Cosmopolitanism and its aftermath: The rise and fall of Greek and Turkish business in Alexandria

Abstract

This article explores the rise and fall of Greek and Turkish business and commerce in Alexandria, Egypt. As the existing literature alerts us, shifting forms of colonial rule made for a complex and multifaceted cosmopolitanism, in which each community secured a distinct economic space. In part, this was due to the insertion of Alexandria into the growing world economy of the nineteenth century, which allowed for both the rise of modern businesses in trade and manufacturing, and a resurgence of quasi feudal, yet export orientated, forms of agricultural production; we evaluate this process through recourse to state and private sector archives. It is concluded that neither community was able to survive the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the diminishing space it allotted to ethnic business. We explore the implications of these findings for the study of business, cosmopolitanism and decosmopolitanization.

Keywords:

• Alexandria
• ethnic minority business
• population
• cosmopolitanism
• decosmopolitanizatin
• Egypt
• nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These are terms used in Mısır Sâlnâmesi (1871).

2 There was a canal in Ptolemaic times that had silted up, and a second canal may have briefly been brought into service in the fourteenth century.

3 Authors’ own calculations based on data available in Annuaire Oriental (1906), Istanbul, Ottoman Empire.

4 Istanbul related figures are not reported in Table 3, we report these figures only in text.

5 These figures were calculated by authors based on The Egyptian Directory (1907) and Annuaire Oriental (1906).

6 After 1830, one feddan is 4,200.833 square meters (about 1.038 acres). (see, What is the unit called a feddan? (sizes.com)).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christine Bischoff

Christine Bischoff in Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Mehmet Demirbag

Mehmet Demirbag is Professor and Associate Dean, Essex Business School, University of Essex in the United Kingdom.

Geoffrey Wood

Geoffrey Wood is DAN Cap Endowed Chair of Private Equity at Western University in Canada, Professor in International Business at Cranfield University and of Finance at Trinity College Dublin.