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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.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.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...