New-model Egyptian troops could not subsist on army pay and required state food rations

Evidence

Feeding the army was considerably more complicated than paying the troops, if only because of the logistical problems involved. The same discrepancy between the authorities’ blueprints and their actual implementation by the bureaucracy existed in the case of requisitioning food for the troops as in that of sending them their monthly pay. When the Pasha dispatched one of his earliest regiments to the Hijaz to quell the ‘Asīrī revolt in 1823 he soon realized that their monthly pay would not be enough for their subsistence and that his new troops had to be fed by their units and not be allowed to live off the land as the old troops used to do. “Although these new troops are well trained and follow known and fixed regulations,” he told his nephew, Ahmed Pasha Yeğen, who was then governor of Mecca, “their pay is only 15 piasters and hence they will not be able to subsist in the way the old infantry soldiers used to do. It has been decided, therefore, that their food rations be sent with the army and distributed to them daily.” However, in implementing these orders of the Pasha enormous problems were encountered. Sea captains ordered to deliver the army’s supplies of food and military equipment from the Egyptian ports of Suez and Quṣair to the Arabian port of Jedda complained of low pay and refused to undertake the job. The amount of food sent to Arabia, when it did arrive, was discovered to be insufficient and it was suspected that the sea captains might have been stealing from it. Since on being loaded in Quṣair, however, it was not weighed, it was impossible to ask them to make good the difference. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 936

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme in this book of the gap between Muhammad Ali’s central blueprints and actual bureaucratic implementation.