This chapter examines the last phase of the Buffalo Agency’s existence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It refracts this institution’s history through an existing body of historical literature that explores the intersections among print technology, Islamic reform and ecumenicalism, and political life in the history of Ibadi and other Muslims communities in Egypt in the context of colonialism. The chapter examines these themes by telling the stories of two people whose lives are largely unknown. The first figure, Saʿīd al-Shammākhī, served as the director of the Buffalo Agency in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1871, however, he was appointed agent (wakīl) for the Husaynid bey of Tunisia in Egypt and served as a line of communication between the governments of the two Ottoman provinces. The second figure is Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, owner of the first Ibadi printing house in Cairo. In terms of its operation, its financing, and its choice of titles, this Ibadi press functioned in much the same way as other late Ottoman presses in Egypt. Through the stories of these two men, the chapter situates Ibadis in the changing technologies and politics of late nineteenth century Ottoman Egypt.

This chapter presents the Buffalo Agency, a trade agency, school, and library that was owned and operated by Ibadi Muslims in Ottoma-era Cairo. It presents the book’s main argument; namely, that the history of the Buffalo Agency shows how Ibadi Muslims participated fully in the religious, economic, legal, and political life of Ottoman Egypt. Their ability to maintain cohesion as a community while also engaging fully with Ottoman society was in part due to their unusual status as both members of a religious minority and part of the Muslim majority. The chapter then situates this argument in the three conversations to which the book contributes: Ottoman history in Egypt, minority communities in the empire, and the history of Ibadi Islam. The chapter next introduces the main historical sources used to support the argument: shariah court records, manuscript evidence from private libraries, and archival documents. Methodologically, the chapter grapples with the tension between the emphasis on the material history of Ibadis in Egypt and my need to rely on digital facsimiles of many of the sources.

This final chapter follows the journey of Jerban student Sālim Bin Yaʿqūb (d. 1991) from Tunisia to Egypt, where he lived at the Buffalo Agency in the twilight years of its existence in the 1930s. The chapter draws on a diverse body of materials including manuscripts from his private library, his research notes, and a recorded interview from the 1980s with him about his time in Cairo. He spent much of his life in the decades following his return from Egypt to Tunisia preparing materials for a book just like this one. Bin Yaʿqūb’s story is thus at once that of the gradual disintegration of the Agency and its library and the earliest attempt to preserve the memory of the Ibadi community in Cairo and the Buffalo Agency before it disappeared. Although he died before writing it, the idea for his book both inspired and laid the foundation for this one.

This chapter lays out the broad contours of the history of North African migrants to Ottoman Cairo from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It focuses its attention on both Ibadis and non-Ibadis from the Maghrib residing in Egypt to paint a picture of the world they inhabited. More precisely, it focuses on the Tulun district of the city of Cairo, where the Buffalo Agency was located. Ibadis and other Maghribis bought and sold property in the neighborhood, went shopping in its markets, prayed in its mosque, welcomed friends and family coming from their homeland, and said goodbye to those departing for other Ottoman cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, and Mecca. In drawing attention to these aspects of everyday life, the chapter sheds light on Ibadi and Maghribi communal identity, their remarkably expansive networks in the Mediterranean, their professional and religious lives as Ottomans, and their relationship to the Ottoman government as it changed over these centuries.

This chapter is the third of three to consider Puccini’s travels, both for work and leisure. It examines Puccini’s travels beyond Europe, primarily to South and North America. South America was a vital outpost of Italian operatic culture, with a large expatriate Italian population. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s works were exported to the major opera houses of the region and his travels to supervise performances in Argentina and Uruguay. Drawing upon Puccini’s correspondence, the author pays detailed attention to the life Puccini would have experienced on board ship, travelling in some luxury, unlike the many poor Italians who were migrating to the Americas for economic reasons – including the composer’s own brother, Michele Puccini. The chapter also discusses Puccini’s travels to New York, where he could not speak the language and was troubled by the weather. The author argues that the vast hotels and ships encountered by Puccini on these trips had a bearing on the sense of epic space in some of his later operas, notably La fanciulla del West. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Puccini’s tour of Egypt in 1908.

