Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.

"Well researched and superbly written." - Journal of European Economic History

"In Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, Lucia Carminati offers an unprecedented glimpse into the lives of the laborers, loiterers, migrants, and transients who passed through the city. . . . Carminati teases from a host of minor events the texture of life in a city made of and by people on the move." - American Historical Review

"A superb history. . . .Such a lucid, passionate and rhetoric-free meditation about the quintessential diasporic nature of the human condition remains one of the enduring achievements of Carminati's book, together with its final exhortation to restore migrants' lives and experiences, despite their usual fragmentariness and sparseness, to the center of global history. . . .A must-read." - International Journal of Middle East Studies