Legal codes and courts martial were flexible spectacles, not rigid rules

Evidence

The picture of the logical, consistent and predictable law offered in the last chapter need not be challenged when we compare it to these cases of how the law was actually applied and punishment orders implemented. Like other spectacles that the Pasha was fond of, legal codes, courts martial and predictable punishments were all part of a new way of imposing order and discipline on society. He seems to have believed that it was in the military that these modern methods of order and discipline could best be tried out. However, being a practical man he also understood that given his limited resources these new techniques of ordering and organizing society should function only as models to be approached as closely as possible and which could, and indeed should, be violated if need be. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 923

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the author conceives of Mehmed Ali’s modern legal and military institutions: performative models to be bent, not fixed systems.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive refinement of how top-down modernization actually gets implemented — institutions as flexible spectacles rather than enforceable rules is a useful lens.