 Well, thank you very much for the introduction. I'm very pleased to be here today. So I will be moderating session number four, The Strategy and Tactics of the Protests. So the first presentation will be by Dr. Neil Ketchley. He is lecturer in Middle East politics at King's College. His work focuses on protests and revolution in the Maina region. And his first book is entitled, Egypt in a Time of Revolution. It was published with Cambridge University Press in 2017. And then the second speaker is Mohamed Said. He's recently finished his MA in history at SOAS. And his research is mainly around subaltern and labor history, humanities, education, and memory studies in post-colonial Egypt. Neil, what do you like? Let's have a close. Can everyone hear me? Do I have to stand right next to the microphone? Or is this okay? Yeah? It's all right? Okay. Next to the microphone. Okay, so I can't pace nervously around. Great. Cool. So I think that we're pressed for time, so I'll get cracking. So what I'm gonna present now is part of a book project on the 1919 revolution that I've been working on for maybe two years. But I'm just gonna present a very thin sliver of the book. And in doing so, try to give some kind of entree into the dynamics of the mobilization, especially during the very initial period. So health warning, there are graphs. So this is a time series graph looking at the occurrence of protest over time, right? The X-axis is daily interval data. The Y-axis is the number of protests that occur in Egypt. So what should be pretty striking is the red dotted line, right? This is the 8th of March, 1919, when Sadzah Alul is initially arrested, along with three other members of the waft. And then on the 9th of March, I take into Alexandria and then put on a boat to Malta. So what's really striking about this from a kind of social science perspective is that, first of all, if you look at the time series to the left of it, there aren't very many events. Actually, if you go further back in time, the 1919 revolution, it doesn't come out of nowhere, but in the weeks preceding the outbreak of protest, there's very little mobilization at all. I'll talk about the empirical basis of the data in a minute. But what you can see is that the first protest happens on the 8th of March. It involves students. The first recorded protest that I could find is of a student protest outside of the British residency in what is now Garden City, where the British Embassy is. But within days, it's spread across the country. We see the peak of protest happen on the 18th of March. There's nearly 70 protests across the entire country in just one day. So this looks at the spread of protest over time. This looks at the spread of the 1919 revolution over space. Some of you at the back may not be able to see it. Some of these shapes may look a bit weird because these are the district boundaries of Egypt in 1919. And I'll talk about how you can recreate this kind of spatial data in a minute. But the pattern should be pretty clear. So each map represents one day. So on the top left-hand side, that's the 8th of March. That's where we find our first protest. By the 9th of March, protest is spread to Alexandria. By the morning of the 10th of March, we have our first protest outside of the major two cities in Tonta, in the Nile Delta. We can see that by the 12th of March, protest is spread not just throughout the Nile Delta but also to Said, to Upper Egypt. By the end of the second week, protest has become a national phenomenon. This is, from a sociological perspective, extremely impressive. This is a real nationwide mass mobilization. And I'm gonna try, for the next 20 minutes or so, to try to explain this pattern. Before I do so, maybe it's just worth reflecting on how people are protesting during this early phase. So I've talked about when people protested and where they protested. It's also worth just briefly reflecting on how they protested. So again, this is a time series graph. The top bar chart, those are demonstrations. The bar chart in the middle, these are strikes. And the bar chart at the bottom are attacks. And by attacks, I mean attacks often on property. And what you can see, the trend, again, should be quite clear. Most of the protests during the beginning of the mobilization take the forms of strikes and demonstrations. And here, two protest sectors are extremely important. Students and lawyers. Lawyers often strike and they cripple the court system and students start demonstrations and marches that move through towns, cities and some villages. After the first week, however, the repertoire really changes. You start to see attacks on infrastructure, on rail stations, the pulling up of rail lines, the cutting of telegraph poles and lines, and the breakdown of telephonic communications. And we'll return to this in a minute. So when we look at the characteristics of the mobilization during this period, what's very striking is not just that this is a national mobilization that's spread across the entire country and people are really mobilizing in large numbers, but it's also, again, from a kind of sociological perspective, kind of surprising because there aren't really any obvious movements orchestrating it. We know that from the history of the WAAF that from their formation in November of 1918, up until March 1919, this is not a movement with a cadre, with a membership, with branches, with any kind of real coordinating capacity. And that's striking. Usually when we look at mass participation revolutions, you need to have some kind of orchestration. And yet in Egypt, it's almost absent. John Chowcraft, who's just written a really magisterial book on popular protest in the region, summarizes the WAAF, thusly. The WAAF, especially at the outset, had little in the way of a ramified organizational structure. And while it enjoyed the spontaneous loyalty of the insurrectionary crowds, it had few means of directing and channeling them, right? That is to say that when we're trying to explain this puzzle of why protest happens in some places and not others, at some times not others, it can't simply be reduced to people are following orders, right? Do you start to get new forms of organization in the months following? So on the right-hand side, this is actually a pamphlet from Mansoura in Dahleya, calling for a protest, this is from the archive, calling for a protest on the 9th of April at 3.30 in the afternoon. And you start to get this kind of, you can find a residue in the archive of local forms of coordination, but in its very earliest phases, the phase that I'm gonna talk about, these forms of local coordination are less obvious than the parent. It's also the case that when we're trying to explain the diffusion of process, one obvious channel through which protest might spread is through media, right? Just like we talk about Facebook resolutions in 2011. However critical we should be of that narrative, the underlying intuition is that people might protest because they hear about something. There's a grievance, Zarghul's arrest, right? And that this might spur on mobilization. So the first, interestingly, when we look at the kind of the documentary record of publications about the initial act that might have precipitated the revolution, that is the arrest of the waft and their deportation, the first record that I can find comes actually from Al Ahram, right? This is working with the microfilms, that's published on the 10th of March, 1919. Some other newspapers like Wadiunil, Mas Al Minbar, and so forth, they take days and days to report on this. And that's interesting, right? So we actually have protest already in Cairo, Alexandria, in Tante, in Rabia, even before local press coverage. And often those very initial protests which were led by students and lawyers, that might suggest that these are not people who are just reacting, right? They're in networks at stake. It's also worth just reflecting on what does Egypt look like, generally, in March 1919. We have a census from 1917, from the end of 1917. So we have some sense of what the country looks like in terms of its sociological profile. We know that the median literacy rate is about 11% for males, it's lower, obviously, for women. But nearly 40% of the adult population are employed in the agrarian economy. They're literally the peasants. At the same time, though, we have a lot of students, nearly 300,000 students in some form of tertiary or secondary education, and we have newspapers, right? 