A Pre-Modern Middle-Eastern Population Brought to Light: Digitization of the 1848 and 1868 Egyptian Individual-Level Census Records

Mohamed Saleh, University of Southern California

The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian individual-level census records, that were conducted under Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-1848) and Khedive Ismail (1863-1879) respectively, provide two detailed snapshots of the Egyptian population in its early attempts to make the transition into a modernized society and perhaps represent the earliest “modern” censuses in the Middle East. The census records provide a unique source of information for all segments of society (including females, children, and slaves) on a wide range of variables such as gender, age, household relationships, type and legal status of dwelling, location, occupation, school enrollment, nationality, ethnicity, religion, place of origin, and infirmities. This paper describes the digitization project of a 1% sample of the individual records in each census that I undertook at the National Archives of Egypt as part of my PhD dissertation. The paper describes the census registers, the enumeration methodology, the sampling strategy, and the descriptive statistics.