Children in the Archive: Migration and School Life in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt

What happens when we approach children and youth as the producers of their own history? This article foregrounds the concrete traces left by children and young students in the historian’s archive in order to offer an exploratory investigation of how they participated in the multifaceted history of transnational and internal migration in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt. I focus on children and young individuals who, on the one hand, belonged to migrant communities in Egypt and, on the other hand, produced narratives which spoke to the experience of transnational and internal migration. By examining school exams, letters, and petitions produced by pupils between the 1880s and the 1920s, I reconstruct how younger members of society engaged with various forms of parental, communal, and state authority and support as they moved across different social, legal, and spatial geographies.