Counting the Population and the Wealth in an “Unruly” Land: Census Making as a Social Process in Ottoman Kurdistan, 1830–50

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the earliest modern Ottoman censuses in Kurdistan in the mid-nineteenth century from a social history perspective. Echoing the efforts of its contemporaries, the Ottoman state set out to conduct its first modern population census in 1830. This early census reflected the state’s aims for standardization and centralization, yet it was conducted “successfully” only in provinces geographically close to the capital. In Kurdistan, a border area controlled by ancient Kurdish chiefdoms and tribes, the census remained a herculean task for over four decades. Following recent society-centered views of global census history, this article approaches the modern Ottoman census experience in this early period as a social process rather than a top down enterprise. It argues that what determined the content, structure, and the format of these early censuses was not the discussions in the meeting rooms of the Ottoman imperial bureaucracy but social encounters between local and central, state and nonstate actors situated in the locality.