Identifying with Nationality studies how the residents of Alexandria were affected by the new laws that redefined their national identities and regulated their interactions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hanley examines identity papers, the census, money, and marriage as the principal means through which more rigid and exclusive forms of (national) identity were gradually imposed on Alexandria during the nineteenth century. To be sure, these tools were not invented at this juncture. Not only had they been in existence for a long time; they had also supported the very cosmopolitanism that the national categories were now seeking to undermine. Hanley shows that as these tools acquired a new meaning and purpose, each one of them became a site of contention. Imperial subjects had to defend their status against an increasingly intrusive state intent on disrupting cosmopolitan flows and relationships.

In describing the conditions that made Alexandria an...

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