Identifying with Nationality by Will Hanley;

Author:Will Hanley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS037000, History/World, HIS037070, History/Modern/20th Century
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2017-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Those who dispensed and those who received protection, as well as third parties observing its workings, perceived the system in three modes: obligation, commodity, and exception. As obligation, protection was conveyed by a sovereign authority upon a deserving subject who warranted favor because of her or his loyalty or (like Margaret Gowans) vulnerability. As commodity, protection was a legal privilege with economic benefits that constituted a form of compensation for services rendered. As exception, protection was a means of managing affiliation when existing laws and procedures failed to satisfy the desires of powerful interests. While each of these modes was a usual feature of “traditional” systems of affiliation, they were at odds with emerging positive legal definitions of membership.

Recent work on “liminal” legal statuses during the twentieth century points to the flexibility of the category of protégé.76 But the litigious cosmopolitan risks becoming a stock character in twenty-first century microhistory.77 While approaches that insist on the creative agency of such individuals make for interesting narrative, they tend to sidestep a more profitable analytical undertaking: the structural description of the universal regime of legal identification that is a unique feature of the modern world. Protégé status was a particular Ottoman status that was foreclosed by the expansion of law in general, and nationality law in particular, at the turn of the twentieth century. The handful of protégés who remained, like the bad subjects of the next chapter, occupied the space of legal exception that was so characteristic of the colonial. The distance between them and the law brings the moral coloring of protection into focus.

The most important consular court case in Egyptian history, if we measure importance in financial terms, was likely the probate of Antun Yusuf ʿAbd al-Massih described in chapter 5. This case, which ran between 1885 and 1890, forms a pivot between the old system of protection and the new. In the end, the court concluded that an Ottoman subject could not become a member of the British community in Alexandria purely “so as to attract to himself English law.”78 But the principle asserted by the court—that nationality and protection meant more than mere legal convenience—had long been a fiction for many bourgeois protégés in Alexandria. Antun’s case was thus pivotal: it contained elements of the old system (reliance on foreign courts as refuge) and of the new (protégés’ sense of entitlement was disappointed).

The practice of protection was a dialogue between the uneven expansion of international law and the enduring influence of older ideas about protection. The reduction in the total number of protégés in the half-century before the First World War could not assuage the widespread concern that this status created among local subjects. Even one exception was too many, and in every case the exceptions mapped onto known patterns of racial, sectarian, class, and imperial privilege. As law expanded its embrace to grasp everyone in Egypt, protégé status mattered most to those who could not have it. This was an effect of the emerging notion of

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