French Expatriates in Ottoman Egypt

The "État Civil" -- standing for civil registration of births, deaths and marriages -- exploratory project processes data from the Egyptian consulate of the "État Civil" to visualise mobility on a continental or global scale and offer insights on patterns of migration and social history more in general.

For the period 1790-1890, France was the only country to keep systematic (tabular) track of their expatriate citizens making it possible to study international mobility at scale and in novel ways. The Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs hold 120,000 digitised microfilm images of the records from 215 consulates around the world.

The "État Civil" -- standing for civil registration of births, deaths and marriages -- is an exploratory project led by Dr David Todd in collaboration with King's Digital Lab supported by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, the Department of History at King's College London and the Harvard and Cambridge Centre for History and Economics. The project processes data from the Egyptian consulate of the "État Civil" to visualise mobility on a continental or global scale and offer insights on patterns of migration and social history more in general. 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).

KDL refined the data model and built the proof of concept solution for the project using Django, which provides functionality to upload the project dataset, add geographic locations to places, provide an admin/editing interface to manage the data, and export data into GeoJSON and CSV formats. The solution makes uses of two existing tools to generate map visualisations: Kepler.gl and flowmap.

For more information on how the data was modelled into a database and exported so as to feed Flowmap and Kepler respectively see KDL technical overview and associated code and data repository on Github. 

Description of this proof of concept with maps extracts, historical introduction, commentaries and data critique are available on the Harvard and Cambridge Centre for History and Economics Visualizing Historical Networks project website.