LAUSR

gave imperial consulates a chance to pose as necessary mediators—or eager undertakers. Dying and death, in her treatment, then become at once moments of imperial taxonomy and sites of imperial competition. At times, it was only in death that somebody’s existence was revealed to the consulate that would go on to claim that particular corpse. Jessie Brown, for example, eluding the attention of the British consulate in life, was “rendered legible within a matrix of colonial governance and communal boundaries that mandated categorizations” upon her passing in 1906 (p. 126). European consulates used the bodies of Brown and other “imperial subjects” like her both materially and performatively. For reasons that can be intuitively grasped but that Minkin could have dug deeper, corpses could neither be shipped nor cremated but had to be interred right away. Thus, consulates rushed to bury the dead as both acts of necessity and statements about belonging. In hospitals, funerals, graveyards, and paperwork, consulates commandeered death to push back against each other’s influence and space within Alexandria. By embracing the intervention and performance in matters funereal of both the British and the French consulates in Alexandria, Minkin approaches imperialism flexibly. First, she shows that Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 was not a watershed concerning the bureaucracy and maintenance of the dead. Then, she convincingly addresses France’s “non-territorial imperialism” in Egypt and the “various strands of French community” in Alexandria (p. 99; p. 120). Thereby, she demonstrates that the British—even after 1882—were never the sole power in Egypt and that the French never relinquished their claim to imperial space even in the absence of territorial control. Third,Minkin goes beyond the revisitation of Franco-British interimperial rivalry in Egypt to explore the relationship between the British and the French on the one hand and the Egyptian state on the other. She finds that both imperial powers were ultimately beholden to the Egyptian governmental authority, with whom the final word on the necessary resources and lands rested. The exact mechanisms of death governance within the Egyptian administration remain elusive; nonethelessMinkin’s claim rings clear: deathwas a “building block of empire” (p. 128) as well as a not-to-be-buried hatchet wrenched by imperial competitors and local authorities alike. Finally, her notion of empire operates on multiple scales. Not only does she wrap up a myriad of individual ends of life, but she also unveils the “tentacles of empire”: the bureaucratic logic necessitating the collection of data and the construction of an imperial community (p. 120). Her treatment confirms preexisting theories of empire as something stratified on the military and diplomatic levels as well as on the ground, where imperial subjects perished and consulates acted as key in-between facilitators. From six feet under the surface, then, Minkin persuasively revisits the history of Alexandria, Egypt, and empire. She also incorporates a welcome reflection on her archival sources, their riches, as well as their omissions. She succeeds in animating numbers and providing a lively rendition of potentially deadly silent data. Her writing displays some truly hilarious passages (“his friends were surprised that he fell over and insisted he was sober” since he “had drunk only six or seven beers that evening,” p. 124) and presents theoretical debates in an accessible way, making this book suitable for upper undergraduate readers. Even if Minkin follows individuals through sickness, memorialization, and burial, hers is not a morbid or gloomy account. The author compellingly reframes death as an interimperial and local affair, while also disinterring the underground connection of both imperial and Egyptian governance to matters of dying and death.