The Egyptian army resembled pre-nationalist European mercenary armies held together by pay and force.

Evidence

In that sense Ibrahim was faced with the usual problems confronting a commander of any of the European armies that preceded the rise of the modern nation-state: a mercenary officer corps that was on the “job market” seeking employment in the expanding armies of this or that prince or king and a disgruntled peasantry which had been conscripted by force but which had not yet been fooled into thinking that it was their own interest that they were fighting for. Force and lucrative pay were the only way to keep such armies intact. It follows that too little pay might push the officers to defect and seek another career opportunity elsewhere, and too much force in imposing discipline might incite the soldiers to open rebellion. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1333

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Resonates with the law-merchant/mercenary institutional analysis in the reader’s Milgrom and ‘Opting out of the Legal System’ highlights about reputation and wage incentives.

Related

• Pre-national-state armies relied on pay and coercion rather than patriotism to hold together (similarity 0.87)
• Egyptian army officers acted as mercenaries loyal to pay, not nationalists (similarity 0.86)
• Egyptian army pay disparity between soldiers and officers dwarfed even the Ottoman’s extreme gap (similarity 0.82)
• Egypt’s army in Mehmed Ali’s era was not a national force. (similarity 0.82)
• The officer corps served the Pasha’s dynasty rather than any Egyptian nation (similarity 0.80)
• Fellahin soldiers may have seen the army as a national force (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian soldiers served under Turkish officers in the reformed army (similarity 0.79)
• The Egyptian military appeared to outsiders as a world imposed onto an older society (similarity 0.79)
• Mehmed Ali’s army pioneered state-supplied logistics but pay chronically fell into arrears (similarity 0.79)
• The army forced peasants to fight for Mehmed Ali’s dynasty, not for Egypt. (similarity 0.79)
• Officers in Mehmed Ali’s army behaved as mercenaries loyal to pay, not national identity (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian infantry replaced individual valor with drill-based unitary action (similarity 0.79)
• The Egyptian army shifted from terror-based coercion to non-physical disciplinary methods (similarity 0.79)
• Shared grievance against Turkish military elites forged Egyptian national consciousness (similarity 0.79)
• Mehmed Ali’s 130,000-man army forced unprecedented state centralization in Egypt (similarity 0.79)