⁹⁴ But that is only part of the story. Other scholars note the competitive presence (and at times political agitation) of Italians on labour markets in colonial Egypt as a means to demonstrate the heterogeneity of these communities.Footnote ⁹⁵ Anthony Gorman’s study of ‘Egyptian Italians’, as he translates the more intricate phrase gli italiani d’Egitto (the Italians of/from Egypt), aims to capture the community’s description of its own history, but he almost entirely neglects the legal, political, and social impacts of emigration from Italy, nationalist politics, and fascist imperialism in the 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁶ Still others consider ‘foreigners’ and their particular legal circumstances solely vis-à-vis Egyptian claims to national sovereignty.Footnote ⁹⁷ Scholarship on colonial communities in Egypt tends to overlook community formation altogether, in part because of the intensely ‘mixed’ – or ‘cosmopolitan’ – environments of Eastern Mediterranean port cities.Footnote ⁹⁸ Scholars within this field often portray ‘national’ communities as structured (through citizenship or place of origin and only rarely through terms of class or race), yet mercurial entities within multilingual or pluralistic encounters of Egypt’s colonial cities.Footnote ⁹⁹ Building upon a logic inherent to cultural history and the linguistic turn, these approaches depict ‘communities’ as retrospectively constructed, ‘nostalgically’, after their departures and as detached from colonial and postcolonial contexts. They disappear from scholarly interest at the same moment they depart. In other words, the entangled worlds of the imperial Mediterranean were, until they were no more. A similar observation has been made regarding the teleological categories of coloniser and colonised, which seem to vanish in (after) histories of decolonisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

It is time we shift our perspective to understand how those imperial entanglements and interactions threaded into new narratives at the same time the old ones unwound. Cosmopolitan narratives of the Mediterranean are teleological in their structures and confuse connections across time, taking national sovereignty (and territoriality) as their predetermined end point. Popular narratives which detail (or lament) the loss of the ‘cosmopolitan sea’ emerge not merely in relation to, but as explanations of, the contemporary geopolitical constellations. Aciman, Lagnado, and others have frequently published op-eds to ‘explain’ the postcolonial Mediterranean in light of their ‘lost’ cosmopolitan worlds. Importantly, they have also done so in the context of public debate on migration in the contemporary Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁰¹ They omit the ebbs and flows in regional connectivity; what Kerem Oktem has referred to as the ‘ambivalent sea’, a Mediterranean whose patterns of social, economic, and political fragmentation and integration have been shaped through ‘regionalizing moments’ and not by harsh ruptures, period breaks, or unidirectional processes.Footnote ¹⁰²

To understand the continuities that cut across the twentieth century, one need not look further than Ugo Dadone, the director of the National Fascist Party’s (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) propaganda office in 1930s Egypt. After the Second World War and collapse of the fascist regime, Dadone became an invaluable resource to the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS (and later CIA) sought to forge new regional alliances out of the old by gaining access to Dadone’s network of Egyptian and Arab nationalists. He had established these networks through connections with Italian residents, journalists, consular offices, the Egyptian monarchy, among others, all of whom had been identified as important actors for fascist foreign policy in the interwar years. Dadone travelled throughout North Africa and the Middle East as an informant for the CIA into the late 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Mediterranean, in this case, was ‘regionalised’ differently at particular historical conjunctures, but a thread of continuity ran through it.

