Zoom In: Visualizing Egyptian Laborers in World War I France

With a few notable exceptions, members of the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) who served in France for the British Army have received little attention from historians of the First World War who focus overwhelmingly on regimental and popular histories of elite politicians and military commanders.  In this paper, I argue one of the most important ways of “seeing” these laborers is through the photographs taken of them.  With the visual representation of Egyptian workers as my focus, I eschew a conventional approach centering on soldiers, generals, and senior officers.  Instead, I maintain by taking into account both the historical context and the interpretive power of photography, we can arrive at more nuanced viewpoints regarding the use of laborers in France.  It can also contribute to ongoing scholarly attempts to reinterpret the visual legacy of the war.

Photography was widespread between 1915 and 1918.  During these years, more advanced, easily acquired forms of camera technology helped to create a new visual vocabulary and language of war.  However, the large number of photographs are devoted primarily to the documentation of military battles.  In an attempt to make sense of the experience of the Egyptian laborers, I discuss the ways in which photographs depicted their lives and what effect these depictions had on official understandings of their wartime contributions.  From a visual perspective, those photos represented a significant shift from older uses of photography that attempted to document the use of colonial labor.  Emphasizing the official nature of the photographs taken of the Labor Corps, I consider how these images reframe historical and historiographical questions related to the First World War in France.  I also analyze the various uses of Egyptian laborers as a process of social change and the unprecedented nature of mass mobilizations during the war.