Conscript resistance showed class aversion to officers, not love of homeland.

Evidence

More concretely, this book attempts to argue that the nation was brought into being through the agency of a multiplicity of “national” institutions, the army being the prime example of them, which together worked to homogenize the nation, to coerce and discipline its citizens, and to silence and exclude its minorities, its “deviants” and its “outcasts.” As such, and concentrating on the national institution, the army, this book takes acts of resistance (to conscription and to other policies of the various national institutions) not as showing their true and umbilical attachment to their lands, but as testifying to the conscripts’ aversion to their officers’ elitist policies and as showing their resistance to having their bodies used for causes that were not theirs. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 94

Categorization

• QUESTION: This rereading of resistance as class- rather than proto-national offers a testable lens on desertion records later in the book.