The campaign of massive public works projects, initiated by Meḥmed (Muḥammad) ‘Alī with the construction of the Maḥmūdiyya Canal (1827), was continued throughout the long nineteenth century with projects like the construction of the Suez Canal (1869) and the First High Dam at Aswan (1902). Each step along the way, young men from the Egyptian countryside were recruited via contracting and corvée to do the actual work of construction. Based on the insights of critical geography, this paper argues that these seemingly discrete projects were actually part of the long-term process of “the production of logistical space” in Egypt. This paper analyzes this process in an effort to learn more about the functioning of the British colonial state in Egypt and the nature of subaltern agency, through a close study of the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Egyptians—many of them illiterate workers and peasants from the countryside—to serve as logistical laborers in the Great War (1914-1918). It investigates the following dimensions of this little-known episode in the history of Egypt: First, how were global trends and influences from throughout the British Empire brought to bear on the decision making processes of the British colonial state in Egypt? Second, how did the experience of (transnational) migration influence the formation of political subjectivity for workers, peasants, and their families? And finally, how can we shift the scale of our analysis of the social history of Egypt during this period to take into account these integrated, transnational fields in which rural Egyptians were operating? In answering these questions, this paper represents an effort to clarify two important issues that have been muddied by historiographical debates. First, it attempts to recoup a place for the military dimensions of colonialism and the mutual dependence of military and commercial personnel and ideologies in British colonial governmentality. Second, it builds on efforts to transcend the epistemological impasse facing studies of subaltern agency, which are alternately trapped between romanticizing the totalitarian state and the resisting subject, by examining the transterritorial politicization of rural spaces in the course of labor recruitment. This paper argues that looking at the relationship between the production of logistical space and formations of political subjectivity in rural Egypt provides us with an opportunity to revisit and reinterpret British colonialism, subaltern consciousness, and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919.