Egypt’s military machine generated surveillance, medicine, and bureaucracy for all society

Evidence

For example, as we have seen, effective surveillance and policing systems that would enable the military authorities to track down and catch deserters were generalized throughout the country to establish a truly controlled society where individuals and their movements were monitored. In addition, the army’s need to screen the conscripts medically, to treat them for disease, and to maintain a healthy environment in the crowded camps and barracks provided the impetus to found a medical school, to institute a country-wide vaccination program, and to make the bodies of the soldiers (and eventually of civilians as well) available to the self-assured medical gaze. Finally, the requirement that the soldiers should not live off the lands they marched through or ended up occupying, and that their food, clothes and equipment should be sent from central depots in Egypt to whichever war front they happened to be stationed at, meant that an efficient administrative system was needed that would ease the functioning of the army, and would also provide a model for the civilian bureaucracy to copy. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1698

Categorization

• XREF: This instantiation of Mitchell’s ‘colonizing’ thesis connects to Foucault’s disciplinary power and to how armies drive state modernization; echoes the reader’s interest in the modern Egyptian army’s birth.