The 1841 firman granted Egypt hereditary rule but capped its peacetime army at 18,000

Evidence

True to his word, and riding a false sense of elation, he ordered his son not to withdraw from Syria or to pull back any forces from any other provinces. And for an entire year there was a tense deadlock of the “Eastern Question”: the Pasha would not withdraw his troops nor return the navy to the Sultan and, at the same time, the Sultan would not grant Mehmed Ali the much desired recognition of independence. In response to the Pasha’s intransigent position, Palmerston convened a Convention in London in July 1840, “The Convention for the Pacification of the Levant,” to which all the major European powers (this time, however, France declined to join the Concert of Europe) were invited; this gave the Pasha an ultimatum to withdraw from Syria, Adana, Crete and Arabia. When he still refused to comply, a British force landed in Beirut in September and forced Ibrahim to withdraw to Egypt. By December the Pasha had no choice but to accept the conditions laid down by the British-led European powers. Finally, on 1 June 1841, the Sultan issued a firman naming Mehmed Ali as governor of Egypt for life and granting his male descendants the hereditary rights of the governorship of Egypt. In addition, though, the firman stipulated that the Pasha reduce the size of his army to 18,000 troops in peace-time. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1564

Categorization

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s stated question about the birth of the modern Egyptian army and the performance of Ottoman pashas versus British lords — the military cap is a key constraint on the army the reader is tracking.