Sourcing the Suez Canal: Building a Four-Document DBQ
The tenth-grade team at a Title I high school is writing a 25-minute document-based question for a unit on nineteenth-century imperialism. The prompt: To what extent did the Suez Canal depend on coerced Egyptian labor? Four documents are on the table: (A) an 1869 London Times editorial celebrating the canal as a triumph of engineering; (B) a page from the canal company's labor register listing 1.2 million corvée labor assignments between 1861 and 1864, with monthly totals; (C) a 1930s memoir by an Egyptian village headman describing recruitment; (D) an 1867 French engineer's report counting 60 dredgers and steam excavators on the southern segment. During the pilot, one student argued that D refutes B: if machines did the work, the labor figures must be exaggerated. Another wanted to cite A for working conditions. The team has one department meeting to finalize the document set and the questions.
1. Which document should anchor a claim about coerced labor, and what limits must students attach to it?
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Document B. Three criteria drive the choice. Provenance: the register was produced by the canal company in the ordinary course of business, for billing and accounting, not for persuasion - the classic profile of a record whose bias is systemic rather than rhetorical. Proximity: it is contemporaneous with the 1861–64 corvée, unlike C, a memoir recorded seven decades later and shaped by hindsight. Form: it is aggregate and serial, so students can see scale and seasonality that a single testimony cannot show.
The limits matter just as much. The unit of count is assignments, not persons; the same laborer recurs across months. The register records the administrative footprint of coercion, not its human cost - there are no columns for deaths, desertion, or wages paid in kind. And it cannot by itself show that laborers went unwillingly; that requires the corvée decrees and C's account. B establishes scale; coercion needs one more document.
2. How should the team handle the apparent contradiction between documents B and D?
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Treat it as a measurement disagreement before calling it a contradiction. The two documents do not count the same thing: B counts labor assignments; D counts machines on one segment in one year. In 1860s excavation, dredgers and men were complements, not substitutes. Machines lifted and moved spoil, but hauling, coal, fresh water, and the freshwater canal to Ismailia consumed enormous hand labor, and mechanization raised total excavation capacity - which could raise labor demand rather than lower it. Dates matter too: B's window, 1861–64, sits before the heaviest machine deployment D describes in 1867.
Students should run a checklist: what is the unit, the date, the geography, the quantity measured. Then ask what evidence would resolve the question - a payroll series spanning both periods, or the company engineer's labor-requirement estimates. The pedagogical payoff is that the contradiction is manufactured by the reader's assumption, not found in the sources.
3. Write one sourcing question that goes beyond who wrote it, and explain why it is stronger.
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Question: The company compiled this register to bill the Egyptian government for labor supplied under the corvée. How does that purpose shape what is counted, and what would necessarily be missing from the page?
It is stronger because a name-and-date question produces recall, while a purpose question produces inference. Students must reason from function to content: a billing document itemizes assignments and rates, so it is likely reliable about quantity and necessarily silent about suffering. That silence becomes teachable - ask what a document designed for a different purpose (a consular report, a hospital register, a village tax roll) would have recorded instead, and what corroboration each would supply.
The question also sets up exactly the move the standards ask for: explaining how a source's purpose and audience limit the claims it can support, rather than rating sources as trustworthy or untrustworthy in the abstract.