Conscription warfare can forge national consciousness among a people

Evidence

First, and as argued in nationalist historiography, this army offered the rural population as well as the townspeople of Egypt the opportunity to bear arms and presumably gave them the right to defend their country for the first time in centuries, probably in millennia, and thus allows one to check the validity of the nationalist assumption that by doing so it helped nationalistic feelings to spread among the Egyptians during the first half of the nineteenth century. It has been argued that wars are essential for the creation of the nation, and that “to make the citizen a soldier is to give him a sense of duty to the country and the consciousness of doing it which, if spread through the whole population, will convert it into … a nation.” — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how states manufacture national identity via mobilizing populations, echoing the social-capital and trust-institution books in the library. — connects to: Attention captured by advertising can be converted into military service — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 147; Selfhood and national unity are forged through conflict with a common foe — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1194; National consciousness deepened through schooling, press, railroads, and war. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 2038