14 daily newspapers with a combined daily circulation of about 85,000 copies. So it's worth keeping these in mind when we try to answer the question. This is what I'll speak about for the rest of the presentation. How did mass protest diffuse and scale up in a semi-agrarian context characterized by political disorganization of the absence of very strong movements? So very, very briefly, we can use the MENA region. It's not just a site for the application of social science theory, but also to generate theory. And we know we've studied revolutions for many revolutions, including revolutions in Egypt but also elsewhere. And we have some expectations about how protest diffuses. One of the expectations that we get from the literature stresses the importance of interpersonal connections of relationality, that people protest because they hear that other people are protesting, or because people tell them they should protest, right? Now, what I'm gonna do is slightly problematize this and say that there's another really important factor that's at stake here. And that is there has to be infrastructure. There has to be communications. There have to be railways. There have to be telegraphs. There have to be telephones for diffusion to occur. And indeed, if we look comparatively across time and space at the historical record, not just from Egypt but elsewhere, communications infrastructure features very prominently. The swing rights, the famous agrarian rights in the UK occur and spread to the diffusion of the stagecoach line. The February Revolution in Russia happens two years before 1919, spreads through the railway network. The Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, some work I've done with a co-author Stephen Brooke. The biggest predictor of where the Brotherhood established our initial branches are if there are train stations there, right? And so this would lead us to an assumption that actually when we're trying to explain the pattern of the 1919 Revolution, the protest is gonna spread fastest to the places that are most connected, right? And we're gonna test this. So first of all, how do you study protest, right? If you want to explain diffusion, you've gotta know where protest happens, where, when and how. And so the standard technique in social science, which is actually a technique that we inherit from social historians, people like Eric Hofsbaum and George Rude, is we create event catalogs. We read local publications, journals, periodicals. So what I went and did working with microfilms in the Darl Kutub and then in the British archives is I created a data set of about 3,500 events that occur in Egypt, encompassing demonstrations, marches, protest, strikes, and so forth from four Arabic language newspapers, Al-Ahram, Al-Minbar, Maas, Wadi Anil, the English language newspaper, Egyptian Gazette, which at this point is being published in Alexandria, but also security bulletins, daily intel briefs from the British residency. RAF reports where RAF planes during the very beginning of the revolution fly across the country on patrol to try to report and detect protests, foreign office correspondence, diplomatic cables, the Milner report, which goes back and tries to recreate exactly what happens. And from this, we can try to systematically actually study the mobilization for the first time. I don't think anyone's done this before. So that lets us know where protest happens. We obviously then need to know where the communications infrastructure is, right? And again, we can do this using tools and techniques from empirical social science. So this is a map series that I found. It's in incomplete collections held at Harvard and at Q in the British archives. And this is a map series that's published between 1916 and 1918. So contemporaneous to the revolution. And what I've done is I've digitized the map series and then I've done what's called geo-reference it. So each one of these squares that you can kind of see, these are in physical form. They're about this, by this. And you geo-reference them. And from this you can harvest, harvest geospatial information. So very obvious thing we can do is we can just get the district boundaries, Hadoor al-Marqas, right? From Egypt during this point, we can reconstruct what a district looks like. But these maps contain a lot more than this. These maps contain information about the location of every telephone, every telegraph office, every railway station, every main road in the country at this point. So we can systematically reconstruct where the communications infrastructure is. So here's an example. This is a map sheet from Qarubiyah. So there's a gray circle on it. This is over Zifter, which sees its first protest on the 13th of March. And every one of these marks, if you can see them, I've added icons to them so they're a little bit more visible, but they may be a bit too small for you to read. That's those are telephones. Those are post offices. Those are telegraph stations. The red line there, that's the main road. So what I've done, just to give you a sense of what I'm trying to get at, is I've drawn a spatial buffer around, in this case, Zifter. But we can do this for every sub-district in the country, every sheikh and nakhir. And we can count how much communications infrastructure there is within the buffer. That is to say, we can systematically measure how connected a place is. This is kind of clear. This kind of makes sense what I'm getting at here. Yeah, great. So that's what I did. I spent several months doing this. And what I've done is I've coded a variable. This is a quantitative study. This is the, I gave you the health warning at the beginning, where I've coded, for every sub-district in the country, I've coded one. If it's within 30 minutes walking distance, which is about three kilometers, of a telephone, a telegraph office, or a post office, or a railway station. I've also measured the distance from a sub-district to a major rail terminal, because you wanna be able to account for capacity, right? So there are some really big train stations. And we know the arrivals by train stations for 1919. And I've also measured the distance to the main road. So if you look on the right-hand side, this is a map of Egypt at this point. And every dot is a sub-district. There's about three and a half thousand of them. And I've colored them by their quintile. And the intuition is basically this. Places that are colored more darkly have more communications infrastructure, so protests should spread there faster, right? That's the basic intuition. And what I've done is, is I've got all of these variables, and I've combined them into just one measure, because they're quite highly correlated. Most telegraph offices at this point are in train stations, right? So one would almost perfectly predict the other. So what you do is you can combine those into just one variable, using something called principal component factor analysis, which you don't care about, which is a statistical measure for data manipulation. And I've come up with just one measure of how connected a sub-district is, right? Again, the intuition is, if infrastructure matters, it should spread to the darkest sub-districts faster than the lighter ones. So when you're trying to study systematically protest mobilization, there are obviously other factors at stake, not just how many telegraph offices there are, or is it close to a train station? We know from the qualitative details of the case that other things matter, like students, like lawyers, right? And so what we can do is we can use census data and other government statistics from this point to try to account for that. So we're also going to test some other variables. So we know, for example, how many