Nationality is the most important legal mechanism sorting and
classifying the world's population today. An individual's place of birth
or naturalization determines where he or she can and cannot be and what
he or she can and cannot do. Although this system may appear universal,
even natural, Will Hanley shows that it arose just a century ago. In
Identifying with Nationality, he uses the Mediterranean city of
Alexandria to develop a genealogy of the nation and the formation of the
modern national subject.
Alexandria in 1880 was an immigrant boomtown ruled by dozens of
overlapping regimes. On its streets and in its police stations and
courtrooms, people were identified by name, occupation, place of origin,
sect, physical description, and other attributes. Yet by 1914, before
nationalist calls for independence and decolonization had become
widespread, nationality had become the defining category of
identification, and nationality laws came to govern Alexandria's
population. Identifying with Nationality traces the advent of modern
citizenship to multinational, transimperial settings such as
turn-of-the-century colonial Alexandria, where ordinary people abandoned
old identifiers and grasped nationality as the best means to access the
protections promised by expanding states. The result was a system that
continues to define and divide people through status, mobility, and
residency.