Mehmed Ali’s bureaucracy was erratic, corrupt-fearing, and internally inefficient

Evidence

These might have been silly excuses for Ibrahim; they were hardly so for the hundreds and thousands of scribes and bureaucrats who had to fulfill these orders. Their daily routine was spent attempting to meet some impossible targets of the Pasha, his son or some senior official. A provincial governor, for example, was ordered to collect 350 qintārs111 of ghee from his province. He was only able to collect 100 qintārs and said in his letter to the Pasha that asking more from the fellahin would result in widespread famine and wholesale absconding. Mehmed Ali did not accept such excuses and merely repeated his order to the official. Moreover, these officials often had to fulfill some order by the Pasha only to discover that it was wrongly issued in the first place: a zero was once missed in an order for a quantity of coal supplied to the army and, of course, the Pasha had to immediately issue another order rectifying his first one. Even if the targets were reasonable and consistent, this did not mean that the orders were executed without difficulties. A missing order would cause unnecessary delays, but the officials in charge would still hesitate to act without documents lest they be accused of corruption. Efficient as the postal system appears to have been, keeping the Pasha in touch with his troops in Syria or the Hijaz hundreds of miles away, different government departments in Cairo would sometimes find difficulty in communicating with each other, even though they might have been located across the same street in Cairo; and “missing letters” were always referred to for not fulfilling orders. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 943

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how the supposedly all-powerful Pasha actually ran the army day-to-day versus the idealized accounts.