This narration will not start at the beginning, as he would have liked, with his childhood in Albania or with his arrival in Egypt, or at the end, as some nationalist historians would have preferred, highlighting his showdown with Great Britain, but in the middle of his long career as governor of Egypt, and precisely in the year AH 1236/AD 1820–1. This is the year that Mehmed Ali started to found a modern army in Egypt, an army which was based on conscription and which relied on the institutions of the modern state that he founded mainly to serve that army. It is this army, rather than Mehmed Ali's character or his person, that is the subject of this book, and it is this central institution that is studied below in order to analyze the nature of Egyptian society in the first half of the nineteenth century.

DEFINE: This clarifies what the book's subject actually is: not Muhammad Ali the man but the conscription-based army as a central institution. Builds on: "Muhammad Ali's army forged the modern Egyptian nation through novel control practices."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 70