students there are in a district, and we might think on the right-hand side, it has expectations and it has a plus or a minus, that tells us what we should find. More students probably means more protest faster. More lawyers probably means more protest faster. Distance to Saad Zarul's house. So I said that the waft at this point is not particularly coherent as a movement, but it is the case that Saad Zarul's house itself becomes a real center for mobilization, famously, like it becomes a site of the starts for many protest marches that go through Cairo. So we might think that places that are closer to that may just see protest faster, not because of communications infrastructure. There's obviously other forms of communications infrastructure in Egypt at this point, there's the Nile. So we might want to measure the distance between a sub-district and the Nile. We also know the home districts of the arrested waft leaders. We might think that places where the waft leadership actually come from, they may have heard about the arrest faster, and so they may mobilize in response. And finally, we probably think that places where there are just more Egyptians are probably going to see a protest faster, not least because where do people establish post offices and railway stations? Where the population is, right? So those are our variables. This is what we're going to do. This is, I'm going to try and avoid the language of the kind of technical social science here, but here's the intuition. In Egypt at this point, there's 3,745 sub-districts, and we're going to observe them every single day during just the first week of the revolution. And we're going to say, why do some of them see protest faster than others, right? And we're going to model this. The outcome variable here does a protest happen, yes or no, which is expressed on the left-hand side. This is a Bernoulli formula. Does a protest happen on the right-hand side, which is on the other side of the equal sign? We're going to test these variables, measured at the sub-district and district level, these things here, and this variable here. And finally, this bit in the middle, I'm going to point to it because it's kind of important. This bit here, this is what's called an auto covariate. And the intuition here is that when we think about when protest spreads, it might not just be because there are more people, or because there are more telegraph offices, it could just be because another protest has happened nearby the previous day, and people have heard about it. There could be contagion dynamics. And that's what that variable there does. It basically marks as one where there are sub-districts within two kilometers of another sub-district that saw a protest on the previous day. This accounts for something called spatial alter correlation. So this is the design. I'm not sure that everyone will have followed this, but hopefully the intuition should be clear. And these are the results. So this is like a nicer way of trying to present statistical analysis. If any of you have ever had to suffer a quantitative paper, you may have seen tables with coefficients numbers and then in parentheses, standard errors, maybe some asterixes to tell you if something is statistically significant or not. This is the same information presented, hopefully in a bit more intuitive way. So on the left hand side, these are the variables that I introduced you to earlier. Those dots, those are the coefficients. That's the estimated mean effect of the variable on the incidence or the likelihood of having a protest. Those whiskers, those are the 95% confidence intervals. So that's where we think the effect will fall 95 times out of 100. Anything that's on the right hand side of the red line, that means it's gonna be more likely. If it's on the left hand side, that means it's less likely. If the whiskers cross the red line, that means that we're not confident if it's positive or negative. That is, it's not statistically significant, right? We can't be sure of the effect 95 times out of 100. So we'll go through this. So we'll start from the bottom. So sub-districts that are within three kilometers of another sub-district that saw a protest the previous day, it gets complicated, are much more likely to see a protest the next day. That makes sense. So these are contagion dynamics. Places with more population are much more likely to see protest. Again, that makes sense. That's not a particularly striking finding. A sub-district's distance to the Nile doesn't really matter. The distance to Sargazalur's house, it looks like it reduces with distance, which makes sense, which might suggest that it's an important factor, but it's not statistically significant. Legal professionals, the more legal professionals you have, actually seems to decrease the risk of a protest, but it's not statistically significant. You can see that the whiskers cross zero. Sub-districts located in districts with more students are much more likely to see mobilization soon on. Students really seem to matter. One of the narratives about 1919 is that it's a kind of a peasant uprising or revolt. If you look systematically at the mobilization, the evidence for this is actually quite weak. Students are really a key factor. People like Ahmed Abdullah have written about this. Wafthome districts, it looks like places where the Wafth leaders come from also are more likely to see protests sooner, but it's not quite statistically significant. And then the top, the thing that I'm really interested in, communications infrastructure, places that were more connected were much more likely to see protests sooner, controlling for all those other things. We can visualize this in a different way. Again, sorry, graphs. The x-axis here, the horizontal axis, this is this communications infrastructure variable that I introduced you to. The further to the left you are, that means the less connected you are. The further to the right you are, the more connected you are. The y-axis is the probability of having a protest. What you can see is in places with very little communications infrastructure, that is here, right? The likelihood of having a protest is nearly zero, right? Infrastructure really matters, right? If you go for the fifth or the 95th percentile in terms of connectivity, it basically quadruples the risk of having a protest within this week period. There really is systematic evidence that protest diffuses through communications infrastructure. So, yeah, thanks. So if you've ever had to like deal with statistical work before, you probably will know that statistical results can be quite sensitive to things like how you measure things, how you estimate things. So inevitably, you have to go through robustness checks. So one of the most striking factors about revolution during this point is that of the 3,000 odd sub-districts, only 70 of them actually see one or more protest. So that is to say it's a rare event, right? And that could be problematic. So we have to account for that by trying other statistical estimators, like rare events, logistic regression. It doesn't change. The findings are not driven just by our data, right? You can estimate it in a number of different ways. The finding is extremely robust. You can do things like, you might think, well, maybe I'm measuring proximity to infrastructure. I've done, I've said three kilometers, but that seems a bit arbitrary, right? What about two and a half kilometers or three and a half kilometers or one kilometer or four kilometers? That is to say, change the measurement of proximity to infrastructure. If you do that, the result doesn't change. You can also do things like, maybe there are just other factors at stake that we're not taking into account. Maybe there's, maybe districts are just really different from another, right? Maybe meet Kormor is just fundamentally different from Babashariya, which sounds plausible, right? Or maybe Cairo is just systematically different from Kafr-i-Sheikh. What you can do then is you can brute force, use something called fixed effects. So you can introduce a unique variable for every