Imperial Legacies and the Making of Egyptian Citizenship: Jurisdiction, Sovereignty, and the Patriarchate of Alexandria, 1869—1951

This article reinterprets the emergence of Egyptian citizenship as a long, uneven process of institutional conversion rather than a rupture with the Ottoman past. Drawing on the analytical tools of historical institutionalism — path dependence, critical junctures, and mechanisms of layering and conversion — the study traces how imperial structures of jurisdiction, protection, and communal autonomy continued to shape Egyptian legal and political life well into the mid-twentieth century. Beginning with the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law, the article examines the coexistence of imperial, consular, communal, and shari’a jurisdictions in the Khedivate and analyses how British rule after 1882 reinforced rather than dismantled this plural order. The codifications of 1926 and 1929, the 1923 Constitution, the Lausanne settlement, and the termination of capitulations under the Montreux Convention of 1937 are treated as sequential attempts to nationalise imperial categories rather than to replace them. The study argues that Egyptian citizenship functioned less as a neutral juridical status than as a stratified mechanism of rule that re-embedded imperial hierarchies within the national legal order. The experience of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria — caught between communal autonomy, consular protection, and Egyptian jurisdiction — serves as a micro-historical lens through which to observe the sedimentation, repurposing, and eventual narrowing of imperial guarantees. By foregrounding the persistence of imperial logics in the national domain, the article offers a revised account of state formation in interwar Egypt and proposes a broader model for analysing how empires become nations through institutional transformation rather than institutional rupture.