Editorial foreword

Abstract

The articles in this issue explore the formation and consolidation of national political communities in the Middle East, as well as the atomization of those communities over the past half-decade. The opening section, Labor and Economy, brings together two scholars of modern Egypt. In The Egyptian Labor Corps: Workers, Peasants, and the State in World War I, Kyle J. Anderson focuses on Britain's mobilization of Egypt's human resources for the war effort. The British recruited workers and peasants from rural areas of Egypt to serve as laborers in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC), which Britain had formed to provide logistical support to its troops in various theaters of war, principally nearby Palestine. By reconstructing the wartime recruitment network through the colonial archive, Anderson considers the broad relationship between the central state extending out of Cairo and rural Egyptian society. Where many historians of modern Egypt have seen a hermetic bifurcation characterized by mutual antagonism, Anderson sees linkages and interdependence that undermine category boundaries. The ELC recruitment effort bound ordinary Egyptians from all corners of the Nile Valley to one another, to their local administrative officials, and to wartime decision makers in Cairo, in London, and on the front lines of the war. Seeing the relationship between power and resistance as dialectical and mutually constitutive, he shows how, in reaction to wartime mobilization efforts, workers and peasants developed new ways of interacting with state officials, while the Anglo-Egyptian state changed its labor recruitment practices in response to recruits, their families, and their communities in the countryside. Anderson's analysis of ELC recruitment concludes by providing important context for rural responses to the outbreak of revolt in 1919.