ABSTRACT
The importance of Alexandria in the modern history of Egypt can scarcely be overstated. Its peculiar geographic endowments made it one of the principal entrepots for the Mediterranean trade of Ottoman Egypt. Muslim Egyptians were numerically dominant in the global population and labor force, particularly in the transport, construction, and service sectors. The rise of Alexandria was both cause and consequence of a fundamental change in the interrelationship of cities and towns within Egypt. If Alexandria was not a microcosm of Egypt, it was certainly a harbinger of Egypt's future history since, for all its eccentricities, the symptoms of the colonial syndrome were evident in Alexandria before they appeared elsewhere in Egypt. From around 1850, Alexandria was on its way to becoming the bridgehead and bastion of the European presence in Egypt, a position that it held for about a century, until the general exodus of Europeans and Levantines in the wake of the Nasser revolution.
