Provincial officials faced impossible quotas that would have caused famine if fulfilled.

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. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 943

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s interest in how the Ottoman/Egyptian bureaucratic machine actually functioned — the gap between orders from the top and extraction capacity on the ground.