Data

I. Egyptian Nineteenth-Century Population Census Manuscripts

The Egyptian individual-level population census records from 1848 and 1868 are two of the earliest individual-level population censuses from any non-Western country, and the earliest in the Middle East and North Africa, to enumerate all segments of the population including females, children, and slaves. They include information on a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. 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.

The 1848 and 1868 Egyptian Population Census Samples on IPUMS-International:

I digitized two nationally representative samples of the 1848 and 1868 census manuscripts (80,000 observations each). The details of the digitization project are available here.
I manually coded the occupational titles following Historical International Classification of Occupations (HISCO) and created the Social Status Index (SSI). Documentation is available in the data appendix here.
I publicly disseminated the 1848 and 1868 census samples including the HISCO codes of occupations on IPUMS International in March 2021.
Users who wish to download and use the samples in their research are 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.

I also digitized two over-samples 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), Kumon and Saleh (2023), and Artunç and Saleh (2023).

II. Geocoding the 1848 and 1868 Egyptian Population Census Samples:

I geocoded of the 1848 and 1868 census samples at the street level in Cairo and Alexandria, and at the subdistrict level in rural provinces. This geocoding is documented in Lévêque and Saleh (2018) and Artunç and Saleh (2023).

III. Egyptian Members of Parliament 1824-2020

Digitizing the list of Members of Parliament (MPs) of Egypt from 1824 to 2020 from secondary (published) sources. This dataset was used in multiple papers of mine: Artunç and Saleh (2025) "Connected National Capital", Hartnett and Saleh (2025) "The Other First Wave", and Hartnett and Saleh (2025) "Precolonial Elites".
Digitizing the Egyptian parliamentary minutes in 1866-1882. These minutes were used in Hartnett and Saleh (2025). "The Other First Wave: Elite Conflict and Democratization in Agrarian Autocracies." CEPR Discussion Paper 20260.
Digitizing the Egyptian parliamentary minutes in 1924-1952 (coming soon!).

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