single place and that absorbs that uniqueness and just confines attention to variation in where protest happens. If you do that, the results don't change. There's no omitted variable bias at the district or the governorate level or indeed at the day level. You can also do day fixed effects. So I'll wrap this up quickly. What are the conclusions then? Well, relational accounts of diffusion, that is, if you just think that protest spreads through people connecting with each other, it aligns something quite important and that is that the built environment is what structures the patterning of protest both in terms of its timings and its locations. As the Egyptian case shows, during a revolutionary episode, protest is really delimited by the extent of the country's communications infrastructure. Less connected places, it's very, very difficult for protest to spread there and that makes sense, I think. Finally, and this isn't against the backdrop of a broader, broader book project, I think these findings, they really underscore how you can revisit these kinds of historical episodes with maybe data that hasn't been properly exploited before or that can be exploited with these newer analytical techniques and you can get really interesting findings. Great, thank you very much, cheers. First, it's a very special moment to be here and saw us after being a student, to be a speaker. What I'm going to present today is actually kind of my ceases after spending three months in the Pritchard archive last year, so I thought it's worse to apply for this conference and see what will happen and I was really astonished that I got accepted. So thank you for inviting me here. What I'm going to talk today is about 1919 revolution in the isthmus of service canal and I mean here for Said and Smaalaya, especially. And I will talk about it through the lens of labor and I'm talking about service canal company labor. For a simple introduction, why I'm interested and this is why I become interested in this project since starting thinking about my ceases. This is a photo from Port Said. First, because labor history is always, main body about labor history is always entangled with nationalism, so every time we mention labor, we mention how labor was part of nationalist movement and labor movement was just, was in a total agreement with nationalist movement. And there is a big problem in this because that means that there was a big gap in the rule of foreign labor who played actually a big role in the labor movement in Egypt and thanks to works like Professor Garman about Italian and Greek labor in Egypt, it emphasized how foreign labor were actually a big part of labor movement and the nationalist approach to labor history in Middle Eastern studies caused a shadow on this. Second is the way we talk about labor history is we talk about strikes and this is actually misses the richness of every day. So when we talk about labor, as you have been and said it, we only consider labor when they were activists, when they were on a strike. So I'm trying to put emphasis on non-strike moments of labor history, especially in the service canal area. Third, when we talk about nationalism and the spread of Egyptian nationalism, big body of the literature is talking about intellectual debates, especially in Cairo. So we are talking about nationalism as this idea came from Europe and spread it and we are talking about debates between people who think of Oma and people who think of Watan. But I'm interested more in nationalism and not in cafes and debates between Afandis but also in the huts of Arab inhabitants of Poseidon and Smalia. The fourth point is related to this because when we talk about nationalism, it's mainly Cairo. And I would like to quote Professor Pesparon in this, "'History of Egypt becomes a cinema of history of Cairo." So putting an emphasis on another place and especially very unique place like service canal would illustrate another case of nationalism, another reason for emerging nationalism. The reason here is mainly exclusion. It's not, they have been convinced of certain idea. It's not because of certain intellectual debate between labor, it's exclusion mainly. It's kind of similar approach to what happened to Arab soldiers in Mehmed Ali army and how being excluded from the top ranking made them form this kind of identity. So what happened in Poseidon and Smalia in 1919 evolution? In March, the revolution started. There was an administration in Poseidon, seven killed and 17 injured. It's the same in Smalia. However, the real escalation happened in May. In May 1919, the biggest strike happened, the most, the biggest strike happened in the source canal company history, happened in May 1919. So first, to explain what is source canal at this time? What is source canal area? So source canal area was part of Egypt, it's Poseidon, Smalia and Suez. But Poseidon and Smalia were company towns. So we have Egypt as a semi-independent or some autonomous state from Ottoman Empire. We have the British occupation which had the largest military presence in source canal. But also we had a big ruler which was a company, the French company of source canal, because they were the one who built this town and they were the one who was supplying it with water electricity. So we have this hierarchy and finally we have capitulations that Egypt was forced to have as part of the Ottoman Empire which meant that big foreign communities used to be trialed in front of their consulates. So among this hierarchy, we have the Egyptian labor in the lower rank. In the company itself, it modeled according to the French pick companies. So the company used to have like English and French mangerial elites, Mediterranean, mainly Greek and Italian intermediaries like skilled workers. And finally at the lower rank was Egyptian labor. What happened and strikes that a group of Greek workers called La Phoenix started this movement by sending petitions to the company, asking for increasing wages and decreasing the working hours to eight hours and also asking for similar treatment during any kind of injury like European workers. The strikes lasted for one month and it ended with a compromise from the company. But however, this strike didn't sabotage the maritime, the naval movement because there was another solidarity between the French and the British at this moment, the British army lends its naval personnel to the company to continue working. But I'm interested more in another kind of solidarity. It was a strike started by Greek workers in a moment that considered nationalist movement in Egypt, 1919 evolution. And here we have a letter written by the workers, workers representative written in French to the British High Commissioner in Egypt. So Greek and Italian and Egyptian writing in French to a British High Commissioner. And here in the signing, we have multiple names but there is one name in Arabic, Mohamed Laiot. Also, the pamphlets during the strikes were really interesting. They were multilingual, so here we have in English. We have here in French and my preferred in Arabic. And they are the same, they are the same demands. So we have Greek workers, Italians and Egyptians unifying together against the French company. And if we thought about nationalist movement, we would think that only Egyptians would revolt and foreigners would step aside, especially 1919 evolution was accused by the British to be a xenophobic. So why is this moment was special and how Seuss Canal area affected this kind of uniqueness? I propose three reasons, my argument is there were three reasons for this kind of solidarity. First, this sense of family. So Seuss Canal company created kind of a corporate identity, if I would say in today's terms. They build schools, they build hospitals, they are the one who built the cities and everyone feels that they are belonging to a certain family called Seuss Canal. And here I quote from A.M. Malcolm, one of the big famous British directors that he was doing these tours in Seuss Canal and he was reporting saying a company provides this welfare status for all its employees and workers. He mainly meant the Europeans and they were grateful to be part of this harmonious family. So having this company and having this welfare capitalism affected how people felt about the company and they felt it's their family and it's not just a business relation. And actually the workers used it in one of the petitions, asking the company to provide education for their children because they are part of the family. The second reason is there is another kind of dichotomy which was not only Europeans and natives, but also workers and employees which interestingly a dichotomy still happening today and nowadays is Smale and Port Said. So there's a big discrepancy between who are workers and who are employees and also back then. So the company had 4,000 workmen. Only 70 of them were managerial and they were mainly French and English. 