Big Data Before the Age of Big Data: The 1917 Anglo-Egyptian “Dress Rehearsal” of the Nazi Census

Abstract 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.