« Micro-histories of expatriation

 

About the data

 

The data collected for this project is located in La Courneuve, Archives Diplomatiques, État civil, Alexandrie, vols. 1-15 (1792-1882); Le Caire, vols. 1-6 (1822-1882); Suez, vols. 1-4 (1861-1886); Port-Saïd, vols. 1-2 (1867-1882); and Ismaïlia, vol. 1 (1872-1889). For more information on how the data was modelled into a database and exported so as to feed Flowmap and Kepler respectively see this technical overview by King’s Digital Lab and associated code and data repository on Github.

This data offers only a partial and imperfect reflection of French migrations to Egypt in the nineteenth century. Firstly, the records did not capture migration per se, but only some life events that frequently, though far from always, ensued. Secondly, due to losses and geopolitical events, there are gaps in the records, not least between 1797 and 1815 – a period which includes the French occupation of Egypt in 1798-1801. Thirdly, it is possible that a significant number of French births, marriages or deaths went unrecorded. Even in metropolitan France, civil registration, although compulsory in theory since the Revolution, only became reliable towards the end of the nineteenth century. Neglecting or eschewing this obligation must have been even easier in foreign countries.

However, there are also good reasons to think that the consular civil registers captured a very large proportion of French births, marriages and deaths. In parts of the world where Europeans enjoyed extensive extraterritorial rights such as the Ottoman Empire, they had a strong vested interest in registering major life events with the consular administration, lest their private affairs fall under indigenous jurisdiction. Recollecting his service in Egypt in the 1860s, a former consul general of the United States noted that each European who wished to enjoy the privileges of extraterritoriality in the Ottoman province wanted their consulate to “take notice of almost every act in his life.” The European attended his consulate “to be married and to record the births of his children; and, ‘after life’s fitful fever’, it is through the consulate that a permit is obtained for the burial of his body, and there his worldly estate must be settled.” Hence a prodigious amount of paperwork for European consuls, and especially the French consul general due to the propensity of the French administrative order to generate legal records: “The number of different officers known to the French civil codes, the duties of whom as regards subjects of that nation resident in Egypt devolve on the French consul-general, is as many as fifty or sixty, and the number of times that officer is called upon to sign his name officially is almost incredible.” (Charles Hale, “Consular service and society in Egypt”, Atlantic Monthly, September 1877, p. 286).

 

Paul des Granges, Place des Consuls, Alexandria, 1860-1869 (J. Paul Getty Museum)
Source : http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/63048/attributed-to-baron-paul-des-granges-place-des-consuls-alexandria-french-1860-1869/?dz=0.5000,0.3717,0.75

 

An important exception to the high propensity of French nationals to register life events was the more limited engagement of French colonial subjects, of sometimes Jewish (until 1870) but mostly Muslim descent, with civil registration. We know from separate informal censuses carried out by French consulates that colonial subjects, almost all hailing from Algeria before 1880, made up a sizeable proportion of French nationals in Egypt; for instance, up to 30% in the Cairo consular district in the early 1870s (“Statistique des Français résidant à l’étranger”, 1874, Archives Diplomatiques, 28ADP14). Yet they are almost invisible in the birth and death records, although they sporadically appear in marriage records. The most likely explanation is that except in certain instances they preferred to place themselves under Ottoman jurisdiction. Conversely, consular registers sometimes recorded the life events of protégés, that is to say, Ottoman subjects who enjoyed European extraterritorial status, and of foreign spouses, although women who married a Frenchman thereby immediately acquired the nationality of their husbands. Since we do not know how consulates regulated access to civil registration, and registers did not systematically indicate the colonial, protégé or foreign status of individuals whose life event was recorded, no attempt was made to treat separately or remove these various shades of Frenchness from the data and its visual representations. Yet another bias in the data is the frequent absence of information on the place of origin of women, especially the mothers and spouses listed in deeds of birth and marriage. In such cases, it is impossible to infer a trajectory. These women thus also became invisible. 

A final caveat is necessary about the accuracy of this data. Consular clerks no doubt made spelling errors when recording the names of individuals and of places, and more errors may have been committed when the data was collected for the project. In addition, the coordinates of locations were determined using automated software and some locations may have been incorrectly identified. Hundreds of place names were also not recognized, because they changed after the nineteenth century or due to changes in political boundaries. For instance, the names of some Alsatian municipalities were Frenchified and the names of some Egyptian towns Arabized in the twentieth century; France’s eastern borders, and even more so borders in the Middle East, changed over time. In all such cases, the current name and political sovereignty have been entered manually, drawing when necessary on research guides for genealogists and nineteenth-century tourist guides and travel accounts, and further errors may have been introduced in the process.

The data is therefore neither exhaustive, nor representative, nor even, at a granular level, always precisely accurate. Yet considered together, the 10,000 records still offer useful general insights into the origins, significance and limits of French imperial expatriation in Ottoman Egypt. Above all, they contain a great wealth of personal information on individual trajectories. These include well known individuals, such as Alexis Jumel, from Breuil-le-Sec in Picardie, the promoter of long-staple cotton cultivation in the Nile Delta.  His death (at age 38) was recorded by the Cairo consulate on 18 June 1823, although unsurprisingly there is no record of the son Jumel is rumoured to have had with his companion, an Abyssinian slave. The records also include lesser known individuals who became connected to famous figures. The journey of Zoé Esther Koenig, born in Alexandria to a minor French Orientalist, whose marriage to Edouard Dervieu, the Marseillais financier behind the early growth of Egypt’s galloping national debt, was recorded by the Alexandria consulate on 5 May 1856.  Consular records capture these and thousands of other expatriates, who led transnational and often extraordinary economic lives.   

Thanks are due to Sylvie Prudon and Isabelle Nathan from the Archives Diplomatiques for their guidance on the archival material, Armand Coulon for his help collecting the data, and Arianna Ciula and Miguel Vieira from King’s Digital Lab for their invaluable assistance in creating the visual representations. I am also very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, King’s College London’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King’s College London’s Department of History and the Joint Center for History and Economics for financing the project.