During the First World War (1914-1918), the British empire enlisted roughly half a million young men into the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC). This paper examines representations of the ELC as “slavery” (‘ibudiyya) or “kidnapping” (khaṭaf) and ELC workers as “Black slaves” (zanūj) in the diaries, memoirs, official communications, and books of nationalist intellectuals and politicians during the 1919 revolution. I argue that the mobilizing force of such representations depended on challenging British rulers for both their white supremacy and their mischaracterization of Egyptian racial identity as “people of colour.” Pioneering research projects by Kenneth Cuno, Terrance Walz, Emad Ahmed Helal, and Eve Troutt Powell have traced the development of popular associations between Black Africans and servile status even after 1877, when the slave trade was officially abolished in Egypt. During the war, urban educated nationalists who saw Egyptian fallāḥīn led away from their fields in handcuffs and tied to each other by thick rope perceived themselves to be on one side of what W. E. B. DuBois called the global color line, and realized that the British had racialized them alongside Black Africans. In response, nationalist politicians like Sa‘d Zaghlul and public intellectuals like Salama Musa centered peasants as the true symbols of national authenticity, doing racial boundary work to differentiate themselves as rural-to-urban middle-class strivers who were heirs to an ancient “civilization,” superior to Black people, and not deserving of imperial subordination. Zaghlul’s rural roots were crucial to constructing support for the 1919 revolution in part because of the prominence of the fallāḥ in Egyptian racial nationalism.