The Egyptian Labor Corps: Migrant Labor, Imperial Logistics, and the Social History of Modern Egypt

The campaign of massive public works projects, initiated by Meḥmed ‘Alī with the construction of the Maḥmūdiyya Canal (1827), was continued throughout the long nineteenth century with projects like the construction of the Suez Canal (1869) and the First High Dam at Aswan (1902). Each step along the way, young men from the Egyptian countryside were recruited via contracting and corvée to do the work of construction. Based on the insights of critical geography, this paper argues that these seemingly discrete projects were actually part of the long-term process of “the production of logistical space” in Egypt. This paper analyzes this process in an effort to learn more about the functioning of the British colonial state in Egypt and the nature of subaltern agency, through a close study of the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians—many of them illiterate workers and peasants from the countryside—to serve as logistical laborers in the Great War (1914-1918). It pursues the following questions: First, how were global trends and influences from throughout the British Empire brought to bear on the decision making processes of the British colonial state in Egypt? Second, how did the experience of (transnational) migration influence the formation of political subjectivity for workers, peasants, and their families? And finally, how can we shift the scale of our analysis of the social history of Egypt during this period to take into account these integrated, transnational fields in which rural Egyptians were operating? This paper argues that looking at the relationship between the production of logistical space and formations of political subjectivity in rural Egypt provides us with an opportunity to revisit and reinterpret British colonialism, subaltern consciousness, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.