Sickness, scoundrels and saints: Tanta in the world and the world in Tanta 1856--1907

My dissertation is an investigation of the Egyptian Delta city of Tanta during its period of rapid urbanization, modernization and development (1856-1907). It determines that in an effort to modernize Tanta-along with Cairo and Alexandria-the Cairo-based state authorities exponentially increased Tanta's bureaucracy and physically transformed Tanta through public work and building projects. Local elites collaborated in this endeavor by joining the new administrative and judicial bureaucracies. Reforms to institutions that focused on physical and spiritual health (new forms of Sunni orthodoxy) became a vehicle to incorporate the governed classes into the project. Specifically, this project underlines the idea that the result of this undertaking was a form of modernity that was created by individuals and affected by local particularities, global forces and the Egyptian state's reform.;This work emphasizes that modernization was a process and shows the interchange between local, global and regional forces. I argue that unlike other urban histories of Egypt that have focused on Cairo and Alexandria, a study of Tanta, (the Delta's most prominent city) illustrates the national, regional and global character of modernization and urbanization between1856 and 1907. It shows that modernization was a site of collaboration where members of civil society negotiated in three areas: the public health system, the administrative and judicial bureaucracy and religious institutions. These arenas illustrate that modernity was a space where a wide array of individuals (Egyptian, Western European, Greek, Syrian, American and others) participated and shaped cultural practices and modern institutions during the second half of the nineteenth-century.