120 were pilots, were Western Europeans and mainly Dutch and French English. And the rest of the workers were either Mediterranean, like Greek and Italian and Egyptians as mostly manual workers and non-registered. So this dichotomy between workers and employees played a big role of making Europeans feel more common cause with Egyptians because they mixed with them in the show floor and there was no other way to make a strong case against the company without having an alliance with the Egyptian. And also the measures that the company take against workers like cutting wages really made the European workers feel that the employees are far detached from them and they wouldn't feel them and they would have a common cause with the Egyptian because they have workers as them. So we here feel this kind of class solidarity or this kind of relationship in a show floor and the ateliers affect where Europeans positions themselves against the European company. The third cause is the spread of communism and anarchism and all this kind of transnational solidarity that exceed nationalism. We have here a British report about a strike happened in 1931 and it states two things. First, number four, here is the accused, the main person behind the strike to be a communist. And this was in 1931 or to have communist source. So communism was already spreading especially after the success of October revolution and the head of the source canal workers syndicate Dr. Scopoulos. He was one of the four people who founded the Egyptian communist party. So communist had a big stronghold in Ismaile and Port Said and Suez. The second reason is European workers, existence of European workers affected how Egyptian workers knew about European laws that protect workers in Europe. And here is a British report states it exactly, they saying the existence of post-French and Greek workmen, most of them are quite ready to tell their Egyptian comrades about the numerous laws and safeguards to prevent exploitation of labor. So Suez Canal was kind of this connection between Europe and Egypt when we talk about labor politics. So yeah. So if we talk about cosmopolitanism, if we talk about communism anarchism, this multi-diverse places usually called as cosmopolitan places, either in academic articles like Claudine Boutin's book about Suez Canal saying, calling Suez Canal like Poutite France, Auto Mayor, like it's like a small France, or by memoirs like Sylvia Middelsky talking about the talking of Port Said as this small city mimicking small cities in the southern France, or also other reasons to call, you used to call them cosmopolitan place because of this kind of diversity from French, English living there, Egyptians coming to work, but also various Indian Ocean people like Somalis and Yemen is coming as Sea Shipmen and Indians coming as a part of the British Army. So it was a very, very diverse place but did this place represent a melting pot? Nationalism in Zazim. So if we are talking about cosmopolitanism, anarchism, communism, how Suez Canal become a stronghold of nationalism? This is a line that I really like from the Nationalist Drama Nasser Sattah Khamsi, Nasser 56, and he's saying, I'm tired of searching for the Egyptian embassy in Port Said without finding it. Is that like we are talking about a different state and people think that Egypt should have an embassy there? So why we are talking about this, the existence of Egyptian state and Egyptians position in Suez Canal was really unique unlike any other places in Egypt. So how the Arabs in the eyes of Europeans or how they called themselves, when the Egyptians in this cities were calling themselves also Arabs, how they become Egyptian? It was 1919, revolution moment. And the argument for this is that after this moment, they started to form groups and did certain celebrations that represented what Anthony de Smez called like symbols of nationalism. So Anthony de Smez is a professor who used an approach to nationalism which called ethnic symbolism. And he argues that every nationalist movement needs symbols. And symbols here in Port Said and Smaelia were first establishment of the Mosque Club, the Egyptian Club. It is the first Egyptian club in Suez Canal and that's why they called it al-Masri. They named it after the famous site that we saw Omiya Masri stand up in Egyptian. And here we can see interesting thing. First, al-Masri was established 1920, just a few months after the revolution. Second, the slogan is so similar to the Egyptian flag at this time and using pharaonic symbols which represented the Egyptian nationalist. And the main reason behind calling it al-Masri was this famous song during the 1990 revolution. The second thing is a celebration called al-Imbi and it's a celebration only happens in Port Said and Smaelia before Shamini Seem, the spring day. And it's kind of hanging and burning a mummy, kind of a dummy. And it started just after the revolution, after 1919 and the first dummy they burned, it was Lord Al-Imbi and there's a famous, there's a really brilliant article by Professor Marion Belly called when Edmund Al-Imbi become Al-Imbi. And interestingly how this celebration is really happening now and every year is a character change and last year it was an ISIS fighter. So how the ismus become an apartheid? So for me nationalism happened because unlike the first part of the presentation national communism and anarchism and this kind of melting pot between workers the living reality of everyday Port Said and Smaelia was an apartheid reality in every sense of the word. From having categories like Europeans and natives from having one neighborhood called the European neighborhood and the other one called the Arab town or the Arab neighborhood. So let's start how Port Said and Smaelia started. It was a company town and for us Egyptian because we have a strong state we always don't think how it was a company town we used to have a state in Egypt that control everything. Actually in Port Said the real ruler wasn't a British nor the Egyptian it was a French company. This is a British report about ports in 1917 and the part here is like at Port Said the real ruler is a source canal company. Egyptian government control is practically limited to fiscal rights and quarantine restriction imposed under international agreement. The source canal company have firstly pursued a steady policy of extending and strengthening its control with the expansion of the port and at present constitute a vertebral imperium in an imperium. This is a famous word, famous phrase to describe the company in Egypt but actually we used to hear it from in post colonial time especially during Nassar that source canal area is a state within a state or a state above the state but this is a British report, this is not Nassar. Even the British were so annoyed. This is a plan of Smaelia. This part is actually the whole of this is European neighborhood and just this is the Arab neighborhood and very, very small detail which is how lands is here is a really big one and how here. So not only the type of buildings is different not only the inner like the cultural life is different but even the exact space is different and how Europeans used to live in all this space while Arabs had been confined only this place. And actually this caused now what we call LECD buildings in Port Said. So having two neighborhoods in one city really different from each other between them there is a clear line of separation which was one street called Muhammad Ali in Port Sites and crossing this line separation wasn't an easy thing. So for one event a Sufi procession in Port Said wanted to cross from the Arab neighborhood to the European neighborhood and the British army fired at them and they killed three people. In another time Hassan al-Banna in Smaelia in 1929 had a demonstration and crossed with a large number from Arab neighborhood to European neighborhood and this caused a huge alert and this actually what brought Hassan al-Banna under scrutiny of British intelligence and Egyptian government. So having this clear separation how people lived in this clear separation how our workers after finishing jobs returned what our workers after finishing their jobs would return to. So the type of buildings and in post neighborhoods are really different in the first neighborhood European neighborhood, they are usually villas anyone had been to Port Said or Smaelia would recognize this kind of villas. It's the only thing we brag about now. This is a striking difference. This is two photos from Smaelia at the same time. Here we have the European neighborhood with all the villas and gardens and this is the Arab quarter, the Arab neighborhood and I will just mention a few quotes describing the life in post neighborhoods. So for European neighborhoods, how people were living. As I mentioned before Sylvia Modeleski is one of the inhabitants of Port Said at the time and she wrote her memoir called Port Said we visited describing the social life high even by European standards. Then Spartans supporting clubs and mixed agenda of socialization, socializing in parts and Pitches mimicking the lifestyle of Pitchtown and South of France. This is, we are talking about Port Said. In Smaelia, there was another testimony by Liotini, a French officer during World War II. He was saying in the dining hall in a veranda overlooking vertical botanical garden complete with one reveal palms. I find myself sitting beside a young lady in a bank who born here 18 years back talking to me of tennis season tickets for music, reading and comedy. He asked, I asked her tips as I was visiting Cairo and to turn it out that she hadn't been there. He says their entire Egypt consisted of season tickets for readings in Port Said and tennis in Smaelia. This is Port Said, this is what we call al-Mamsha or the walking, this is just in front of the canal and this is Port Said. We have here famous Simone Arzes which used to be one of the biggest malls in Egypt at the time and all the signs are either in English or French and it seems more for European city. So for Arab town, actually we don't have a lot of accounts on what was happening in Arab towns. In my thesis, I used the account by Hassan al-Banna who used to know Arab towns and used to live there during his time in Smaelia. But here I would like to refer to a journalist, report by a journalist from Al-Masawa newspaper and he was describing the Arab town in Smaelia in 1950, not in even 20 or 30. He was saying two views in deep contrasts, the view of Afrangi or the European neighborhood and the view in Arashit al-Abid. The first is a neat heaven with trees and flowers and the second is hill with clay-built houses not suitable for chickens. Roads from clay like village roads, shoeless children and the entrenched poverty, it's called Arashit al-Abid which is slave huts and it really deserves this, it's only suitable for slaves. So talking of this kind of striking difference between Arabs and Europeans and how they experienced the city and going back to this idea of Port Said or Smaelia as a cosmopolitan or hub for internationalism. Was it a cosmopolitan? So as Sami Zubaita talks about cosmopolitanism in Alexandria he described it, native Egyptian society provided servants, functionnaires and prostitutes for the cosmopolitan mullah. They were inferiorized and despised. This can be doubled 10 times for Port Said and Smaelia. So even in Cairo, lower class people managed to have kind of lower class cosmopolitanism mediterranean like Greek and the Italians were able to mix with Egyptians, especially working in department stores because they had culture capital and they were able to identify with European in social events like drinking alcohol or mixed gender socialization. But who wears Arabs who lived in source canal? They were business who come to dagza canal. They were illiterate because most of the work were manual. They were living in a very confined places and the relation between them and the Europeans were not in an equal term. They weren't comrades. They were meeting as kind of servants and owners. So my conclusion, I was interested in this research first because this is my city and I wouldn't write about Cairo. But because middle class, middle eastern studies kind of dropped a class as a relative aspect to understand Middle East. And I think in recent years this reconciliation between culture agenda and class agenda resulted in great books like industrial sexuality by Hanan Hammad. So I still argue for class as a relative approach to understand Middle East but also not reducing moments of workers towards the strike moments and trying to understand the intimate world of workers. And second thing to understand how colonial enclaves like poor Said and Sma'alei and Sos Canal as a colonial periphery really played a big role in suing the seeds of nationalism but also political Islam. And they weren't margin or periphery as we think about. I would like to end with a song that was sung by Egyptian workers just after nationalization in 1956 and how they saw nationalization and how they saw the end of this relation. So they say the Canal, Ya Canal Ayama Ka'id O our Canal, your days are festivals. Wala ad-as-yad wa abid no more monsters and the slaves. Ashabika poor Said, long live poor Said. Long live your people poor Said. This is our Canal and this is our sea. The Canal now Bahven. Thank you. Thanks, Philip Marfleet. I've got a question, a couple of questions for Neil. Yeah. Your approach made me a little nervous because it put me in mind of the insistence during and after the events of 2011 that we could understand the uprising in Egypt as a function of social media. And you remember that there are all sorts of people drawing up means of observing mobile phone networks and the like. There was a book called Revolution 2.0 and there's a type of technological determinism associated with modern means of communication. And the biggest problem with that, it seemed to me, was the complete marginalization, exclusion almost of ideas about agency, about social and political action. Going to 1919, are there not other factors that you might even want to include amongst your variables? Like for example, I understand that in rural Egypt, many of the protests were associated with attempts to reclaim from the British the food stalls because the British had been seizing, critically seizing grains and they've been holding onto them for many, for many, many months. As news of the Cairo events spread, people locally took their own initiatives. Not only did they take their own initiatives, for example, to seize food or to fight the British who were preventing them getting the food, but also the British then reacted. There was bombing of course of villages which were centrally involved in these activities. And this in turn prompted responses and protests. So some of these actions on the ground, it seems to me might be, well, let me say, is there a place for these in your analysis? Yeah, sure. My question actually follows on from that and it's methodological. I appreciate that you focus on quantitative aspects of past history to generate primary data that then enables you to analyze the importance of certain variables. In your case, the conclusion that those areas with better communications had higher chance of participating in the revolutionary activities is hardly surprising as you conceded, but