The rise of suburbs was a key dynamic of the twentieth century and speaks to a number of fields of research that have recently flourished, from histories of real estate to social segregation. Not least for these reasons, Annalise J.K. DeVries’ study is a very welcome contribution that zooms in on a prominent case in the Middle East during the first half of the twentieth century: the suburb of Maadi, south of Cairo. DeVries’ book adds to scholarship about other suburbs of the Egyptian capital in the same period, such as Heliopolis and Helwan.Footnote ¹ The author opens the book with the historical context from which Maadi emerged. She describes the Capitulations and Mixed Courts that endowed European and North American nationals in Egypt with economic and legal privileges. After 1882, the British occupation further fuelled migration and the flow of capital from Europe to the country. Privatized land and railways became two main fields of foreign investment. As DeVries illustrates, few companies reflect this trend better than the ‘Egyptian Delta Land & Investment Co., Ltd’. Established by a railway company in April 1904, Delta Land was registered in London and went on to create the suburb of Maadi.

There are 11 short chapters, each 11 to 15 pages long, that follow the introduction. The chapters are organized chronologically and present a narrative along individual biographies. In the first two chapters, readers learn about the personal networks that bolstered Delta Land's projects. DeVries presents the histories of several Sephardic, Levantine and British families, such as the Suarèz and Williamson families, who played prominent roles in the early years of the suburb and fostered its development according to garden city ideals. Chapters 3 to 5 focus on the first phase of Maadi's construction between 1907 and the 1930s. DeVries illustrates how infrastructure projects that connected the suburb to Cairo were pivotal for its development. In 1909, Maadi's railway station was finished; towards the end of World War I, electric lighting was added to its streets; and in 1933, lights were introduced to the road connecting Maadi to the Egyptian capital. The author shows how these projects came with conflicts that provide revealing insights about the suburb's social history. DeVries shows, for instance, how the affluent, mainly non-Egyptian residents of Maadi opposed street lights because they wanted to avoid any encouragement to servants to congregate when they were off duty.

DeVries identifies a second phase of the suburb's construction in the 1930s, which she details in chapters 6 to 8. While Maadi's earlier development followed the ideal of a ‘garden city’, the influx of residents hailing from an Egyptian, urban middle class, the afandiyya, brought the suburb much closer to debates about the Egyptian nation and the place of foreigners in the country. In tandem with the changing social composition of its inhabitants, Egypt's independence in 1922 and the political debates that followed also created a radically changed environment for the suburb. With the Montreux Convention of 1937, the Capitulations were set to be abolished in 1949. DeVries shows how these transformations inspired nationalists who sought an independent future for the country that would still build on ties to many of the foreign residents who lived in Maadi. In chapters 9 to 11, DeVries argues that World War II, the Arab Israeli War of 1948 and the Suez Crisis of 1956 ultimately brought an end to this vision. The three conflicts shaped a narrower understanding of the Egyptian nation, which increasingly excluded those with Italian, Greek, British and other nationalities who had been living in the country for generations. The large departure of resident foreigners upended what DeVries describes as Maadi's ‘cosmopolitanism’. She illustrates how the policy of nationalizations under Gamal Abdel Nasser put further strain on older power structures that had supported the suburb. In 1962, Delta Land itself was eventually dissolved.

In this way, the book traces a development from the creation of Maadi as a product of foreign investment and imperial connections to its integration into elite conceptualizations of the Egyptian nation and ultimately the dissolution of the company that had created the suburb. With these insights, DeVries’ book is an important addition to the literature on suburbs in Egypt. However, the narrative of the suburb's ‘making and unmaking’ also risks reproducing the perspective of a nostalgia that former inhabitants of Maadi, who had benefited from imperial hierarchies, have voiced. Stretching the periodization beyond 1962 and including more Arabic sources might have yielded a different perspective. The book also does not always combine its findings with a history of Cairo. Maadi frequently appears as a reflection of imperial policies and economic inequalities, rather than a driving factor of these phenomena. Studies by Jean-Luc Arnaud, Khaled Adham and others suggest, however, that the creation of suburbs contributed to the social segregation of the Egyptian capital along economic and colonial hierarchies.Footnote ² While DeVries’ book thus offers a detailed history of Maadi, additional scholarship can further clarify the import of the suburb for larger histories of Cairo, Egypt and the British empire.