Mohammad Ali Salih is a Sudanese journalist who has written in English for a number of important global publications. Last January, he reached out to me with a series of questions about my book, The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War. He hoped these questions would form the basis of an interview that could be published some day, but unfortunately, that has not proven to be possible.

I’ve decided to publish the interview in two parts here, on my blog. Unfortunately, this blog has been dormant for almost 10 years, but in a different lifetime, I used to use this to share my thoughts on a variety of topics. As we get ramped up for a new academic year, and in the wake of a number of controversies about race in Egypt, and the relationship between Egyptians and African Americans, I thought it could be a good time to share this now.

Without further adieu:

• What made you plan to write the book, in the first place?

As an American college student in the early 2000s, I wanted to learn Arabic because I was deeply against the War in Iraq that my own government was waging. I started taking Arabic language courses because I wanted to communicate with and learn from Arabic-speaking people.

I went to Egypt in my third year of college and fell in love with the place. I decided I wanted to become a historian focused on rural Egyptians, because I felt they had been left out of histories of modern Egypt, which often focused on Cairo and Alexandria.

It was in grad school that my adviser first told me about the hundreds of thousands of mostly rural Egyptians who served in the First World War. When I started looking at archival sources, I realized there was enough material to write an entire book on these migrant laborers, who were organized into a number of groups, the largest being known in English as the “Egyptian Labor Corps” (or ELC for short). Since discovering these sources, I became focused on telling the story of the ELC.

• How did your research take you to many countries? (and to Sabit Harun Mohamed’s grave?)

I started out with a small grant that allowed me to spend three months in London looking at the British national archives. The next place I went was Egypt. I tried unsuccessfully for months to get permission to access the Egyptian national archives, but the Ministry of Culture denied my request twice. I did get permission from the Ministry of Higher Education to research in the public libraries and archives in Egypt, so I spent a lot of time at Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya and the library at the American University of Cairo in Tagammu‘ al-Khamis. I ended up spending about 18 months in Egypt, finding mainly newspapers and popular culture sources, as well as secondary sources, about the ELC. Living in Egypt at this point was one of the best periods of my life so far.

In the summer of 2015, I travelled to Paris to visit the National Archives at Pierrefitte-sur-Seine and the Foreign Ministry archives at La Courneuve. That fall, I returned to the US and visited the YMCA archives in Minnesota. Documents from these four locations—London, Cairo, Paris, and Minnesota—form the backbone of the narrative.

• “Slavery” is a strong word to describe what happened. Or it isn’t?

There are some important ways in which the ELC was different than slavery. Two big ones are: 1. they got paid, and 2. they served temporarily for periods of 3-6 months, which were renewable if laborers elected to re-enter the ELC or any other auxiliary labor force. Many did elect to re-enter the ELC after their term was over. The one biographical narrative of an ELC laborer I have been able to find in English purports to be from a man who re-enrolled for several tours of duty and advanced up the organizational hierarchy.

Rather than focusing narrowly on slavery, I think many political scientists and sociologists today would expand the category a bit to talk about “coercive labor regimes.” These are basically attempts to use violence in order to compel people into performing bodily labor. Coerced labor can be paid or unpaid, temporary or permanent, and can be associated with a wide variety of activities, from slavery to factory work to military conscription. The ELC was definitely a coercive labor regime.

But it was a unique one in important ways. In contradistinction to military conscription, ELC members only performed hard labor behind the front lines—they never picked up weapons and fought—and they were often flogged by their commanding officers, whereas parliament had outlawed flogging in the British army in 1881, and the British colonial government in Egypt often touted its supposed “abolition” of the kurbag in Egypt.

I think these differences can be explained by the particular ways that British officers and colonial decision makers thought about the supposed “racial characteristics” of Egyptians and others they employed during the First World War. The ELC was part of a broader set of organizations across the globe, which British officials referred to as the “Coloured Labour Corps.” This put them in an analogous position to migrant laborers from countries as far-flung as China, India, South Africa, Senegal, Algeria, Vietnam, the West Indies, and Fiji. British officials saw such “people of colour” across the globe as appropriate for certain kinds of hard labor during the war.

So, this coercive labor regime during the First World War was racialized; the young men who served in it were thought to have specific racial characteristics that set them apart from the white troops and officers who commanded them. This aspect of the ELC does have some important similarities to the global institution of slavery that had developed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And this is what I think Egyptian nationalists like Salama Musa are referring to when he compared scenes of ELC recruitment to “a village of Negroes” (qarya zanjiyya) in his memoir Tarbiyyat Salama Musa. 

