In-Between Categories 51 statelessness, citizenship, and access to employment and state resources. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Capitulations at the beginning of the twentieth century, Egypt’s decolonization and the new labor laws in the 1950s and 1960s that protected the position of Egyptian nationals in the job market, together with the 1956 Suez Crisis and the two Arab-Israeli Wars (1967 and 1973) all impacted the Greek community’s cohesion in the Suez Canal cities and defined its relation with the Egyptian postcolonial state. For some children, Egyptian citizenship came as a condition of their parents’ work environments, where employees were forced to ask for it so as to not lose their jobs. For others, their stateless status could not continue in postcolonial Egypt, where nationality became “the primary element of all identification.”46 Greek children with Egyptian citizenship were granted access to Egyptian labor market and state resources, such as subsidized healthcare, in a period in which economic policies seemed rigid and Egyptian citizenship was difficult to acquire. Nevertheless, many young Greeks hesitated to obtain Egyptian citizenship because of the 1960s and 1970s political situation in Egypt, which cultivated fears of war and army conscription with long terms of service. Those who applied, however, did so for primarily practical reasons, like work, as they saw permanency in their life in Egypt. Identification documents cannot necessarily capture the reasons individuals and families opt or reject naturalization. Nevertheless, tracing the legal status of Greek children in Egypt and engaging with the oral histories of those who left offers insight into how Greeks responded to changing regimes of legal belonging and navigated the social, political, and economic opportunities of postcolonial Egypt.47 NOTES I would like to thank the editors of this volume and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on this article, as well as Joseph Viscomi for his help with navigating the Italian archival sources. 1 It was not defined in the archival material whether Chryssoula’s father worked for the Suez Company or a company contracted to work for the latter. Shahāda al-milaād (birth certificates), Mathētes (students) file, Scholika (schools) file, 1961–1963, 1966–1967, Koinotēta Suez (Suez community), Archeio Ellēnikēs Koinotētas Kairou (Archive of the Greek community in Cairo, henceforth AEKK). Will Hanley referred to this term as reaya, meaning “the Ottoman flock.” Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans 2