In The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War Kyle Anderson offers a multifaceted history of the half a million Egyptian logistical laborers involved in the Allied war effort during World War I. When the war began, Egyptians unexpectedly found themselves on the wrong side of the global color line, classified as laborers rather than soldiers and responsible for laying railways and water pipelines, digging trenches, and guiding camel supply lines. Anderson's argument, expertly pieced together from limited archival material, places the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) at the center of new constructions of Egyptian racial identity during the war and the implications of that racial difference in the subsequent nationalist movement. In so doing, he seeks to interrupt familiar narratives of the 1919 revolution in Egypt and the First World War.
At the core of Egyptians’ experience with the ELC, and likewise at the center of Anderson's argument, is the moment of recruitment. Though imagined and promoted as a voluntary labor corps by Great Britain, historical evidence reveals patterns of force and coercion. Men hired into the ELC were bound by rope and kept in holding cells for weeks before being transported to military depots, where they were disinfected, stripped of their clothes, and given new uniforms. Anderson is careful to note that some men did voluntarily join the ELC. However, for many Egyptian observers, recruitment looked very much like kidnapping, a form of violence that was routinely carried out on Black African or enslaved bodies, but not Egyptians. Anderson argues that it was the imperial reclassification of Egyptians as people of color that inspired Egyptian intellectuals and elites to articulate a distinct racial identity. Yet one wishes that he had spent more time with the holding cells and ropes and disinfection stations: liminal spaces in which Egyptian men became Black subjects alongside their transition into military workers. Anderson is interested in space and power and the book introduces the concept of logistic space: the network of depots, rail lines, steamship routes, and maps that guided the British war effort. Egyptian bodies turned into Black bodies as they moved through these sites. Anderson would do well to reflect further on how the lived experience of Black subjectivity, being on the wrong side of the color line, was first felt and then reinforced within logistic spaces.
Anderson is at his best when examining language. He is a careful reader and draws our attention to power and prejudices embedded in the vocabularies of Britons and Egyptians. When the term nigger appeared in the letters of British officials, for example, it was often connected to ideas about labor and work: Egyptians were either not doing enough or had the capacity to do much more. One of the book's most compelling chapters, “Listening in on the ELC,” recreates the soundscape of the ELC camp, which, sources agree, could be heard well before it was seen. Anderson invites us to interpret the appearance of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic within the archive as a glimpsed record of specific words spoken by men of the ELC. His close readings of word choice and metaphor, such as the elision between the eyes of the British officers and the evil eye in popular culture, bring the intelligence and humor of Egyptian men to life. Chatter, songs, and theater productions were all means of forging group identity and finding respite in an otherwise harsh environment. If British officers relied on surveillance and visual order to maintain control, men in the ELC used sound as a form of resistance and to lay claim to the worksite.
The book reaches its climax with the 1919 revolution. Popular understanding holds that the sparks of nationalism began with educated urban elites and then spread to the countryside. Anderson reverses these vectors of time and influence. He documents uprisings and attacks on imperial symbols in rural areas in the spring and summer of 1918, a year before the revolution's recognized start, while familiar figures, like Saʿd Zaghlul and ʿAli Shaʿrawi, are recast as witnesses to the coerced recruitment and violent practices of the ELC. Confronted with the spectacle of the forced transport and hard labor of Egyptian men, akin to the treatment of Black Africans, Egyptian nationalists refused to accept this imposed racial classification, what Anderson calls “racial nationalism” (p. 4). Nationalist arguments were framed as freedom from metaphorical slavery, a system that appeared much more real when applied to the ELC. Outside of the nationalist rhetoric, Anderson shows that the 1918–19 protests throughout Egypt were motivated by a range of factors and, occasionally, acted at cross-purposes with one another. After the war, state extraction of agricultural resources continued, making it difficult to sustain a basic living. In one of his most convincing arguments, Anderson asserts that attacks on infrastructure were not attacks on imperialism, in theory, but the very real state and foreign interference in the lives of Egyptian villagers.
There is much to contend with in the final chapter and one wishes that Anderson had spent more time unpacking the blurred edges between class and race. While it is clear that Egyptian elites made a connection between an imposed color line and independence, it is less clear how those who experienced the violence of racial prejudice and subjugation, a Black subjecthood, imagined their position vis-à-vis the nationalist movement. Part of this confusion may be due to an organizational quirk of the book in which the author analyzes the rural uprisings in Chapter 2, while the 1919 revolution is not addressed until Chapter 9, thus tempering the drama of the moment and the strength of his claim. Even so, he makes a provocative argument linking racial identity and Egyptian nationalism that is sure to invite further conversation on the part of scholars and contemporary commentators who are bringing new perspectives to traditional, top-down interpretations of the 1919 revolution.
Within the broader field of Middle East studies, race and Blackness have only begun to receive the analytic attention that they deserve. As Anderson notes in his acknowledgments, he did not set out to write a book about race but found he could not ignore what the sources were telling him (p. xiv). The Egyptian Labor Corps is a timely example of the productive avenues that open when race and racialized experience are incorporated into once-familiar narratives. Anderson displays a sensitivity to the source material and generosity toward his subjects. Accessible writing and short thematic chapters make this recommended reading for an informed general audience and academic readers alike.
