An Unlimited Supply of Labor? Counting Workers and Planning Development in Mid-Twentieth-Century Egypt (1939–1960)

Abstract In the 1940s and 1950s, the concepts of surplus labor, disguised unemployment, and underemployment emerged as key tools for thinking about economic development in the emerging “Third World.” This article examines how these concepts were developed and debated in Egypt, a country that was at the forefront of postcolonial planning efforts internationally. To this end, the article examines the statistical construction of the “labor problem” and the way it shaped competing visions of economic development among national, colonial, and international actors. Using a variety of sources—including Egyptian government archives, documents from the British Foreign Office, and the International Labour Organization—the article contributes to the global history of development and quantification, and contributes to the scholarship on Nasserism in Egypt.