Mehmed Ali’s army failed to command its soldiers’ inner loyalties

Evidence

As tightly as the authorities wanted to control the activities of the soldiers, reality spoke differently. The training manual might have portrayed the soldier as a robot with every gesture, every glance meticulously controlled and vigilantly manipulated. Judging from the accounts of the battles, however, it appears that soldiers were full of the all-too-human emotions of love, hate, jealousy, pride and fear of death. And reading the accounts of their daily lives on the camps, it does appear that the authorities failed in capturing their bodies, let alone in imprinting on their minds that this was indeed their army. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1183

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s question about army performance: proposes the gap between disciplinary manuals and soldiers’ actual conduct as a structural limit on the force. Spans to Foucault-inflected readings of the ‘docile body’ ideal versus practice. — connects to: Mehmed Ali’s army embodied power and order more than his schools did — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 655
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a modernizing state could regulate gesture while failing to capture loyalty or imagination is a dense, transferable insight about institutions generally.