From listing religions to tabulating nationalities: Ottoman identity policies and enumeration practices

Abstract

Two features are attributed to modern state censuses: measurement and classification. Yet the real contribution of the modern census is tabulation, one of the most important and yet ignored part of statistics. The literature on censuses ignores tabulation, probably because it is not possible to separate it from statistics. Tabulation is not just a geometrical drawing, rather a tool for ordering, hierarchizing, simplification and exposing of data. Its most important function is to provide comparable data, both classifications and numbers. This study demonstrates the contribution of tabulation, by comparing premodern surveys (tahrir) to modern censuses (sayim) of the Ottoman Empire. The ethno-religious identities were listed in surveys but tabulated in censuses. This study argues that the emergence and use of tabulation emanates from the change in state-subject and state-minorities relations. In other words, it originates from the politicization of population and identity. The tabulation became a tool in the hands of the modernized empire to expose social boundaries and make comparable the ethno-religious identities.