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Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestyan investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. He describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House´s staging of Verdi´s Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the Urabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, Mestyan illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East.

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"Filling a major gap in the historiography of modern Egypt, this engaging book fuses cultural and political history, Egypt´s place in the late Ottoman world, and the emergence of Arab identity politics. This is one of the most exciting new works that I have read in recent years." - Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans

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Adam Mestyan is assistant professor of history at Duke University.

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