Egyptian state power grew through the army’s monopoly of violence like European nation-states

Evidence

Third, the army, being the institution of power par excellence, is a suitable institution for observing the process of state formation in nineteenth-century Egypt. Similar to the role played by eighteenth-century armies in the creation of the rising European nation-states, Mehmed Ali’s army could be said to be “one of the instruments with which [the state’s] political power [was] originally created and made permanent.” European nation-states came into being not only through the spread of nationalist feelings and sentiments but also through the states’ monopoly of means of violence and their amassing of administrative and military measures that enabled them to extend their authority and control over remote regions in a permanent and stable manner. Studying Mehmed Ali’s army offers a good opportunity to verify whether a similar process could be detected in the Egyptian case, and if the growing power of the Egyptian state in the first half of the nineteenth century could be attributed to its effective monopoly of means of violence. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 119