Join us for a presentation by author, Lucia Carminati. 

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 and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants’ prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal’s making.

Lucia Carminati is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Oslo and a social and cultural historian of migration and the modern Middle East. In particular, she researches Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries with a special focus on migratory routes, imperial interests, and infrastructural transformations. In 2023, she has finalized a digitization and preservation project with a grant of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme that makes 70,000 periodical pages of 19th- and 20th century collections from Cairo available on the British Library website.