The second chapter provides a brief description of the Sunni political Islam as an ideology with a focus on its historical provenances of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its diffusion to the broader MENA region. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders: Mohamed Morsi, Rashid Ghannouchi, and Khaled Mashal. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from the Sunni political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics. The chapter concludes that despite the conventional portrayal of Muslim Brotherhood leadership, these leaders resort to negotiation and cooperation to settle their differences, hence the best way to approach them is to engage in a Rousseauvian assurance game that emphasizes international social cooperation.

This chapter explores the depictions of the barbarians, and indeed the very concept barbaros, in Plutarch’s works. It reviews Plutarch’s rhetoric dealing with non-Greeks, which was circumscribed on the one hand by the Roman imperial political reality and on the other by memories of the old Hellenic valor, which was filtered only through texts and oratory. The chapter examines Plutarch’s play with the established stereotypes in a way that shows ethnic labeling to be elusive. It studies Plutarch’s ethnic taxonomic schemes (i.e. a twofold arrangement of barbarians vs. Greeks/Romans and a threefold scheme of Greeks vs. Romans vs. barbarians), and the subtle moral and political implications thereof. It also looks into the literary significance of the use of barbarians in the narrative and of the mismatch between Greek and barbarian practices as presented mostly in the Lives.

Corruption in the Middle East and North Africa is both widely prevalent and a puzzle because it is so resistant to reform. This book will engage with democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia to better understand why these countries saw so little change in terms of cronyist relations between businesses and the state.

This chapter explains how Egypt became a state with a high level of crony capitalism, and also why the Arab Uprisings failed to change the status quo despite throwing out the prior regime. The rise of the Egyptian military, and in particular its economic holdings, consolidated business support behind a military coup that overthrew democracy and pushed Egypt back toward corrupt dictatorship. Business had relatively little choice, but nonetheless played an important role building a new authoritarian regime.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

This chapter presents original survey evidence of corporate political action in Egypt and Tunisia. Employing multiple surveys between 2017 and 2020, the chapter shows that Egyptian business were more active politically and more willing to take strong measures such as telling their employees who to vote for. These differences in engagement are a reflection of the presence of the military in Egypt and its strong economic linkages with businesspeople.

This chapter examines the 1984 Algerian Family Code and 2005 amendments governing marriage, divorce, marital property, child custody and guardianship, and parentage. Both the original Code and the amendments faced substantial challenges in their enactment and were drawn out over decades. Algerian women’s groups have had to advocate for reforms in a difficult context involving an entrenched state bureaucracy, military dominance, a decade long civil war between security forces and armed Islamist groups, discrimination against the Amazigh, and major natural disasters. The Code perpetuates inequality and discrimination against women, including limited access by women to divorce, the persistence of polygamy and unilateral divorce at will by the husband. 2005 amendments to the Code were only enacted by Presidential ordinance after legislative deadlock; women’s groups note that the reforms reflect concessions to the Islamists, by maintaining the mandatory presence of the male marital guardian (wali) for women at marriage.

As empires fragmented after the second world war, politicians in the Global South finally had the opportunity to determine the economic policies of their newly independent states. As many of these countries were relatively poor, developmental ideas came to the fore once more. This is true both in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in Asia. Nationalist movements in these regions combined their nationalist economic ideas with a variety of complementary ideologies. In sub-Saharan Africa, politicians such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere turned to socialism, which they interpreted as a developmental system. In Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, governments espoused free market economics, which they supplemented with an activist state that promoted exports. Argentina and Egypt, on the other hand, saw the rise of populist regimes. These provide another important type of economic nationalism. Populists such as Juan Perón and Gamal Abdel Nasser associated international integration with enrichment by domestic elites Because they opposed these elites, populists sought to cut links with the world economy and espouse isolationist economic systems.

Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).