Egypt’s modern army was founded through conscription in 1820–21

Evidence

Only after warning the reader by introducing the “old spider in his den” and seeing him manipulating his audience can one feel safe in stepping back to narrate Mehmed Ali’s story and to place him in a wider historical context. This narration will not start at the beginning, as he would have liked, with his childhood in Albania or with his arrival in Egypt, or at the end, as some nationalist historians would have preferred, highlighting his showdown with Great Britain, but in the middle of his long career as governor of Egypt, and precisely in the year AH 1236/AD 1820–1. This is the year that Mehmed Ali started to found a modern army in Egypt, an army which was based on conscription and which relied on the institutions of the modern state that he founded mainly to serve that army. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 70

Categorization

• SEED: The conscription-based army as the engine of Egyptian modernization is a strong angle for an essay on how military needs drove state-building.