Wartime urgency forced abandoning French methods for pragmatic ship repair

Evidence

It was these time constraints that often forced the Pasha to deviate from the original models he was following in building his army. At the outbreak of the Syrian war, for example, Ibrahim was repeatedly urging him to send him ammunition and supplies promptly “so as not to suffer from the lack of ammunition as I used to do while in the Morea.” His father answered him by saying that he was doing everything possible to meet his requests. Ibrahim replied by saying that it seemed that Engineer Cerisy, who was in charge of the Arsenal in Alexandria, was very slow in preparing ships and sending them to Syria because he was insisting on doing things the “French way.” He proposed to hand over the task of preparing the ships to Hajj ‘Umar because we do not have time to organize our affairs along French lines. What we need now is to prepare our ships with cannons and other supplies. When we finish our business here, and His Highness becomes the [undisputed] lord of these areas, then we can prepare our ships along French and English lines. Only then will we have ample time to do this. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 917

Categorization

• XREF: Ibrahim’s insistence that Europe-style technique must wait until after victory echoes the tension between ideal procedure and improvised necessity.