36 Eftychia Mylona their identities and sought to cultivate national senses of belonging, they introduced new tools of governmentality, such as birth certificates, which aimed to track and control children, especially the marginalized ones. Whether select children were abandoned, orphaned, or simply fell through the cracks of categorizations concerning legal belonging, the new states assume "control” over said individuals as a way to fashion their modernist projects and reform agendas. Categorizations not only demarcated how new states envisioned and sought to shape future loyal citizens but also, as this article explores, influenced how young people understood their positions in society.5 Children are political actors (even before receiving adult political rights) as well as social and economic actors (even before entering the job market). Nevertheless, historians have not often perceived them as active historical figures who, as Nazan Maksudyan notes, “deserve a history of their own.”6 More recent scholarship has examined children as members of a social category with agency—an agency that is an effect of the social relations young individuals form through their status as “children,” rather than as opposites to adults or outside “adult” society.7 To both understand childhood as a social category and discern the political and social contexts that shape these categories, one should investigate several variables, such as gender, social class, ethnicity, and religion. In this article, I look at how variables like ethnicity and social class intertwine with categories of citizenship and statelessness to demarcate children’s social and economic participation in Egypt. As I analyze below, children with Egyptian citizenship were particularly important in building the new Egyptian postcolonial state. However, children’s future social and geographic mobility were impacted by several political and economic events that took place in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. Those events defined Greek children’s relationship with the Egyptian postcolonial state as well as their future presence in Egypt.8 GREEK MIGRATION TO EGYPT: THE SUEZ CANAL REGION IN FOCUS In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Greeks, like other Europeans, started to settle in Egypt. Other settlements of different non-Egyptian communities, such as the Armenians and Jews, developed as a consequence of the millet system of Ottoman administration. 9 Waves of immigration increased in the following decades, and by the late nineteenth century, Greek islanders—