In this succinct, engaging account of urban life among the lower classes in mid-nineteenth century Egypt, Liat Kozma promises and delivers two things. The first is the recovery of the voices of poor, socially marginalized women. The second is a new way of understanding the Egyptian state. Kozma uses the police station, the examination room, and the courtroom to portray the state not as “a coherent entity that masterminds and implements a set of reforms,” but rather as “multiple interactions between institutions and individual litigants” (3 and xvii). To fulfill both promises, Kozma focuses on formal police procedures and forensic examinations. Using police and court records, she illustrates how investigations into women's behavior became commonplace in khedival Egypt. By charting women's interactions with the emerging state's medical and legal bodies, Kozma succeeds in illustrating that the examination room and the courtroom were arenas in which subaltern Egyptian women empowered themselves. At the same time, she suggests that women's legal interactions with the state unwittingly aided the state in the development and extension of its power.

Kozma is not the first historian of modern Egypt to use police records and court documents to write women's history. Her well-researched account of life in Cairo on the eve of British colonial rule joins a growing body of Egyptian social histories that draw on legal documents to chronicle the lived experience of women of both the elite and non-elite classes. What is pioneering about Kozma's account is her focus. In her determination to access women “on the margins of social networks and of respectability,” Kozma succeeds in adding new actors to Egyptian history in addition to providing a fresh spin on the well-worn topic of Egyptian state building (xxiii). Using sharìa court records, fatawa (juristic rulings), police records, Supreme Council records, and appeal records, Kozma uncovers the interactions between an ever-evolving state and its citizens, and in so doing succeeds in giving voice to heretofore silent women.

Policing Egyptian Women is organized into two sections. In opening two chapters, Kozma constructs the historical and theoretical frameworks into which she later places women's experiences with law and medicine. In chapter 1, she situates Egypt within the broader context of Ottoman legal reform, illustrating how the new Ottoman Penal Code of 1851 was adapted to Egypt's specific circumstances. She suggests that the establishment of new bodies, such as the Supreme Council of Adjucation—a secular judiciary—resulted not only in the rise of new legal strategies but also in the establishment of new hierarchies and bureaucracies. As new courts allowed for the introduction of novel forms of evidence (circumstantial and procedural), court hierarchies were quickly joined by the emerging power of police investigation. Kozma follows her examination of the subsequent spread of police stations, where the urban poor increasingly turned to initiate criminal investigations, with a study of the offices of medical examiners whose testimony was called upon in the Supreme Council with ever-increasing frequency. Chapter 2 discusses state-trained hakimas (midwives), who, like police officers, constituted new sites of state authority and of interaction between subaltern women and the state. Kozma argues that female litigants and defendants were empowered by the articulation of their bodily experiences in the police station and the examination room as well as in the courtroom. The book's remaining three chapters use the legal and medical frameworks from chapters 1 and 2 to illustrate the experiences of manumitted slaves, prostitutes, and allegedly deflowered maidens as they used police stations, examination rooms and courtrooms to make charges and to contest charges brought against them.

The result of Kozma's dedication to exhuming the subaltern voice, her impressive research, and her deft writing create a snapshot of khedival Egypt, of the judges, police officers, hakimas, defendants, and litigants who circulated through the new institutions of the emerging khedival state. The weakness of the book is, perhaps, the unintended consequence of so vivid a portrayal of new police mechanisms in action. The details of Kozma's depictions distract her from fully representing the legal system that preceded Ottoman reform, and her study, therefore, fails to convey the dynamics of change over time. Students of social history will nonetheless find in Kozma a worthy model, as from her pen, both state officials and subalterns emerge as historical subjects. Scholars of legal history will appreciate both the suggestions Kozma makes about the role of the courtroom in the evolution of the Egyptian state, and the variety of cases witnessed in khedival-state courtrooms.

Policing Egyptian Women will find an eager audience in students of Egyptian history, legal history, women's history, and subaltern studies. Kozma's conclusions will manifest themselves in further studies, as will her models for writing history from the margins.