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A Pre-Colonial Population Brought to Light: Digitization of the Nineteenth Century Egyptian Censuses

2013; Routledge; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01615440.2012.678807

1940-1906

Mohamed Saleh,

Islamic Finance and Banking Studies

Abstract Knowledge of pre-colonial Middle Eastern populations has been limited by the lack of data. The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian censuses provide two snapshots of the Egyptian population in its early attempts to make the transition into a modern society. These censuses are perhaps the earliest in the Middle East and among the earliest in any non-Western country to include individual-level information on all segments of the population, including females, children, and slaves, on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. This article describes the digitization of two nationally representative samples of the 1848 and 1868 censuses from the original manuscripts at the National Archives of Egypt. It then introduces an application of the samples in Egyptian economic history. Keywords: Egypt historical censushistorical demographyMuhammad AliMiddle Eastern economic historystate industrialization Acknowledgments I sincerely thank Dora Costa and Leah Boustan for their great support and advice. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support for the project that I received from IPUMS, Economic History Association, and University of Southern California. I also gratefully acknowledge the logistic support of the administration of the National Archives of Egypt (Saber Arab, Rifaat Hilal, and Emad Hilal), which was crucial to undertake the project. I thank Julie Iskander for the IT guidance and all the members of the data entry team for their great work, without which the project would not have come to fruition. I sincerely thank Jeffrey Nugent, Ragui Assaad, Naomi Lamoreaux, Steven Ruggles, Robert McCaa, Roger Owen, Khaled Fahmy, Kenneth Cuno, Terry Walz, Dimitris Pipinis, and the participants at the UCLA Economic History Proseminar, the International Commission of Historical Demography Conference 2010, and the Population Association of America 2011 for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are mine. Notes 1. Kenneth M. Cuno and Michael J. Reimer (Citation1997), 213. 2. Cuno and Reimer (Citation1997), 215. 3. According to Kemal H. Karpat (Citation1978), the first Ottoman census took place in certain parts of the empire in 1831–8, but was an enumeration of households rather than individuals. The second census took place in 1844 and was an enumeration of the adult male population. Finally, the third census (1866–73) was limited to the Danube province and was also an enumeration of adult males. In fact, the first census in the Ottoman Empire that contained an enumeration of females took place in 1881/82–1893 (Karpat Citation1978). 4. There are a number of census registers at the NAE that date back to 1879–82. These registers include individual-level census records as well as preliminary tabulations and are probably remains of the mostly destroyed microdata of the 1882 census. 5. This applies to Cairo and Alexandria. The city of Rosetta is treated as one single district and is hence directly divided into urban quarters. Besides, there are two single-city provinces that have one register each: Al-Arish (in Sinai Peninsula) and Al-Qusayr (on the Red Sea coast). 6. See Appendix A for two scanned pages of the registers. 7. I found a government order from 1847, published in Amin Sami (Citation1928, II: 547–52), on naming Cairo's streets and numbering its dwellings. The order might have been related to the then-ongoing census operations. 8. To control peasants' flight, starting from 1829, immigration from one village to another required government permission. People were "illegally" deserting their villages in order to avoid taxation, military conscription, and corvée in public works (Cuno Citation1992, 121–4; K. Fahmy Citation1998, 99–103). 9. In large provincial towns, the census records are classified by urban quarter and street name, and are hence similar to the recording in urban provinces. 10. For Arab tribes, the recording starts with the household of the headman of the tribe. 11. I found about 3,700 distinct occupational titles in each census. The titles "scribe" and "scribe at the customs department" are counted as distinct. 12. In the 1868 census, the place of origin of the child is often different from the father, thus suggesting that the concept of this variable was getting closer to the "place of birth." 13. Occupation for males who are less than 6 years old is often left blank or is recorded as "unemployed." The words "child" and "infant" are also often recorded. 14. The "not enumerated" note is either mentioned explicitly or by assigning a "zero" to the individual, indicating that he/she is not added to the enumeration count of the page. A non-enumerated person has only his/her name recorded (and occupational title for military personnel and students in military schools). 