Demographic Changes During The Reign of Muhammad Ali and His Successors
During this period the stagnation of the Egyptian population that had been fluctuating at about 4 million level for many centuries prior to 1805 was changed by the start of a rapid population growth. This growth was quite slow till the 1840s, but since then the Egyptian population grew up to about 7 million by the 1880s, and the first modern census registered 9 734 405 people in Egypt in 1897. This was achieved by a radical decrease in mortality rates and concomitant growth of life expectancy by 10–15 years, which, of course, indicates that Muhammad Ali and his successors in fact achieved impressive success in the effective modernization of Egypt and that the actual quality of life of the majority of the Egyptian population significantly increased in the 19th century. In Egypt in the 19th century the overall pattern of the population growth was explicitly non-Malthusian and can be characterized as hyperbolic, whereby the increase in population was accompanied not by decreases of the relative population growth rates, but by their increases.
Read more about this topic: History Of Egypt Under The Muhammad Ali Dynasty
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