In the interwar years, the Egyptian medical profession emerged as a leading national middle-class project. Egyptian doctors asserted their professional identity as they competed with foreign doctors who practiced in Egypt, and they struggled to prove themselves as equal members in the international scientific community. They saw indigenous medical research on specific Egyptian problems as a sign of local competence and, moreover, as professional independence necessary for national one. This chapter offers a social and intellectual history of the Egyptian medical profession from the late nineteenth century to World War II. First, it argues that during the decades in which medical education in Egypt was declining under colonial rule, the Egyptian medical community rebuilt itself through education in many different medical schools abroad. Second, it describes how Egyptian doctors sought to integrate themselves into global scientific conversations and regional networks. Third, it demonstrates that Egyptian doctors struggled to prove their professional competence on the international scale by conducting research on and offering solutions to Egypt’s pressing problems: child mortality, obesity, prostitution, drug addiction, and more. Finally, this chapter suggests that the re-emergence of the Egyptian medical profession was, for the most part, an effendi male project, designed to cultivate both the self and its other—particularly middle-class women, and both male and female peasants.

This article examines policies adopted by the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children (CTW) toward Europe’s Middle Eastern and South Asian colonies. It argues, first, that, under the pretext of protecting women from traffic, the CTW provided colonial powers with justification to monitor and restrict the international mobility of women traveling alone. Second, it demonstrates that the League adopted colonial racial assumptions about the sexuality of colonized women, and thus perceived them as less deserving of protection from forced prostitution. Third, it argues that the CTW thus helped perpetuate and justify differential treatment of foreign and indigenous women in Europe’s overseas colonies. The article relies on the CTW’s protocols, on the traveling commissions it initiated, on country reports to the League, and on protocols of the conferences it initiated dedicated to traffic in women in the “East.”

Following World War I medical discourse and practice increasingly concentrated on the ability to contain and channel the sexuality of young men on the move. This article examines how colonial and international authorities in the interwar period sought to contain the presumed damages resulting from soldiers’ and sailors’ interaction with prostitutes. As mobile men, this article argues, they had largest potential to carry microbes and parasites to their next station or port of call. As low-ranking soldiers or workers, they could be effectively policed and monitored. Within their military or labor hierarchies, they were subjected to measures that could not be applied to the general population. Finally, lower-class men were a convenient other for the emerging middle class and its dream of sober, hard-working men and respectable families. This article first zooms in to three examples of British and French attempts to contain venereal disease and hence the sexuality of lower-class men: British-colonized Egypt and Palestine, and French-colonized Morocco. It then turns to sailors, whose sexual interactions and their medical consequences became a matter of international policy, as embodied in the International Labor Organization. This article follows several sites – ports, BMCs and ex-pat entertainment venues, as nodes of mobility, and the ways in which different authorities tried to monitor the encounters created between prostitutes and patrons, North African and European bodies, soldiers and civilians, humans and germs.

Port Said was founded in 1859 and named after the Governor of Egypt, Sa‘id Pasha (1854–1863). Initially it housed foreign engineers and workers of the Suez Canal. Upon its inauguration in 1869, the Suez Canal was the main connection between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea — and further to India and South Asia — which replaced the long and costly trip around the south of Africa. Port Said thus became the Canal’s main harbour and principal coal station. During the later decades of the nineteenth century, it attracted foreign consuls and representatives of foreign business operations, coal workers and service personnel. Like many other cities in the colonized world, it was a divided city, as Egyptians and Europeans inhabited different neighbourhoods. From a modest beginning of 10,000 inhabitants in 1869, it became a city of 100,000 in the interwar period.