my worry is that those places with least communication facilities would also likely be the ones that would generate less reported activities. We're talking about 100 years ago and the data, the primary data you generated is through newspaper reports and so on and so forth. Of course, these reportings from far off places, places that are far away from the news and reporting infrastructure are far away, are much less likely to generate the kind of observations that your study needs. It's a little bit like studying the impact of famine on locations in relationship to their distance from main roads. Now, of course, the places that are far away, I mean, if famine kills larger numbers, they're less likely to make the headlines or be reported in that sense, especially if it's far away in the past. So I think that's one thing. The other thing in terms of your reported results on students, which if I'm not mistaken, showed the highest level of significance, the 99%, the 1% significance level, right? That was the only variable which showed 99% confidence interval. I think if you check back, your students reporting would be double asterisk. If you use the conventional reporting, maybe you show the slide and I'll explain. Let's do it. So the point I was going to ask was, although reported is significant, yeah, if you look at the student. Yeah, you can't infer 99 levels of significance. Yeah? These are only 95% confidence intervals, but actually in terms of... So what explains the width of the... Yeah, sure. So this shows that 95% confidence interval, 99% confidence interval would be actually closer. Let's look at the students. Yeah. That's 99%. This is actually the effect size, right? Yes. So to infer the physical significance, you have the effect size, the coefficient, which is divided by the standard error of the estimate. Yes. Which has to be away from zero. Yes. So at a 95% level, so 0.05 levels of significance. This is significant. As you can see, communications infrastructure is really far away from zero, right? Yes. So actually the most substantive effect, which is what you're asking for, is population, which makes sense, because... There are two things. One is the size of the coefficient that you're estimating, right? Yeah, sure. And according to this, the population... So a 1% increase. So this is an independent variable. Yeah. So it's a percentage. So a 1% increase. Yes. And students increase the log-alts of an event within this seven-day period by 0.3. Yeah, which is smaller than population. However, the reported result for students is more significant because of the narrower band, which means higher level of confidence. That's the point I'm making. Thank you very much. I'm just gonna... Let me respond. So Neil, you've got less than three minutes. So I can't, I'm not gonna arbitrate. Confidence intervals. But I think your reading is spurious, actually. But regardless, in terms of data, I mean, these are all super interesting questions and very relevant. So I think the really interesting question you asked is about under-reporting. So do these findings just reflect and reproduce the fact that there's an urban bias in the data collection, right? So events that are in more urban connected areas that it's inevitably going to be more likely to be picked up. That sounds like an extremely plausible vulnerability. So there are some reasons to think that that's probably not the case, or at least if it is the case, it's less of an issue. One is that actually, when you have so many different sources, if you look at Al-Qalam, Al-Minbal, Al-Masar, what do you need? They actually have very different kind of geographical focuses. Some look at the site, some look at the Nile Delta. Some are really chitra-specific or Alexandria-specific. So through triangulation, you're kind of trying to get as much of a coverage as possible. The really important things, though, for getting events in those areas that are not, if not, governorate capitals or even major towns, but in the villages are the security bulletins and the RAF reports because they're flying because the colonial security infrastructure at this point has penetrated Egyptian society really quite efficiently, actually. And indeed, when we talk about connectivity in the Egyptian case, there are about 3,500 telephones in each distributed across the country. There are really no places that are completely off the beaten path. And indeed, if we look at the distribution of protesters that occurs, if we just look at where protest happens during the mobilization, we're getting protests in pretty obscure places, but they just tend to have, the characteristics are predicted not by their ability to appear in the sample, but because of these other variables that predict them. So I take the point that there could be an urban bias in the data, but going through basically every single source material that's possible, it doesn't seem to be the case that there's one particular part of the country that's not being picked up. So I appreciate that this is a vulnerability, but as I say, the security reports and also, I mean, the important thing is that, I'm really critical of this as a source, but the Milner report, the appendices of the Milner report, which runs several hundred pages, the British put in really great effort to actually go back several months after the fact to recreate exactly what happens across the country. And here, they're actually also very sensitive to the fact that they might just be picking up sentiment in cities and so they get a great effort to try to actually recruit informants, for example, to try to piece together what happens in the countryside. So incorporating these kind of together in an imperfect data situation, you have more confidence that this isn't just reflecting and reproducing an urban bias. The point about technological determinism is I think quite a good one. And in many ways, I actually wrote, this is a chapter that's part of a book about infrastructure effectively, is that I actually wrote this because I was very critical of the social media narrative about 2011, which is basically, if you have an internet connection, you're going to mobilize, right? You're going to protest, which seems extremely simplistic and as you say, deterministic. So the question then becomes, if communications matter and infrastructure matters, how does it matter? Which is what I'm trying to get at here, which I think is a slightly different question. I think there is really compelling evidence to say that in places that are less connected, controlling for a bunch of other things like the distribution of students and so forth, that it does pattern the timing of protest, at least. The other question that you had, which was about that there may be other dynamics, right? So we know, if we just look at the timeline of protest, it's worth noting, I'm just looking at the first week of the revolution. I have data for about a year and a half now of the revolution. So you're absolutely right. Other things that things like repression, right? I could have generated mobilization dynamics, right? There could have been other kind of demonstration effects, contagion effects, all extremely plausible. However, just for this analysis, I'm just looking at the first week from the outbreak of protest, right? And indeed, I'm already accounting for, if you remember, this kind of technical bit of gymnastics that I did here, we're basically already accounting for the idea that there may be contagion dynamics, the idea that protest inspires other protest, that's already in the model. So those effects are being accounted for. The point about a rural uprising and the labor corps, right? You're effectively one of the things, one of the master narratives of the Egyptian revolution is that there is, that this is a peasant revolt and that there are enduring grievances. There's quite mixed evidence for that, actually. The most compelling evidence for that narrative, I will just look at how people protest is, I'm sorry, they're hitting me with graphs, is here. It's, I've talked about the first week, which is up to here, this