Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender

2. Family and Household in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo

2 Family and Household in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo Philippe Fargues The most salient characteristic of the family in mid-nineteenth-century Cairo, the largest Arab city, was extreme instability. Indeed, physical survival was precarious for everyone, primarily because the newly instituted measures of public hygiene were still too recent to bring about any effective social regulation of mortality. One individual out of two died at such a young age that his or her only experience was that of a childhood, and often a short one, amid his or her family of birth. Due to the high infant and child mortality, siblings formed the most ephemeral grouping. Due to the high adult mortality, two generations overlapped for only a short time. It was not the norm to enjoy the company of both parents for a long period of time, and it was even rarer to have surviving grandparents . In contrast to this instability, the family operated within a rigid social order that based its stability on the organization of families by trades and religious communities. By the mid-nineteenth century, however , strong forces of renewal were emerging in Cairo and challenging the old order. After several decades of demographic stagnation and possibly decay as a result of intense labor mobilization for compulsory public service outside Cairo, conscription in the military, and plague epidemics, population growth witnessed an upturn. This was in large part due to immigrants recently attracted to the city by the emergence of large industries and the resumption of trade.1 23 24 Philippe Fargues The unpublished population census of 1848 reveals this transition towards modernity. This census deserves special mention, since it marks a turning point in the political history of statistics in Egypt.2 Generally speaking, this census does not take the Ottoman census of Anatolia and Rumelia (1831) as a model, but instead seems to follow the population censuses concurrently undertaken in Western Europe, notably in France, a country to which Muhammad Ali was resolutely open and where his administration regularly sent students for training. Specifically, the Ottoman registers of 1831 were geared towards fiscal and military objectives .3 In these registers, Muslims, who were susceptible to be enrolled in the military, were classified according to conscription criteria: age group and health status (absence/presence of a disability). Meanwhile , Christians, who were not admitted in the army but were subject to a poll tax, were classified differently, according to criteria of wealth. Since conscription was reserved for males and taxation was applied to households (normally headed by men), only adult men were recorded in Ottoman registers.4 Women and children did not matter for the military or the fiscal administration; consequently, they were not counted. In the Egyptian census of 1848, it was the individual who became the statistical unit. The administration in charge of the census was guided less by taxation or conscription purposes and more by the objective of making a comprehensive account of what today would be named the “human resources” of the country, the capital upon which the government would be able to build a national economy. For the first time, not only potential conscripts or taxpayers, but all individuals residing in Egypt were recorded: women as well as men, children as well as adults, slaves as well as free persons, Egyptian citizens as well as foreign residents. Also for the first time, particular attention was paid to the record of individuals’ economic activities—such as detailed information on occupation, place of activity, employment status (employed/unemployed), and the number of young students (bi-lkuttab ). From this point of view, the census of 1848 was modern. However, it remained archaic in the use the government made of it. As a matter of fact, registers were kept in their original form—a nominal list of households and of individuals within each household, closely reflecting the visible structure of the society. They were never transformed into a statistical map of abstract groups, such as an age pyramid or categories of a professional classification.5 The Source6 Muhammad Ali’s household and population census of 1848 offers the oldest comprehensive statistical source covering all the inhabitants of Family and Household in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo 25 Egypt. It was based, at one and the same time, on an Ottoman accounting tradition and on a modern knowledge newly acquired in the West. When the Ottomans conquered new lands, they would rapidly take count...