• You wrote that the Black Lives Matter’s movement had an impact on your writing the book. Please explain.

I knew that racism was an important influence on British officers as soon as I started reading their diaries and correspondence, right about the same time the Black Lives Matter movement was getting started (2013-14). But I didn’t really connect the two, nor did I center race as a lens through which to look at the ELC as a whole, until after I wrote a couple initial drafts of the book.

It was during this process of re-writing that a large protest movement linked to Black Lives Matter took over my neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY (2020). I joined in the demonstrations and couldn’t help but be affected by it.

These experiences inspired me to read more of the Black Studies and African-American Studies literature on race and think seriously about how this work spoke to the book I was trying to write. I took a graduate seminar with my colleague at SUNY Old Westbury, Dr. Llana Barber, an expert on the history of race and immigration in the US, where we read  books that influenced me, like Edmund Morgan’s American Freedom, American Slavery and Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom.

It was African Americans who most clearly identified the binary approach to race underwriting white supremacy in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which crudely separated “white people” from “non-white races.” W.E.B. Du Bois famously called this the “global color line.” I came to see the institution of the so-called “Coloured Labor Corps” by the British empire during the First World War as an attempt to implement the theoretical global color line on a world scale. I realized that what was going on in Egypt was just one part of a global shift entailed by a global war, and that the Black Studies literature had a lot to say about this moment that had been ignored by historians of the modern Middle East that I spent my time reading in grad school.

• You wrote about being looked at in Egypt as a “khawaja” (white man). Was that the stereotype “White Guilt” that affected your writing?

If white guilt is an emotional urge towards atonement motivated by recognition of one’s personal benefit from the historical accumulation of racist structures of power, then I think it probably motivated my career choice overall quite a lot. But my own white guilt is a separate issue from the historiographical ignorance of the ELC, which is itself an injustice at least partly motivated by racism. I didn’t start the research process thinking I was going to write a book about race in Egypt. It’s just that, the more I looked at the ELC, the more I realized ideas about race at the time were paramount.

When I was doing my research in Egypt, my “khawaga” identity offered me a level access that I had never experienced in the United States. My white skin helped me enter rarefied spaces, the equivalent of which I would likely never approach in my home country. I think what these personal experiences taught me, and what they provide evidence of as a social fact, is the influence of global whiteness on Egyptian society. White supremacy came to Egypt in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, just as it came to the rest of the world, and it radically re-shaped cultural norms. The spaces white historians have access to, and—Guilio Regeni notwithstanding—the relatively small risk we face when we speak out, seems to me to still be informed by these ideas about the global color line. So my personal experience as a white man living in Egypt certainly reinforced some of what I was seeing in the sources.

• Still, some Egyptians criticized you for “exploiting” them for this “guilt”. And for transferring the American race theories and practices to a “raceless” country.

The first thing I would say is that theories of race in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were not “American” or “European” or even “Western.” They were global ideas. People in Egypt, and throughout Asia, Latin America, and Africa were not ignorant of scientific developments in the West. Elise K. Burton’s book shows how Levantine intellectuals participated in the development of scientific racism as an academic enterprise. In Egypt, Shibli Shumayyil translated Darwin’s The Descent of Man into Arabic and published it in 1886. It was a huge event. In Chapter 8 of my book, I show how influential writers like Salama Musa, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Mohammed Sabri had all clearly formed an outlook shaped by translated and re-worked ideas about race by the time of the 1919 revolution in Egypt.

Scientific racism was also being interpreted in the context of an Egyptian society in which skin color had mattered for a long time. Throughout the nineteenth century, the slave trade picked up speed in Egypt, and a specifically colorized understanding of the social role and value of slaves sorted, for example, Circassians, Ethiopians, and Black Africans into different social groups. Cultural historians of Egypt have shown how actors and newspaper publishers used racialized characters throughout the nineteenth century. So this was not a “raceless” country by the time of the First World War, by any means.

Certainly, the system of racial classification attendant to slavery in Egypt was different than the analogous system in the United States. For one thing, as Ali Mazrui has argued, the umm al-walad status attributed to slaves who had become pregnant by their masters allowed for a level of upward social cooptation, with the mixed child adopting their father’s status, in a way that meant the upper ranks of Egyptian society were more racially diverse than in America. But when British colonialism came, it grafted on top of this an elite caste of white government employees, missionaries, tourists, and soldiers that was systematically privileged in public spaces like social clubs, churches, schools, and hotels. This led to the displacement of a multifaceted and ambiguous racial classification system with a more rigid and binary distinction that Egyptians found themselves forced to grapple with by the time of the 1919 revolution.