Over the past fifteen years, historians have explored the processes, spaces, and practices that
shaped gender roles in the 20th-century Middle East. Several studies have emphasised the role
of schools and education in shaping both the “new woman” and effendi masculinity in colonial
Egypt. However, with few exceptions, the construction of boyhood in missionary schools across
North Africa and the Levant remains largely underexamined. Drawing on various missionary
and diplomatic sources, this article investigates the discourses and practices employed by mis
sionaries to cultivate a cosmopolitan working-class masculinity in late 19th to mid-20th-century
Egypt. It focuses on the Salesian Schools of Arts and Crafts established in Alexandria (1897) and
Cairo (1931) in response to the growing influx of Italian migrants who made Egypt their home.
Through a micro-historical analysis of practices that masculinise and discipline, as well as di
scourses on religious and national coexistence within Salesian industrial schools, this article del
ves into the complex interplay between education, gender, and cosmopolitanism in the colonial
Mediterranean. It argues that cosmopolitanism was used by missionaries as a narrative device,
and was both contingent and instrumental. Ultimately, it demonstrates that missionary schools
were contested spaces where gender norms and notions of religious, social, and national diversity
were elaborated and negotiated during an era of rising nationalisms and imperial rivalries.