Modern Egyptian nationhood emerged from administrative practices, not nationalism or conquest.

Evidence

This book, however, has also argued that “Egypt,” as referring to a nation-state, was not simply a result of a semantic shift brought about by the dominant discourse of nationalism. Neither was the birth of the Egyptian nation in the nineteenth century a result only of the modern state’s ability to monopolize the means of violence by reorganizing the administrative and military apparatuses so that it could extend its control over wider areas in a permanent manner. The Egyptian nation was brought into being as a result of a multiplicity of practices and discourses that transformed the administration in Cairo from being interested mainly in taxation and in maintaining law and order to a government devising modern techniques of control and using more effective and more subtle ways of manipulating its population. As we have seen throughout this book by concentrating on the Pasha’s army, examples of such novel practices were the issuing of tezkeres which functioned as identity cards that people had to carry all the time in order for the authorities to be able to catch deserters; regularly checking the bodies of conscripts for signs of diseases that were now treated in newly constructed hospitals; subjecting the bodies of the soldiers to a strict regime whereby all their movements were supposed to be subject to control and surveillance. In the wider society similar practices were instituted that together turned Egypt from a province within the Ottoman Empire into a modern nation-state. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1692

Categorization

• XREF: This is a Foucauldian/Benedict Anderson-style argument about nation formation through bureaucratic and disciplinary practice rather than ideology or war — connects to ‘imagined communities’ literature and the broader ‘state effect’ scholarship.
• SEED: Angle: the tezkere identity-card system as proto-surveillance state, an early identification regime born from desertion-control rather than ideological nation-building.