Data

Egyptian Nineteenth Century Population Census Manuscripts

The Egyptian individual- level population census records from 1848 and 1868 are two of the earliest population censuses from any non-Western country. They include information on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables on all segments of the population including females, children, and slaves. They are preserved in over 7,000 hand-written registers at the National Archives of Egypt (NAE).

First page from register of Village of “Bigirim wa Kafr al-Sheikh Mansour,” Al-Gharbiya Province, Egypt, 1847. Preserved at the National Archives of Egypt.

Completed Data Collection Projects

  • Digitizing two nationally representative samples of the 1848 and 1868 census manuscripts (80,000 observations each). The details of the digitization project are available here. The data were publicly disseminated on IPUMS International in March 2022. Users who wish to download and use the datasets in their research and requested to cite:

Saleh, Mohamed (2013). A Pre-Colonial Population Brought to Light: Digitization of the Nineteenth Century Egyptian Censuses. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 46 (1): 5-18. DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2012.678807.

  • Coding the occupational titles following Historical International Classification of Occupations (HISCO) and creating the Social Status Index (SSI). Documentation is available in the data appendix here. This coding has been disseminated on IPUMS International together with the datasets.

  • Creating two oversamples of non-Muslims in 1848 and 1868 Cairo. The oversampling rate is 25%. Each oversample is about 4,000 observations. These samples were used in multiple papers of mine: Saleh (2015), Lévêque and Saleh (2018), Saleh (2018), Artunç and Saleh (2021).

  • Geocoding of the 1848 and 1868 census samples in Cairo and Alexandria at the street-level. This geocoding was used in Lévêque and Saleh (2018) and Artunç and Saleh (2021).

  • Digitizing the public amenities of Cairo and Alexandria according to the description of Ali Pasha Mubarak in 1888.

  • Digitizing the list of Members of Parliament (MPs) of Egypt from 1824 to 2020 from secondary (published) sources.

Data Collection Projects in Progress

  • Digitizing 100% samples of the 1848 and 1868 Egyptian census records and Linking the individual records across the two censuses 1848 and 1868.

  • Inferring the attitudes of MPs in parliament from the parliamentary minutes in 1884-1895 and in 1924-1952 using Machine Learning.