Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Nineteenth-Century Egypt and the Mediterranean LUCIA CARMINATI History, University of Arizona In October 1898, the Italian Vice-Consul Apollinare Burdese in Alexandria of Egypt arrested a group of Italian anarchists on the charge of having been involved in a plot against the German Emperor Wilhelm II on his tour through Egypt and Palestine. Two bombs, found in the wine-shop of one of the accused, were sequestered. 1 Although the plans of all those involved ulti- mately went awry, I will examine the events surrounding this episode and the multi-lingual trail of documents they left behind. My analysis will connect events, people, and ideas on different Mediterranean shores, and probe the nodes and the networks created by one particularly mobile anarchist group in late nineteenth-century Egypt. I will employ different scales of anal- ysis to show the ways in which the Italian members of this group simultane- ously moved in and between multiple contexts, constructing local and international networks and taking advantage of the somehow extra-legal condi- tions enjoyed by foreigners in Egypt and in the Ottoman Empire. Acknowledgments: This paper benefited from multiple conversations with Julia Clancy-Smith, David Ortiz, and Minayo Nasiali—special thanks to them. Thanks also to the anonymous CSSH reviewers for their insightful comments. I also thank the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina, for organizing the 2015 Conference “Bodies in Motion: Middle East Migrations,” where I presented this article as a work-in-progress and benefited from the participants’ valuable feedback. A Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and a Pre-Dissertation Grant from the Research Institute of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Arizona made my archival research possible. All translations from the archival sources are my own. Generally, the system of Arabic transliteration that I have adopted is that of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For the often-cited city of Alexandria, however, the English version has been preferred. For other toponyms, I have maintained the Italian transliteration found in the sources. 1 Burdese, Italian Consulate, Alexandria, 14 Oct. 1898, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome, to Ministry of the Interior and to Berlin. See also Italian Consulate, Alexandria, Sentenza, 10 Feb. 1899, Busta (henceforth B) 25, Polizia Internazionale (PI), Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Min- istero degli Affari Esteri (ASDMAE), Rome. Fifteen were arrested right away, one in November 1898, and two more the following January. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2017;59(1):127–153. 0010-4175/17 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 doi:10.1017/S0010417516000554 127 use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417516000554 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 70.167.205.37, on 29 Jan 2017 at 16:53:47, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of