Free and slave populations in four Egyptian villages for 1847–48 and 1868

Source: Egyptian National Archives, census registers (dafatir taʿdad al-sukkan) for the villages of Damas in 1848 and 1868, Ikhtab in 1848 and 1868, Sandub in April 1847 and 1868, and Zafar in 1848 and 1868.

By all accounts, the population of enslaved Africans in Egypt increased in the 19th century compared to earlier times.Footnote ¹ An estimated 5,000 African slaves were imported annually during the 1840s and 1850s, and as few as 1,000 in 1860. However, during the cotton boom (1861–64), some 25,000 to 30,000 slaves were brought to Egypt each year to satisfy the demand for labor generated by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation.Footnote ²

Most of our sources for 19th-century social history underrepresent the poor and transient, the young, and the unfree. However, Egyptian census data from the third quarter of the century offer a relatively full picture of the population, enabling us to gauge the extent of the surge in slave ownership in villages during the 1860s.Footnote ³ Slaves were counted as part of the populations of four Egyptian villages in the eastern Delta province of al-Daqahliyya in the enumerations of 1847–48 and 1868, as shown in the table. These villages are among a minority for which registers from both census years are extant.Footnote ⁴ Although not statistically representative of all rural Egypt, the data are illustrative of certain key developments in rural society during those decades, including internal labor migration and the forced migration of Africans.

Damas, to the north of Mit Ghamr, was located in prime cotton-growing country. Its population more than doubled between the two census years, much of that due to internal migration and to an influx of African slaves. Damas had no slaves at all in 1848, but in 1868 they accounted for 5.5 percent of its population. Nearby Ikhtab, a smaller village, grew by a little more than one third in the same period. Here, too, there was a pattern of internal migration along with forced migration. In 1848 the sole slave-owning household was that of the leading village shaykh, Ahmad al-Atarbi. By 1868 other households had acquired slaves, who totaled 7.3 percent of Ikhtab's population.

Sandub, near the provincial capital and commercial center of al-Mansura, was north of the main cotton-growing area and probably produced sesame and rice instead, which may explain the modest growth of its population by only one eighth. Even so, the slave population grew from a handful in 1847 to 4.4 percent of Sandub's population in 1868. Zafar, a small village on the eastern fringe of the cultivated zone, had poor land and lost population during these decades. However, that was partially offset by the arrival of African slaves, who were 3.2 percent of its population in 1868.

Most slaves in Cairo and other towns were female and employed in domestic work,Footnote ⁵ in contrast to our four villages, where there was a three-to-one ratio of male to female slaves. Most belonged to the households of village headmen (ʿumdas), village shaykhs, and other landholders, confirming travelers' reports of slaves being employed in agriculture,Footnote ⁶ a rarity in Islamic history. Some undoubtedly worked as domestic servants, and some of the female slaves were concubines, although the census registers offer no indication of that. Fatima, a slave in the household of Ahmad al-Atarbi in 1848, was mentioned twelve years later in his probate inventory as his predeceased mustawlada (one who bore him a child), the mother of his daughter Nafisa. Had Nafisa not lived long enough to become her father's heir, there would be no record of Fatima's role as a concubine.Footnote ⁷

In sum, the census registers show that mid-19th-century rural Egypt experienced significant population growth and internal migration, with diverse districts growing at different rates and some even losing population. In addition, large numbers of enslaved Africans arrived in the 1860s. They accounted for more than five percent of the population of our four villages in 1868, although by then their numbers may already have begun to decline due to the end of the cotton boom and the continued growth of the native labor force. The antislavery convention banned the trade in African slaves in 1877, and under its terms slaves could emancipate themselves. Thousands did so per month, although we have relatively little knowledge of how they and their descendants fared subsequently.Footnote ⁸

Although the surge in slave ownership in the countryside receded almost as rapidly as it began and is largely forgotten nowadays, it complicates late 19th-century Egyptian history. Rather than the familiar narrative of progressive modernization, this episode suggests more complex processes at work.