In 1820 Muhammad Ali sent an army under his son Ismail into Sudan, explicitly to secure gold and slaves for a new conscript army; Sennar and Kordofan were taken, Khartoum founded, and captives were marched north, most of whom died of dysentery and other diseases in the camps before they could be trained. When the resistance leader Nimr of Shendi killed Ismail in 1822, the Daftardar's reprisal campaign devastated the Ja'aliyyin districts. Unable to fill the ranks with Sudanese, the state turned to conscripting Egyptian peasants, who fled villages, mutilated themselves and hid to avoid the levy, and to the corvee, which assembled vast unpaid work gangs for the Mahmudiyya canal, the barrages and the cotton estates; European consuls and Egyptian chroniclers report very high mortality on the canal works. Historiography is divided between accounts that treat the reign as the foundation of a modern state and those that emphasise the coercion on which it rested. Al-Jabarti and later Egyptian historians recorded both.
Muhammad Ali's Egyptian state invaded Sudan for slaves and gold, conscripted Egyptian peasants by force and requisitioned mass corvee labour
Egypt's first modern census, taken in 1846-48, counted about 4.5 million people, and the French expedition's earlier estimates and Daniel Panzac's demographic work suggest a similar order for the 1820s. Conscription took perhaps 250,000-300,000 peasants into the army over the period, corvée levies for the Mahmudiyya canal and other works ran to hundreds of thousands with heavy mortality, and the Sudan campaigns seized tens of thousands of captives from beyond Egypt's own population.
The range aggregates campaign deaths in Sudan, mortality among enslaved recruits at Aswan (contemporaries describe the great majority of about 20,000 dying), and corvee deaths on the canals, for which contemporary European estimates run as high as 100,000 and Egyptian official accounts far lower. None rests on systematic records.
Egyptian chronicles including al-Jabarti, European consular correspondence and later Sudanese accounts describe the slave levies, the Shendi reprisals and mortality in the corvee.
Egypt, Sudan