Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 9780520424715
Paperback
Uneven labor, migration, and inequality built the Suez Canal city.

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said

Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906

$86.86

  • Paperback

    356 pages

  • Release Date

    26 February 2026

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Summary

Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor’s role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said’s residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal’s northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780520424715
ISBN-10:0520424719
Author:Lucia Carminati
Publisher:University of California Press
Imprint:University of California Press
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:356
Release Date:26 February 2026
Weight:542g
Dimensions:229mm x 152mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“Well researched and superbly written.” * Journal of European Economic History *“In Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, Lucia Carminati offers an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of the laborers, loiterers, migrants, and transients who passed through the city… . Carminati teases from a host of minor events the texture of life in a city made of and by people on the move.” * American Historical Review *“A superb history… .Such a lucid, passionate and rhetoric-free meditation about the quintessential diasporic nature of the human condition remains one of the enduring achievements of Carminati’s book, together with its final exhortation to restore migrants’ lives and experiences, despite their usual fragmentariness and sparseness, to the center of global history… .A must-read.” * International Journal of Middle East Studies *

About The Author

Lucia Carminati

Lucia Carminati is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.

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