In-Between Categories 39 lived as young children in the cities of the canal by demarcating their social and economic presence in Egypt. BETWEEN OTTOMAN CITIZENSHIP AND CITTADINANZA EGEA ITALIANA Despite the British occupation of Egypt in 1881, Egypt remained a de jure Ottoman province until 1914. Thus, Greeks who arrived in Egypt from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, such as Asia Minor, the Dodecanese Islands, and Cyprus, shared Ottoman nationality with their Egyptian counterparts. As Anthony Gorman states, more than a quarter of the Greeks in Egypt had Ottoman nationality prior to 1914. Despite their status as Ottoman subjects, the 1907 and 1917 Egyptian censuses categorized Ottoman subjects of Greek, Syrian, Armenian, and other descent as foreigners. The 1917 census, issued three years into the World War I British Protectorate, estimated the Ottoman Greek population to be 4,258 persons.17 Ottoman subjects of Greek origin did not cross international borders, as they came from other parts within the Ottoman Empire, and even though Egypt was occupied by the British in 1882, Ottoman identifications were still at play. Will Hanley notes that “subjecthood was the concept of membership” in the nineteenth century, with the Ottoman sultan seen as the shepherd of a flock (reaya in Ottoman Turkish), and with notions of loyalty and protection rather than sovereignty defining the sultan’s relationship with his subjects. Ottoman subjecthood changed during this period as a result of the empire’s attempt to appeal to its diverse population and the state’s efforts to create more direct relationships with individual subjects.18 As concepts of legal belonging changed, so too did territory and jurisdiction. Following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, Ottoman subjects lost their nationality and were listed in some documents as apatrides, meaning stateless people in Greek. Indeed, changing territories and jurisdictions influenced Greeks’ lives in Egypt decades after arriving in the Suez Canal zone. In some cases, it took decades for Greeks to obtain papers from the Egyptian state, consequently rendering them in a state of ambiguous nationality.19 In principle, those former Ottoman subjects could claim Egyptian citizenship under 19/1929 Law, which aimed to naturalize every foreigner who was born and permanently resided in Egypt. This process, however, was not automatic; individuals had to initiate it themselves. As Angelos Dalachanis notes, either out of ignorance (in the sense of not knowing what steps to take) or because some expected