Please show zeal in carrying out our wishes in the capital matter.Muhammad Ali, the Khedive of Egypt, wanted a large and steady supply of slaves to train into a modern army to deploy in other parts of his empire to further his grand territorial ambitions.

[1][9] After the conquest, Muhammad Ali constantly urged his commanders in Sudan to collect and send as many slaves as they could to the training camps at Aswan.

[11] Although they posed no immediate threat, it was not uncommon for a defeated faction in Egyptian power struggles to flee upstream, waiting for the opportunity to descend once more on Cairo when circumstances changed in their favour.

[18][page needed] As the army advanced, they received the submission of the kashif of Lower Nubia, which was only nominally subject to Ottoman rule, and when they passed the second cataract, the ruler of Say likewise submitted, although he later rebelled and was killed in the fighting.

[19] At the van of the Shayqiyya forces was a young girl, Mihera Bint Abboud, on a richly decorated camel, who gave the signal to attack.

This may have been a tradition deriving from the legendary exploits of the seventeenth-century woman warrior Azila, famous for her martial skills and for being in the thick of every fight.

As the Shaigiya had lost much of their cavalry, they now conscripted peasant infantry who were blessed by holy men who covered them in dust, telling them it would protect them against bullets.

The various local rulers who had been holding out against the Egyptians all now made terms with them; the remaining Shaigiya, whose cavalry Ismail enlisted into his forces, and the Ja'alin under Mek Nimr of Shendi.

Only nine small Egyptian boats had been able to pass the Third Cataract, the remainder were trapped upstream as the annual flooding ended and the water level dropped.

The forces assembled at Al Dabbah where they were joined by supporting units of the Kababish tribe who escorted them southwest across the Bayuda Desert into northern Kordofan.

Egyptian rule in North Kordofan was now secure, but the Defterday Bey lacked the forces to make a direct assault either on the Nuba mountains or on Darfur itself.

A rudimentary military administration was established, under four governors (ma'mūr); Ali-din Agha At Dongola, whose role was to protect the supply lines to Egypt and who was wise enough to impose taxes at a low enough level to avoid revolt; Mahu Bey Urfali (of Kurdish origin) at Berber, who followed his example and maintained a watch on Shendi and the other towns north of the Jazirah; Ismail himself at Sennar, and the Defterdar Bey in Kordofan.

Ismail's secretary Muhammad Said, assisted by Coptic official, Hannah Tawīl, and the former Sennar minister the Arbab Dafa'Allah, devised a system whereby taxes were to be paid at a rate of fifteen dollars per slave, ten per cow and five per sheep or donkey.

[35] Other Ja'ali leaders intervened to defuse the confrontation, but, unwisely, Ismail then spent the night in a house on the opposite side of the Nile to his forces.

[36] As news of the revolt in Shendi spread, Egyptian garrisons in Karari, Halfaya, Khartoum, Al-Aylafun and Al-Kamlin had to be evacuated and retreated to general quarters at Wad Madani.

The revolt was confined primarily to the Ja'alin under Mek Nimr and to some elements in Sennar under the Arbab Dafa'Allah and the Hamaj regent Hasan wad Rajab.

Osman Bey brought with him the first contingent of soldiers captured in Sudan and trained in modern military discipline in Egypt, known as the jihadiyya, with whom he maintained strict order in the country.

[39] To prepare for the training of his Sudanese slave army, Muhammad Ali sent a corps of Mamluks to Aswan where, in 1820, he had new barracks built to house them.

The head of the military academy at Aswan was a French officer who had served under Napoleon, Colonel Octave-Joseph Anthelme Sève, who became a Muslim and is known in Egyptian history as Sulayman Pasha al-Faransawi.

[42] Muhammad Ali's Turkish and Albanian troops that partook in the Sudan campaign were not used to weather conditions of the area and attained fevers and dysentery while there with tensions emerging and demands to return to Egypt.

[43] In addition the difficulties of capturing and raising an army from Sudanese male slaves during the campaign were reasons that led Muhammad Ali towards eventually recruiting local Egyptians for his armed forces.

[43] Despite the overall failure to create slave armies in Egypt at any great scale, the use of Sudanese in agriculture did become fairly common under Muhammad Ali and his successors.

Agricultural slavery was virtually unknown in Egypt at this time, but the rapid expansion of extensive farming under Muhammad Ali and later, the global surge in the price of cotton caused by the American Civil War, were factors creating conditions favourable to the deployment of slave labour.