Dr. Kyle Anderson from the History and Philosophy Department recently presented his research on the Egyptian Labor Corps at The First World War in The Middle East - Aftermath and Legacies international conference held at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium. This three-day conference, organized jointly by the In Flanders Fields Museum, the Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries, and Power in History: Centre for Political History of the University of Antwerp, was focused on the experiences and aftermath of the First World War in the Middle East.
Anderson's paper, "The Egyptian Labor Corps: Conscription, Migrant Labor, and Subaltern Resistance in the Global First World War," was part of the first panel of the conference.
"This research combines sources in three languages from archives in four countries to tell the little-known story of a vast army of laborers from Egypt who worked for the British empire during the First World War,” said Assistant Professor Anderson. “In my presentation, I focused on resistance to conscription in the Egyptian countryside and to the difficult conditions the laborers faced on the front lines. I argued that, while these acts of resistance should be acknowledged and incorporated into the broader historiography of the First World War and the Egyptian nationalist movement, we shouldn't take them as evidence that all laborers were violently coerced. Memoirs and petitions preserved in the British archives show that laborers had a more complicated relationship to the recruitment network, and many viewed their service as an opportunity for upward mobility."
Dr. Anderson’s paper will be published in an edited volume of the conference to be released in 2024. A member of the SUNY Old Westbury faculty since 2017, Dr. Anderson earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Modern Middle East History from Cornell University, and his B.A. in History & Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan. His first book, The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War, was published last year.