Shana Minkin's Imperial Bodies: Empire and Death in Alexandria, Egypt opens with the death of Miss Gertrude Beasley Woodward, a British barmaid in Alexandria, Egypt, from typhoid fever in 1899. It is in death that Miss Woodward became a historical subject, an imperial body, and a part of Alexandria. In death Miss Woodward made local, imperial, and global history. Her death lifted her from obscurity.

There is something obviously morbid in this curiosity of the historian whose agenda to dig up the dead and buried has only one aim: to think with death about the past. It is to Minkin's credit that the stories of the dead that she recuperates and retells are done in a way that most likely does not disturb their rest. In addition to capturing what is most human about what is much more than a human story, death opens a window onto the modes through which human life entered a global process of politicization. Through Alexandria's hospitals, funerals, cemeteries, death registers, and inquests, Minkin documents the specific and uneven politics of life that marked the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, which in turn illuminates the formation of a modern state in Egypt between imperial and national claims on, and refusals of, particular dead bodies. The archives created in the process of doing consular work in Alexandria are central to her account.

In the introduction, Minkin situates her intervention in relation to older historiographies of modern Egypt, Alexandria, and the British Empire. Minkin revises these narratives and their periodization by regarding Alexandria and its imbrication in a dense global web of economic and political relations through the lens of death and its associated rituals, technologies, and practices. She is thus able to characterize the city as “multiempire” and “transimperial” (7–10), reflecting respectively, the competition among multiple states (British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Italian, and so on) over the city's government even after its 1882 British Occupation and the flow, residence, and death of variously positioned imperial subjects in and through the city. As she puts it, “[t]he archives of death show that the imperial residents of Alexandria were simultaneously local and foreign, of Alexandria and of empire” (12).

Imperial Bodies is structured to mimic “the movement of the dead from dying to documentation” (15). Within that framework, Minkin uses chapter 1 to examine the moment of death. She opens the chapter with the slow demise of Lisette Bohren, a Swiss cook who had been a resident of Alexandria for eleven years and spent her last two in and out of hospitals, namely the Deaconess and the European Hospital, before she succumbed to “pseudo-leukemia” on March 1, 1908. Minkin gains access to the life of this ordinary working woman mainly through her dying and death, which activated the French Consulate of Alexandria's paper mill that churned out different kinds of documents about subjects under its protection. With these documents of death, reports on hospital finances and statistics, petitions to the Egyptian government for subsidies and land, Minkin is able to sketch a complex portrait of the “foreign” hospitals in Alexandria as serving patients of any nationality and mostly the nonpaying urban poor. Even as imperial politics of the French, British, and rising powers Germany and Italy were played out through and between the hospitals, and despite the high stakes of multi-empire competition, the Egyptian government remained a significant player after 1882: “These hospitals were thus serving as functionaries of the Egyptian government, as spaces of colonial influence, and as local institutions” (35).

In chapter 2, Minkin examines funerals. She opens this chapter with another victim of typhoid, Rose Northcote, a woman from Kent who worked in Alexandria as a private nurse for a year or two and died at the Deaconess Hospital in 1904. Her death and especially her burial became occasions for the British Consulate and the city of Alexandria to cooperate because of her status as a citizen of the colonial power and as a resident of the city where she died from a communicable disease. Another case, that of a British Indian Muslim subject, Said Basselm, raises questions that consular records alone cannot answer. The Alexandria police found his dead body decomposing in a hut behind Deaconess Hospital on March 2, 1893. With the intervention of British consular officials Said was given a Muslim funeral and buried on site due to public health concerns given the state of the corpse. Minkin does not query how this body in particular came to rot for some three weeks in a structure that was part of a German-established hospital because it would be an impossible question to answer. Nonetheless, the complexity of imperial bodies as revealed in consular records by nature elides the very simple fact of racism in the late nineteenth century, which could simultaneously see without contradiction a body dumped out back like garbage and the same body officially buried. Whether the British consulate knew of this Indian Muslim's death when it happened is something an archive would not reveal. That his decomposing Brown body was discovered by Alexandria police, however, made it impossible to ignore. Between the absence and the presence of archival evidence is an abundance of colonial violence, which includes the neglect-to-death of Brown and Black bodies as Mike Davis has most provocatively reminded us in Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2002). These are facts of history, and though they might not readily register in consular archives of Alexandria, they index at once the promise and the limit of the category of “imperial bodies.”

In chapter 3, opening with the 1897 double murder of Alexander Welch and Mohamed Ahmet, Minkin examines cemeteries as another site of negotiation between multi-empires and the Egyptian government mediated by globally circulating public health technologies and the need to protect transimperial bodies. In chapter 4, opening with the birth of Pauline Borivent in 1908 and her death in 2003, Minkin explores consular certification of death through registers (French) and inquests (British). Both chapters further Minkin's argument that imperial power was shot through with ambiguities and that the reality of death exposed complex, though often mundane, processes of resolving divergent claims over populations and territories that involved the indigenous government at municipal and national levels in ways that exceed conventional notions of colonial rule.

Minkin uses consular and other records to reveal a side of Alexandria that has long been buried (pun intended) in an ahistorical attention to cosmopolitanism, colonialism, and nationalism that was more often an expression of desire of particular classes or constituencies than grounded historical realties. There is perhaps nothing more material and grounded than a corpse, and the failure to explore the stories of the actual dead is an odd oversight for a discipline that depends all too morbidly on death! Thus, Minkin can be considered among the groundbreakers in the historiography of modern life.