Standardizing soldiers’ bodies enabled aggregating them into one battalion-level force

Evidence

The orders were, furthermore, directed at manipulating very specific movements and gestures of the soldiers. The bravery and strength of the soldiers are done away with, and instead a minute and very fine adjustment of the soldiers’ bodies was conducted aiming at aggregating the isolated movements of the soldiers into one, massive force, that of the battalion. To be able to add up movements necessitates, in the first place, some kind of standardization, for only similar things can be added up. The process of training the new soldiers, therefore, started with an attempt to regularize and standardize their appearance. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 735

Categorization

• XREF: The body-standardization-for-aggregation logic echoes Foucault’s disciplinary power analysis of armies, which the reader may connect to later chapters on the modern Egyptian army’s social role.