Mass peasant conscription was adopted only after other options failed

Evidence

Looking at the army he created at the end of his reign, however, one thing stands out as significantly different from other Ottoman military reform attempts, namely, adopting something close to universal conscription whereby masses of peasants were drafted in the new army. Yet again, in this respect the Pasha was being more pragmatic than radical. By following the steps he took in coming to this decision it becomes clear that he did not originally contemplate conscripting the fellahin of Egypt when he was thinking of founding his new army; rather he was pushed to taking this bold step only after he had run out of other alternatives. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 429

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in how and why the Egyptian army was built.

Related

• Universal conscription of Egyptian peasants was adopted reluctantly after other options failed (similarity 0.95)
• Universal conscription of Egyptian peasants was a reluctant last resort, not a plan. (similarity 0.92)
• Mehmed Ali had exhausted alternatives before conscripting Egyptian peasants wholesale (similarity 0.88)
• Conscription arose only after Albanian insubordination and failed Sudanese recruitment (similarity 0.84)
• Conscription gave the Egyptian state power over peasants that Ottoman and Mamluk rulers lacked (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian peasants universally hated conscription into Mehmed Ali’s army (similarity 0.84)
• Egyptian peasants strongly resisted conscription into the modern army (similarity 0.83)
• Egyptian conscription began as a limited, three-year substitution pool, not mass mobilization. (similarity 0.82)
• Albanian resistance and Sudanese failures forced conscription on Mehmed Ali (similarity 0.82)
• Fear of removal drove Mehmed Ali to build a conscript army in 1820-21. (similarity 0.82)
• Mehmed Ali’s conscript army drove the creation of the modern Egyptian state (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian peasants were first mass-conscripted into a standing army only in 1822. (similarity 0.82)
• Egyptian peasants strongly resisted conscription into Mehmed Ali’s army. (similarity 0.82)
• Conscript soldiers resisted the Pasha’s project and undermined his army’s power (similarity 0.81)
• Egypt’s modern army was founded through conscription in 1820–21 (similarity 0.81)