Narratives of rupture form part of a larger story about an end to Mediterranean ‘unity’, one whose foundation is rooted in the Enlightenment. If Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the ‘invention of the Mediterranean’ – or of the imaginary of Mediterranean modernity, as several scholars have argued – then the turning away from the sea after the Second World War would have been its dissolution.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such periodisations reify temporal boundaries. Manuel Borutta and Sakis Gekas have astutely called the modern Mediterranean ‘a maritime space of colonial interactions and entanglements that transcended continental and national boundaries’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ By considering these ‘interactions and entanglements’ across time and through the lens of historical temporalities and political membership, I argue that we can better conceive of what makes or breaks (historical) categories. In this book, therefore, I move along a chronological arc from the turn of the century to the period just before the migration ‘crisis’ of the 2010s. Within this arc, horizons shift. As the story progresses, it turns backwards in time, from the aspirations of fascist imperialism to the experiences of an uncertain present during and after the Second World War, from the expectations of integration to the nostalgic gaze of a political community taking its last breaths, Migration at the End of Empire shows how historical temporalities and forms of membership conflict, endure, and sometimes collapse and fade away.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Chapter 1 illustrates how extraterritorial jurisdiction facilitated the coexistence of nationalist and imperialist projects in colonial Egypt. Throughout much of the Mediterranean, the safeguards proffered by Ottoman-era extraterritoriality had been either adapted to European colonial administrations or cancelled by the early twentieth century. In Egypt, they remained in effect until 1937, playing a formative role in determining Italy’s migration diplomacy when Mussolini announced an aggressively imperialistic project in the Mediterranean in 1933. Cultural institutions, state schools, and Italian consulates became crucial sites of encounter and propaganda dissemination for the regime. Rome’s focus on building a national community coincided with a steady rise in unemployment among Italian subjects. Italians in Egypt became dependent upon Italian state structures just as the they became vital to Rome’s ‘Arab’ and ‘Mediterranean’ propaganda. Notwithstanding the efforts of the fascist government to convince Egyptian nationalists that Italy’s imperial ambitions posed no territorial threat, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty set the stage for the end of extraterritoriality and discourse around ‘repatriation’ emerged to mitigate tensions between nationalist and imperialist projects.

Turning away from this future-oriented framework, Chapter 2 examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. The war has long been studied as a rupture in modern history. This pivotal chapter challenges such an approach by focusing on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ‘fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had been central to the population during the 1930s, was abruptly brought to a halt. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war. This chapter shows how the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, yet many of its political structures remained intact.

Chapter 3 examines the sense of uncertainty fostered by postwar geopolitics. It looks at how the political orientations shaped during the interwar period were dislocated both from postwar Italo-Egyptian relations and from emergent Mediterranean constellations. While uncertainty traces through much of Migration at the End of Empire, this chapter argues that the fall of the fascist government in Rome in 1943 and the creation of the Egyptian republic in 1953 made uncertainty a defining condition for Italian residents in Egypt after the war. Their experiences no longer resonated with the political aspirations of the post-fascist state, nor did they align with Egypt’s accelerating movement towards national sovereignty. The material and symbolic exchange of two deposed kings – Vittorio Emanuele III and Faruk – and the establishment of the Italian and Egyptian Republics paved the way for new industrial and economic ties. Political-economic relations tightened around this kinship of exchange, and the Italian state sought to reinforce the Egyptian military government. Yet, many Italian residents fell into greater duress, coming to understand departure as their only possible future. This uncertainty comes to bear in the following chapter.

In Chapter 4, I demonstrate the ways by which the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. French historiography has demonstrated that integrative policies were crucial to decolonising colonial institutions and subjects. These processes unfolded differently in Italy. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government sought to avoid repatriation out of fear that the population would sway political balance and place unnecessary stress on the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions that had been developed to resolve questions of population displacement at the European level, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of Italian departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. This chapter shows how Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the refugee camps and holding centres in order to represent their interests in the Cold War Mediterranean. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community. Departure and arrival reified the networks on which the community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it.

Chapter 5 shifts registers to examine the narrative of the preceding chapters. Oral histories and personal collections recount repatriated Italians’ remembering of their departures and their reception in Italy. While preceding chapters paid close attention to how political actors between the 1930s and the 1960s used history to imagine futures or navigate uncertain presents, this chapter brings that focus into the lives of repatriates reflecting on their pasts. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. After considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and their reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership in relation to various migrant departures.

As this introduction began in the present, the epilogue returns to it, displaced once more. Migration at the End of Empire concludes by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ‘The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. The epilogue suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the Mediterranean.