is Friday, right? No one strikes on a Friday. These attacks, attacks on plantations, attacks on rural infrastructure, attacks on colonial imperial symbols of power, those have a very different dynamic. So that's the next chapter in the book that I haven't quite talked about. And those are a lot more rural and those are a lot more rambunctious and unruly and actually look quite different from the first week. And that's because, and again, writing against the kind of technologically deterministic narrative, protest as it unfolds, it changes its nature and character, right? So at the moment, I've just talked about the first week, but you're absolutely right. What happens later does change in, I think, quite important ways. Cool. Thank you very much. So, mother. Oh, I got an applause. Another round of questions, final round. Yes, here. This is actually for the second speaker, very interesting, but nothing has changed. I've seen, I'm a tourist guide and I've seen models of, I forget, where with the Norman's large establishment and the Anglo-Saxons with their big families in tiny, tiny little huts with tiny gardens. Last week I was in Uganda. I arrived on a public boat from my sister's island, Bulago, to a place called Bangar. I have never been so glad in my life to get out of somewhere. Makes your Arab quarter look like top luxury. The streets are about three foot wide, three foot deep with mud. The houses are totally extraordinary. Thank God I met my sister's friend with his Boda Boda, which is a motorcycle taxi, and we got out and I said, well, how can people live like that? This morning in the Metro, there was a thing about Henry developments. They've got an establishment, I don't know where, maybe in London I don't know, where the middle class children whose parents own the houses have a lovely big green grassy area to play in the council tenants. They look over that, but they have their children have a little narrow band where the floor is barked so they get splinters. So nothing changes. Not a question, just observation. Another question? Yes, the gentleman in the back and the lady here. Thank you. My question is also to the second speaker. I found that a fascinating presentation. One thing that interested me was that you used the word Arab quite a lot to talk about the workers, the menial workers if you like. And I noticed that earlier on today, perhaps people would have been talking about Egyptian workers. Could you tell me what was behind that choice of terminology? Was it something to do perhaps with the documentation produced at the time by the Suez Canal company? Or weren't the menial workers necessarily Egyptian? Or were they from the tribes in Sinai? What was going on, please? Thank you. A question from the lady here and the gentleman here. And I'm afraid that's going to be it. Hi, Catherine Smith. This is also to Khaled. I'm looking for advice, actually. And again, it's in connection with the comment made here about apparent culture inequalities and race inequalities in different countries in terms of the living conditions. When I was brought in to developing countries as an expert and authority to import understanding and learning for the good of the local community, those who brought me in made sure that I was contained within a safe place and interacting only in a safe way. Is there any way in which we can overcome this expat enclosure means of actually introducing good from outside without incurring envy in the locals of the apparent wealth of those who come outside who are actually imprisoned in the enclave during their time there? It's actually just a trial to answer and ask a question about the comment. I mean, the difference in industrial states in England and other places that there is no race difference. There is a class difference whilst in what you're showing of the Arab quarters and the other things immediately give the feeling of color difference. The natives against the occupiers, against the people who live. So that compound the feeling of isolation and indeed get the word apartheid here because then it's a combination of class as well as race relationship. So, thank you for your comments and yeah, nothing changed. And yeah, this is the last paper of my thesis how after nationalization things changed. If you just did a small research about the strikes happened the last five years by the workers in the source canal authorities and the body that inherited the source canal company the same demands, the same thing. We need to be registers, we need to increase wages. It's interesting because source canal used to be this kind of symbol of nationalism. What nationalism did the source canal is a big question. Even in the sense of who now lives in the French villas, they are not the people who used to live in Arptown. And yes, company towns are interesting because it were like they were the laboratories where the colonial authorities tried their urban techniques of controlling and then they moved it back to Europe. So they deserve a study on their own. Second question about the Arabs. I haven't invented the term, it's in every archive describing the Egyptian workers. It's in every piece of paper or article about the Egyptian workers by workers, by foreign newspapers. Interestingly, if you're familiar with Egyptian culture, projection popular culture, the word Arabi or Al-Arabi, it's a famous word related to Persaid. And it's a very derogatory term at the time because it's used to describe the faceless, nameless Arab workers, Egyptian workers. All of them were just Arabs to Europeans. So when they tried to call them Arabi, they don't call them by their names. When they felt from, yeah, it's a moment of 1919 towards a moment where Arabs decided like the people in the Arptown called them self-Egyptian because it's a big historical debate when we called our self-Egyptian. When is the exact time that Egyptian realized that we are Egyptians, we are not just Arabs or Muslims or Copts or, this is a big question, but in South Canal area, even the town was called the Arptown. And I have documentation about how they were calling them natives or Arabs and we're actually thinking of them as Arabs, like Bedouins, not Egyptian. So when they were building their homes, they were building it according to his life in the desert. And yeah, it's a big Orientalism piece. How's a French, especially, thought about the Egyptians living there. About safety and this kind of apartheid places were, I think, reading about Abadan in Iran, reading about South Canal, and reading about Algeria, Al-Qasaba, I think, yeah, this is a continued reality and we always think, I grew up in Ismailiyah and I have been told that don't go to the Arptown, which is now called Mhatta-Gerida, because it's not safety. It's not safe. Only because we substituted the race difference was a class difference. From my personal experience, I have no advice, but I just go and talk. Like, those people aren't animals to be confined in one place and the others aren't angels to be protected. And I think the Gito communities at the sprang everywhere now in Egypt started with this kind of thing. Interestingly, in Port Said now, they are building new Gito communities, like this kind of gated communities for elites. And you feel that the roots of this kind of communities come back to the European neighborhood in Port Said. One last thing about race and the class. It wasn't just class. It was perfectly race, because this journalist from Al-Masawa, he tried to find a place in European neighborhood. They didn't let him in any hotel. When he tried to have a meal, they didn't let him in any restaurant, saying our meals were reserved for weeks. He was shocked. He was coming from Cairo. So he was shocked about how race defined everything. No matter how rich you are, you were, you wouldn't live in a European neighborhood either in Port Said or in Sma'alaya. And I think what happened now is like class substituted race. And it become another race. Unfortunately, I have to conclude the session here. Thank you all for your great questions, and please join me in thanking the two speakers.