In-Between Categories 35 Furthermore, I discuss what it may have meant, in terms of economic and social access, for a child of Greek origin to become an Egyptian citizen in the 1960s and 1970s—a period of economic and social change in Egyptian society. Last, I examine how the political and economic developments in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean demarcated non-Egyptian nationals’ experiences of employment, citizenship, and access to state resources. Intriguingly, the ways in which the Egyptian state documented children allow historians to trace how Greek families navigated citizenship and belonging across the tumultuous decades before and after World War II. Furthermore, oral histories reveal that individuals who were children in the 1960s and 1970s realized the implications of legal belonging for their families. In order to examine how political, economic, and social changes shaped Greeks’ labor practices and experiences of class and citizenship, my analysis studies a collection of different forms of identifications, all housed in the archive of the Greek community in Cairo. These documents, written in mostly Arabic and Greek (and sometimes Italian) came from Greek communities residing in cities across the Suez Canal region, such as Suez, Port Tawfik, Port Said, Port Fouad, Ismailia, Kantara, and Sinai. These archival records include registration documents, such as passports, birth certificates (shahāda al-milaād), and health certificates/health ID cards of Greek children who were born and registered in Suez and Ismailia, as well as student cards (biṭāqa madrasīya / atomiko deltio mathētou) of the Suez and Port Tawfik Community School. Alongside the archival material, I discuss thirteen oral accounts, conducted with eight male and five female interlocutors of Greek descent who were born between the 1940s and 1960s and grew up in Cairo, Alexandria, and the Suez Canal cities. These interlocutors, who now live in Athens, Greece, differ in socioeconomic status, profession, political viewpoints, and origins. The oral accounts were based on a semi-structured questionnaire with both open and closed questions, which provided the interlocutors with space to share a range of feelings and reflections on different aspects of their life in Egypt. In my attempt to create a broader historical interpretation, I grouped the accounts around certain themes and placed them in a wider sociopolitical context.4 Children, as much as adults, contribute to the development of modern states in social and political terms. Indeed, modernizing states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adopted a new interest in children and consequently cultivated new tools to manage them and their families. For instance, as the modern states fashioned

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