For most historians, the Alexandria arsenal was the pride and joy of Mehemet Ali Pasha – the ruler of the Ottoman province of Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century. ‘Abd al-Karim (1938) describes it as one of the first educational institutions that graduated several woodwork artificers which helped the pasha build his armada. For Barakat (1934), the Alexandria arsenal was the quintessential institution that allowed Mehemet ‘Ali’s designs for independence to materialize. Built in 1829 – after the battle of Navarino in 1827 – it was the blood, toil and sweat of the arsenal workers that allowed it to rebuild its fleet for the two ensuing wars against the Ottoman Sultan in 1831 and 1839 (Houghton, 2019; Fahmy, 1997, Peters, 2002). But what if we looked at this institution not as an industrial and national one, and instead queried it as an outright penitentiary? We know from Foucault (1975) that the French Minister of the Navy and Colonies ran the bagnards of Toulon and Marseille. Moreover, Jeremy Bentham also advocated for abolishing transport overseas to colonies as a penal punishment, making the genealogy of the prison inextricably tied to the navy and the colonies. Thus, if convict labor powered the French Royal Navy in the metropole, how then did the Alexandria arsenal differ or match its French metropolitan version which also served as a recruiting ground for Naval architects that worked at the Alexandria arsenal? By looking at the Alexandria arsenal as more than a prison, this paper problematizes early Egyptian historiography and the influence of modernization theory. It does so by looking at the political prisoners of the 1839-40 war between Mehemet Ali and the Sultan who were housed at the arsenal. By presenting a history of the early Mehemet Ali years, one that centers round the arsenal and which is from the point of view of these convicts, several different insights into Ottoman and Egyptian legal and political history can be gleaned. Specifically, this paper argues that what many described as the first birth pangs of Egyptian modernization and industrialization took place in the Alexandria arsenal through French expertise and was powered by convict labor. The arsenal was not a site of reforming prisoners as much as it was a naval factory that surveilled its convicts.