15. According to the census order (1847) (Cuno and Reimer Citation1997, 213–6), each quarter's headman had to send to the Prefect a list of the notables in his urban quarter. The Prefect then was to request counts of males and females in the household from the household head, which were to be recorded in the notables' register. This way, the census takers and the quarters' headmen in charge of the census operations could not intervene in the enumeration of the notables or access their households. Similarly, the Khedivial Diwan was responsible for collecting information on foreigners from the consulates. 16. Under-enumeration could mean that some individuals were indeed not enumerated during the census operations, or that they were enumerated but their records were lost afterwards. In the absence of secondary information, there is no way to distinguish between the two possibilities and I thus treat them as one. 17. Compared to the 1882 census' list of cities, Damietta, Suez, and Al-Qusayr (in 1868) are entirely missing. Enumerated cities are Cairo, Alexandria, Rosetta, Al-Arish, and Al-Qusayr (in 1848). 18. This is based on two assumptions: (i) that the boundaries between provinces did not change between 1848 (or 1868) and 1882, and (ii) that the population distribution across provinces in 1848 (or 1868) remained the same in 1882. The first assumption is justified since only 2.5 percent of all geographic units in 1848 (less than 1 percent in 1868) belonged to a different province in 1882. The second assumption is perhaps reasonable across rural provinces, but might be less so between urban and rural provinces with presumably an increasing population share of urban provinces over time. 19. A priori information on the population size of the entire country in 1848 (and 1868) is needed here. For 1848, I used the figure of 4,476,439 (Alleaume and Fargues Citation1998). I then assumed a constant annual growth rate between 1848 and 1882 in order to estimate the population size in 1868. 20. I obtained the enumerated population of each province in the 1848 census by summing up the enumeration counts of all its census registers. Logistic problems, however, did not allow me to do the same for the 1868 census. Instead, I estimated the enumerated population of each province in that year using the total number of pages (adjusted for blank pages and tabulations) and the average number of individuals recorded per page in the sample taken from that province. 21. Besides the entirely missing provinces, I excluded the registers of Al-Minya and Girga in 1868. However, I decided to include Al-Sharqiya in 1868 although only 1 percent of its villages were enumerated because it had 20 registers, which is a relatively large number. 22. This assumes that the register(s) of the earlier year(s) enumerate exactly the same population as the latest year, and that if there is more than one register from the latest year, they must enumerate different segments of the population. 23. I discovered the existence of duplicate registers for a few units after their inclusion in the sampling frame of the 1848 census, and hence these units had higher chances of selection. To correct for this, I adjusted the sampling weights of individuals in these units by multiplying their original weights (subsection 3.3) by the reciprocal of the number of duplicates that were included in the sampling frame. 24. The interval for a given province is calculated based on the targeted sample size, the total number of pages of the registers of the province, and the average number of individual records per page. 25. Specifically, every household that starts in the page is included in the sample. I defined the starting point of a household as the line including the information of the first member in the household. Hence, if a household starts in a previous page and continues on the sampled page it is not included in the sample. But, if a household starts on the sample page and continues in the following page it is included in its entirety. This ensures that all households have an equal chance of appearing in the sample regardless of their size. 26. The IPUMS 1850 U.S. census sample applies individual-level sampling to a group quarter instead of recording it in its entirety as a single household. The drawback of my approach is the resulting increase in the standard error because observations in a group quarter are more likely to be correlated. Nevertheless, the very small number of group quarters that I found in the census registers mitigates such concerns. 27. I am grateful to Ragui Assaad for this suggestion. 28. This may have been the case because of the nature of modern transportation projects in 1868 such as railways, telegraph, and steam navigation, which required more administrative/clerical jobs than Muhammad Ali's manufactories in 1848.