Big Data Before the Age of Big Data
The 1917 Anglo-Egyptian “Dress Rehearsal” of the Nazi Census
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12458014 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Karim Malak (0000-0002-8686-8665, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 465-474 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1089-201X • E-ISSN: 1548-226X |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/1089201x-12113492 |
| OpenAlex | W4413137186 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
The Herman Hollerith Tabulator, the predecessor to the computer, was essential to the 1890 US census. Reducing years of manual tabulation into weeks, the tabulator is normally celebrated as a European and governmental technology. Scholars such as Edwin Black, however, have shown the dark side of the tabulator and how it was essential to the Nazi Holocaust because of its ability to tabulate information on a new scale and generate new categories for sorting individuals. This is what allows Black to argue that the Nazi census of 1933 was the “dress rehearsal” for the 1935 US Social Security Administration, which for the first time utilized tabulators to create individual files on US citizens. This essay challenges this claim and looks to an older dress rehearsal: the 1917 Egyptian census. As the largest client of the predecessor of IBM, the British-organized colonial census of Egypt used new categories. Using tabulators, the census tracked the number of able-bodied citizens and cross-referenced them by race, ethnicity, and religion. This essay offers a colonial history of Big Data and a colonial genealogy of modern censusing techniques outside Europe, drawing on the example of colonial Egypt
Big data · Data mining · Data science · Political science · Big Data Technologies and Applications · Computer Science · History
The American Census
Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule
The Government Machine
The Great Social Laboratory
Rule of Experts
La naissance d'une statistique d'État [Le recensement de 1848 en Egypte]
IPhones as Compromised Talisman
A Pre-Colonial Population Brought to Light
Barren Land and Fecund Bodies
The Population Census of 1917 and its Relationship to Egypt's Three 19th Century Statistical Regimes
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |