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The 1931 census of Palestine and the statistical (un)making of an Arab landless
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DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2019.1664476

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 Middle Eastern Studies

ISSN: 0026-3206 (Print) 1743-7881 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmes20

The 1931 census of Palestine and the statistical

(un)making of an Arab landless class

Isaac Sasson & Ronen Shamir

To cite this article: Isaac Sasson & Ronen Shamir (2019): The 1931 census of Palestine
and the statistical (un)making of an Arab landless class, Middle Eastern Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00263206.2019.1664476

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MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2019.1664476

The 1931 census of Palestine and the statistical (un)making

of an Arab landless class
Isaac Sasson and Ronen Shamir
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

This study analyzes one instance in the history of British-ruled Palestine’s projects of statistical
calculation. It traces the maneuvers of statisticians and officials vying to shape the type of data
that would be generated by the 1931 Census of Palestine. We focus on those aspects of the cen-
sus which could have yielded valid statistical knowledge about the alleged emergence of an
Arab ‘landless class’, arguably as a result of Jewish colonization. The urgency in generating such
knowledge were British concerns and Palestinian-Arab claims that Jewish immigration exhausted
the ‘absorptive capacity’ of Palestine: straining water resources, reducing the areas of Arab-held
cultivable lands, and restricting employment opportunities for Arabs.1
We find that the Census, contrary to original British intentions and Arab hopes, altogether
avoided using landlessness as a statistical category. We situate this outcome in the context of an
asymmetry between Jews and Arabs in matters of statistical expertise. We show that Zionist insti-
tutions were by far more effective than Arab ones in translating their political interests to the
language of comparative statistics and in asserting themselves on a par with British expertise. At
the same time, we also find that the definitions of ‘cultivators’ and ‘labourers’ in the schedule of
the census and the final tabulation of its results indirectly provided a strong approximation to
an alleged Arab landless class, although not one whose size could be attributed to Jewish colon-
ization. We attribute this result to the ability of the British Superintendent of the Census to
somewhat neutralize the politics of calculation by aligning the Census of Palestine with the
British colonial experience with the censuses of India.
Our study is anchored in three basic premises. First, censuses are instruments of state power
and their history is intimately coupled with the history of imperialism; their rules of categoriza-
tion create a ‘totalizing classificatory grid’ by which populations ‘are ordered for administrative
purposes’.2 Second, censuses do not merely reflect and record demographic and statistical facts
but are constitutive of these facts: affirming, validating or fixing some social categories or eco-
nomic relations while disallowing or misrecognizing others. Censuses assemble social worlds and
hence shape not only governmental policies but also public perceptions of difference and hier-
archy, processes of identity formation, and more broadly ‘the categories we think in’.3 Third, sub-
sequent to these two premises, censuses often become sites of contestation over their
categories and rules of classification.4 It is this latter premise which is our prime focus here.
The schedules and operations of censuses become sites of contestation when the enumerated
population or a segment of it openly or tacitly tries to modify, challenge, oppose, subvert, inflate,
or otherwise frustrate official classifications and definitions.5 Censuses also become sites of con-
testation when statisticians, demographers, and other social scientists debate their methods of
measurement by invoking the language of scientific expertise and comparative statistics or when
census officials negotiate or clash with political leaders and policy-makers over what to meas-
ure.6 In all such cases matters of uneven political representation, unequal scientific resources,

CONTACT Isaac Sasson isasson@tauex.tau.ac.il

ß 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

and asymmetrical levels of statistical expertise, may be decisive in determining the form and
content of a census.
Scholars studying the politics of calculation in census-making often look at struggles around
the categories of race, religion, and ethnicity.7 In the United States, the issue of whether the
Census Bureau would ask Americans about their citizenship status in the 2020 Census has
already become politically controversial. The present case investigates a different type of strug-
gle; a conflict over the kind of data that the census would have yielded concerning the relation-
ship between an ethno-religious community and its patterns of agricultural land use and
holding.8 The outcome of this struggle had important implications: the generation of data con-
cerning this matter was directly related to the politically sensitive issue of whether to impose
stricter regulations on future Jewish immigration and land purchases. We trace the contested
evolution of the schedule for the 1931 Census of Palestine as it pertained to this matter.
The task of preparing and executing the Census had been assigned to the British statistician
Eric Mills. We offer an archival reconstruction of the consultations of Mills with an Arab and a
Jewish advisory committee and trace the behind-the-scenes correspondence between Jewish
officials, the Colonial Office in London, and the office of the British High Commissioner in
Palestine.9 In the first part we discuss the appearance of landlessness as an ambiguous and con-
tested category, and the political pressure to remove it altogether from the prospective schedule
of the census. In the second and main part of this study we focus on the consultations of Mills
with the Jewish and Arab Advisory Committees, demonstrate the asymmetry of expertise
between these two committees, and assess the impact of the consultations on the schedule of
the census. In the third part we introduce the final schedule of the census and the results which
are most relevant to the present study. We conclude with a brief summary of our over-
all findings.

Landlessness as a contested category

The deadly riots in British Mandate Palestine in August 1929 have been described as the Year
Zero of the Jewish-Arab conflict; although preceded by some deadly clashes in the beginning of
the 1920s, this time Jews and Arabs violently ‘collided head-on’ in a way that ‘shaped the con-
sciousness of both sides for decades thereafter’.10 For the first time, British officials became
acutely aware of their scant knowledge of the country, its resources, and its population. The
British administration conducted a limited census in 1922 and various governmental departments
conducted various types of surveys throughout the 1920s. Yet the 1929 riots unleashed an
unprecedented flurry of surveys, studies and reports; they all shared in common an acknow-
ledgement that valid and accurate data was still scarce and that further inquiries, and specifically
a country-wide census, were imperative to the task of ruling the country.
Alarmed to investigate the root causes of the riots, the British Government first appointed the
Shaw Commission of Enquiry. The Shaw Report of March 1930 suggested that institutionalized
Zionist land purchases could be associated with ‘those rendered landless or divorced from the
soil in consequence of the purchase over their heads of the holdings on the cultivation of which
they now rely for their subsistence’.11 It warned that ‘the creation of a large discontented and
landless class is fraught with serious danger to the country’ and urged ‘further scientific investi-
gations’ and ‘a survey of the whole country’ in respect of the land issue.12
Subsequent to the Shaw Report the Government had begun preparations for a general cen-
sus. In the meantime, it appointed William Johnson and Robert Crosbie to study the situation of
Arab peasants. Johnson and Crosbie conducted a survey of 23,573 Arab families in a selected
sample of 104 villages. In Table XXIV of their Report they classified the sampled rural population
into three categories based on their ‘declared holdings’: ‘owner-occupiers living exclusively on
their holding’, ‘owner-occupiers who also work as labourers’, and ‘labourers’. They found that
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 3

6,940 families (out of the 23,573 total) were ‘labourers’ (29.4 per cent).13 Yet as one latter-day
scholar rightly observes, ‘the Johnson-Crosbie Report never equated the laboring class with a
landless condition’.14 Johnson and Crosbie further qualified their findings by commenting that
the numbers only related to an area of 797,529 dunams which were owned by villagers and that
‘there was no record of the holdings of tenant farmers cultivating 245,275 dunams owned by
absentee landlords and 126,522 dunams leased from other villages.’15 The category of ‘labourers’,
therefore, seemed to have referred only to those families who did not have a share in the
Musha system (lands jointly held and cultivated by villagers) and could not be squarely equated
with landless farmers who had neither ownership nor any other form of tenure.16
Nevertheless, the figure of 29.4 per cent agricultural laborers would soon be transformed into
a magic number representing the existing size of an Arab landless class in the whole of
Palestine. In 1930 the British Government appointed the Hope-Simpson commission to report on
issues of development, immigration, and land purchases in Palestine. Hope-Simpson relied on
earlier studies. Using the 1922 Census as baseline, the Department of Health estimated the total
population of Palestine by adding and subtracting the annual number of births, deaths, and net
migration. This arithmetic yielded a total population of 945,991 persons. The number of rural
Arabs was estimated at 478,390 (excluding Beersheba and the Southern Desert and the entire
Bedouin population about which no reliable statistics had existed since 1922). The Department
of Health also calculated that the average fellah family size was 5.5 persons and Hope-Simpson
also had at his disposal an estimate of the total available cultivable land in Palestine.17
Using these figures, and dividing the estimated total population by average family size, Hope-
Simpson concluded that the number of families whose subsistence relied on agriculture was
86,980. He then combined this estimate with the findings of the Johnson-Crosbie Report, treating
the latter’s 29.4 per cent estimate of the number of ‘labourers’ as ‘landless’.18 Hope-Simpson
therefore concluded that ‘of the 86,980 rural Arab families in the villages, 29.4 per cent, are land-
less’. He further maintained that although ‘it is not known how many of these are families who
previously cultivated and have since lost their land’, there was no doubt that this figure included
‘landless men who previously were cultivators’ and, moreover, that quite a few lost their land
because ownership ‘passed into the hands of the Jews’.19
In response, The Jewish Agency targeted the methodology of the Hope-Simpson Report and
challenged its conclusions concerning the area of cultivable land, the number of families
dependent on agriculture, the size of the ’lot viable’ per family and the number of landless
Arabs.20 Its statisticians also challenged the data of the Department of Health and questioned
the findings of a Government’s aerial survey which estimated the amount of cultivable land; to
that end the Jewish Agency also consulted Sir John Russell, ‘a distinguished agricultural expert’,
who criticized the size of the sample and its ability to represent the entire region.21
Ever since the early 1920s Zionist institutions engaged in the project of assembling and vali-
dating the existence of a distinct ‘Jewish economy’ in Palestine. This work of assembly required
a systematic statistical effort to collect, measure, and report upon economic activities along
‘ethno-nationally divided figures’.22 To that end, various Zionist institutions began to employ
local Jewish statisticians, economists, and scientific experts in areas such as hydrology and epi-
demiology, as well as to commission various surveys and studies by experts from abroad. By
1930, the result was that whereas systematic knowledge about Jewish industry and agriculture
and about land and water resources had been created throughout the 1920s, no equivalent data
and knowledge had been collected and produced in respect of Arab economic activities. Arab
institutions ‘did not create statistical mechanisms for the systematic collection and analysis of
data’, leading to a great ‘imbalance between the wealth and scope of the economic data that
was created in the Mandate period by the Jewish community and about it and the poverty of
statistical data about the Arab economy’.23 British studies of Palestine routinely relied on data
provided by Zionist institutions and Jewish experts. British officials sometimes questioned the
4 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

data, yet often felt on the back foot.24 Responding to the Jewish Agency, Hope-Simpson wrote a
letter eighteen pages long to Sir John Shuckburgh in the Colonial Office.25
The Jewish Agency blamed Hope-Simpson for making a serious error in the interpretation of
Table XXIV of the Johnson-Crosbie Report. It maintained that the category of ‘labourers’ in that
Report included ‘tenant farmers’, hence rendering it impossible to consider all agricultural
laborers ‘landless’.26 Hope-Simpson defended his own interpretation, claiming that the two cate-
gories of owner-cultivators in the Johnson-Crosbie Report included ‘either owner-cultivators or
tenants’, therefore repeating his assertion that agricultural laborers were necessarily landless.
Lord Passfield’s White Paper of October 1930 was published almost simultaneously with the
Hope-Simpson Report. The White Paper outlined the necessary British policy for Palestine in the
aftermath of the 1929 riots and favored British restrictions on Jewish immigration and land pur-
chases. However ambiguous and contested the category of ‘landlessness’ began to look, the
White Paper adopted Hope-Simpson’s findings and conclusions almost verbatim, specifically cit-
ing the 29.4 per cent figure of landless Arabs.27
Both the Hope-Simpson Report and Passfield’s White Paper acknowledged the lack of suffi-
cient data. Hope-Simpson wrote that ‘the number of Arabs who have become landless’ was ‘a
matter which should be ascertained in the course of the Census which is to take place next
year’.28 A few months later, responding to the critique of the Jewish Agency, he also wrote that
‘the question of a rural exodus can only be settled by a census’.29 Hope-Simpson expected the
forthcoming census not only to establish the size of the Arab landless class but also to discover
how many of these landless families previously held land, either as owners or tenants. Passfield’s
White Paper expressed a similar expectation. Addressing the issue of landless Arabs, it main-
tained that it was ‘not possible to speak with greater precision’ on this issue without having this
matter established ‘in the course of the Census which is to be taken next year’.30
The Jewish establishment reacted with fury to the White Paper. In February 1931 a hard-
pressed British Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald qualified the White Paper, writing a letter of
clarification to Chaim Weitzman, head of the World Zionist Organization, and prompting a disap-
pointed Palestinian-Arab leadership to refer to it as the Black Letter.31 In the matter of Arab land-
lessness McDonald’s letter clarified that the White Paper only referred to ‘such Arabs as can be
shown to have been displaced from the lands which they occupied in consequence of the land
passing into Jewish hands, and who have not obtained other holdings on which they establish
themselves, or other equally satisfactory occupation. The number of such displaced Arabs must
be a matter for careful inquiry.’32 In other words, McDonald’s letter defined landless Arabs in a
restrictive way that indeed may have been suitable for a special ‘inquiry’ but was unsuited to be
settled in a general census. In fact, MacDonald used a definition of landlessness which had been
espoused by the Jewish Agency for precisely such a special inquiry.33
In sum, on the eve of the census the category of ‘landlessness’ had already been contested;
an unstable and fuzzy politically-negotiated concept whose definitions ranged from covering all
those agriculturalists who were neither owners nor tenants at a given point in time, to those
who were previously owners or tenants and lost their land for various reasons, to those who lost
their holdings due to Jewish land purchases (with additional and varied conditions and qualifica-
tions). MacDonald’s letter did not refer any further to the forthcoming census, leaving the
Colonial Office in London to its own devices in responding to Jewish pressures.
Regardless of MacDonald’s reassuring letter, Zionist institutions acted to ensure that the
White Paper’s recommendations would not shape the form of the census. The principal person
who acted in the matter was Professor Selig Brodetsky, a professor of mathematics at Leeds
University and an official of the World Zionist Executive. Brodetsky asked the Colonial Office to
allow Jewish experts to express their views on the draft questionnaire of the census.34 He dis-
closed that he was mainly ‘concerned about the White Paper’s suggestion that the scope of
Arab landlessness would be determined by the Census’. He therefore lobbied the Colonial Office
to ensure that ‘no attempt should be made to utilize the census’ for determining ‘the number of
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 5

dispossessed’ Arabs, demanding that all references to landlessness should be removed from the
census’s questionnaire.35 Brodetsky questioned the scientific reliability of any such attempt:
the questionnaire issued in connection with the Census will contain such questions as: Do you own land?
Have you ever owned land in the past? Are you a tenant or a Harrath? etc. etc. Such questions are difficult
to answer accurately, especially by an illiterate Arab, whose form will be filled up by others on his behalf.
The result will inevitably be a tendency to use the Census as an opportunity to prove Arab contentions
against Jewish immigration and land purchases. The value of the replies will thus become very doubtful.
Considering the important issues which will be made to depend on the results of the Census it is clearly
desirable that only such questions should be asked as can easily and clearly can be answered, and as leave
no loophole for tendentious and political replies.36

Doubts and suspicions about the ability of the Arab rural population to reliably take part in a
scientific endeavor had been central to the effort to eliminate landlessness from the census. The
Revisionist Zionist Organization wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies that the planned
census was political rather than scientific, a recipe for ‘disaster and a calamity’: ‘In the Arab dis-
tricts the counting is to be entrusted to the so-called Mukhtars – mostly semi-literate villagers
themselves who can hardly be enthusiastic about the abstract honesty of a census but who, at
the same time, may be confidently expected, under the influence of a chauvinist propaganda’ to
provide self-serving false answers. ‘To the Jew, with a European upbringing’, the letter asserted,
‘such cheating is impossible’.37
The portrayal of the Arabs as unreliable and vulnerable to manipulation aimed to resonate with
the general British distrust of native populations. In England, ‘head of families’ were trusted to reli-
ably fill in the schedule while in the colonies this task was invested in the hands of enumerators
who also had to be supervised.38 This portrayal also served to distance the Jewish population from
the ‘native’ Arab one and implied that its experts shared scientific rigor and enlightened values
with the British ones. The experts representing Zionist institutions in the matter of the census had
only one aim – ‘to assist in the preparation of a purely demographic census of the Palestine popu-
lation’ – and only one interest: ‘that this census shall be of a high standard scientifically’.39
Accordingly, they strove hard to know who would verify the census returns and check the compe-
tency and reliability of the (Arabic-speaking) enumerators: ‘the majority of Arabs were illiterate and
while they might return correct answers the enumerators might distort the returns’.40
Internal memoranda and exchanges among officials in the Colonial Office reveal a degree of
discomfort with that type of lobbying. British honor seems to have been on the line. One official
warned that succumbing to the demand to inspect the Census’s questionnaire prior to its
approval should be resisted because it would make a ‘farce’ of the British administration.41 A first
line of defense was to articulate the response to pressure in terms of scientific expertise and spe-
cifically in terms of long-standing colonial experience with censuses.
The British Government of Palestine appointed Eric Mills as the Superintendent of the Census.
Mills spent time consulting British experts. In London, he consulted the Registrar General, head
of the General Register Office for England and Wales. The experience of the British in India
served as a yardstick of scientific expertise. Mills consulted Richard Burn, whose long career in
India included serving as the Superintendent of the Census for the United Provinces in 1901,
and Edward Gait whose long civil service in India included his experience as Superintendent of
the 1891 Census in Assam and Census Commissioner for India in 1911. Officials at the Colonial
Office were instructed ‘to refer to the steps taken by Mr. Mills to acquaint himself with the pro-
cedure followed in this country and in India’ and to emphasize the fact that the consultations
with British experts had been made ‘with a view to obtaining information as to the procedure
adopted in England and India respectively in taking the Census’.42
At least some officials in the Colonial Office thought it essential not to yield to Jewish pres-
sure in the matter of landlessness. One official wrote that in response to the demand to ‘exclude
all reference to “landlessness” etc. from the Census questionnaire’ he told Brodetsky that ‘we
could not possibly do anything of the sort’. Another noted that there was nothing in
6 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

Figure 1. Abba Ahimeir, member of the Zionist Revisionist Movement, standing next to wall graffiti urging Jews not to partici-
pate in the census. November 1931, unknown photographer, Jabotinsky Institute in Israel.

MacDonald’s letter ‘modifying’ the White Paper’s recommendation to employ the Census in order
to establish data on the issue of landlessness in general.43 However the Colonial Office also
sought to relieve the pressure by citing MacDonald’s letter and reassuring Brodetsky that ‘such
information as may be obtained from the forthcoming Census in regard to Landless Arabs will
concern all such Arabs and not only those who have been displaced in consequence of the lands
passing into Jewish hands. The Arabs of the latter category are to be made the subject of a spe-
cial enquiry by the Development Department.’44 This latter clarification distinguished between
two definitions of the statistical category of landlessness. One, to be worked out by the census,
referred to landlessness as a generic category of those who did not own land (while leaving
open the issue of whether it would identify previous owners or tenants who lost their holding).
The second, to be worked out through a ‘special inquiry’, referred to landlessness as that class of
people who lost land as a consequence of Jewish purchases of land.
The assurances of the Colonial Office did not put to rest Jewish concerns (Figure 1). While the
Arab press described the forthcoming census as ‘an act of great national importance’,45 one
Jewish pamphlet called for a boycott of the Census because it was part of a British plan ‘to
liquidate “scientifically” the Balfour Declaration’.46
Jewish statisticians and officials particularly worried about Questions (‘Columns’) 10-11-12 of
the forthcoming census. As we shall see in the next section, these concerns went beyond land-
lessness to other related statistical data that could indicate the dire situation of Arab agricultural-
ists and hence at least indirectly substantiate claims about Jewish dispossession. Taken together,
those three questions could in principle reveal the number of Arabs who were landless or
unemployed by 1931 – a task which the Hope-Simpson Commission and the White Paper had
assigned to the census a year earlier.

Negotiating the schedule: the appointment of Mills and the Advisory Committees
Major Eric Mills was among the first British officials to arrive in Palestine in 1917. At the time of
his appointment he served as Assistant Chief Secretary and was in effect the Government’s chief
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 7

statistician. In later years he would become Palestine’s Commissioner for Migration and Statistics
and would also be among the last British civil servants to leave Palestine in 1948.47 ‘Census offi-
cials live in two worlds, politics and science,’ writes Choldin, ‘each placing certain demands on
the other.’48 In many countries Census directors are political appointees; in the United States,
the head of the Census Bureau is a presidential appointee, facing a Senate confirmation process.
In Egypt, James I. Craig, the Controller General of the 1917 Census, had been a ‘pinnacle figure’
who enlisted the state bureaucracy to the project while overcoming ‘the “distrust of the
uneducated” by means of statistical propaganda’.49 The role of Mills required him to navigate
between the political nuances of the Colonial Office in London and the British High
Commissioner of Palestine, the pressures of Zionist institutions, and the expectations of the Arab
Executive. Seeking to ensure the willing cooperation of the population Mills tried to create a
joint Arab-Jewish advisory committee that would grant the Census popular legitimacy.50
The Arab Executive responded by demanding proportional representation; ‘I agreed gladly’,
reported Mills, when they later settled for a Committee of ‘six Arabs to two Jews’ as long as this
would not set a binding precedent on future joint ventures.51 Yet Zionist officials conditioned the
Arab proposal on a British commitment to grant general amnesty to all (Jewish) people who entered
or stayed in Palestine illegally and, further, on an assurance that no questions be asked at the Census
‘seeking to elicit information about landless Arabs or employment particularly in agriculture’.52
Unable to create a joint advisory committee, Mills worked his way through ‘prolonged con-
sultation with a separate Jewish Census Advisory Committee and an Arab Census Advisory
Committee’.53 The Jewish Committee advocated statistical simplicity in order to prevent the
manipulation and contamination of the Census by ‘political motives’: ‘Under the circumstances it
is incumbent to reduce the number of complicated questions in the questionnaire’ and to ensure
that ‘the questionnaire will not contain questions which cannot be properly answered in a
demographic census, for instance questions regarding unemployment or land tenure’.54
The asymmetry between Jewish and Arab expertise in statistical matters became manifest dur-
ing these consultations. The names of the members of the Arab Advisory Sub-Committee, as ori-
ginally recorded in the protocols, were Auni Bey Abdul Hadi, Jamal Eff. Husseini, and
Moghannem Eff. Moghannem. All were highly respected members of the Arab Executive,
devoted to the Palestinian national cause, with significant political credentials. Abdul Hadi and
Moghannem also had legal education, but none of the three had any professional understanding
of demographic and statistical methods.55 The three members of the Jewish Advisory Committee
included Dr. Reuven Katznelson, who took a leading part in the discussions precisely in the cap-
acity of an experienced statistician.56 The difference in matters of statistical expertise also came
to light when Mills reported on his efforts to assemble ‘high professional staff’ ‘for the mathem-
atical and actuarial analysis’ that would be needed in the aftermath of the Census. He wanted to
‘have a good balance of Arabs and Jews’ yet reported that ‘in the Jewish Community there are
several qualified statisticians but in the Arab Community there are, so far as I have ascertained,
none. In this matter the Jews have quality but the Arabs none.’57
Mills held several meetings with the Arab and Jewish advisory committees during the summer
of 1931. As we shall see, a stark example of the asymmetry of expertise between Arabs and Jews
transpired during the deliberations over Q10-12.

Negotiating the schedule: Q10: earners & dependents

Question 10 classified the ‘economic status’ of the population as ‘earners’ and ‘dependents.’ The
main concern of the Jewish Committee in respect to Q10 was that it might have given a biased
and inflated indication of the number of people (typically a household) dependent on the
income of a single breadwinner.58 Among the rural agricultural population, the greater the num-
ber of dependents per earner could have an effect on subsequent estimates of ‘lot viable’
8 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

(minimum area of land needed for basic subsistence) and hence on the absorptive capacity of
Palestine. Another concern of the Jewish Committee was that people who were out of work at
the time of the census would not be recorded as earners. This possible outcome also had the
potential of decreasing the number of earners compared to dependents and more generally to
augment concerns about the shrinking employment opportunities of Arab agriculturalists
because of Jewish colonization.
In respect to Q10 the enumerators were instructed to record as dependents ‘a wife who does
housework’ and ‘a son who helps in work in the fields but does not bring to his family additional
wage’. By the late nineteenth century these definitions of ‘dependents’ had become the scientific
convention in Germany, the United States, and throughout the British empire.59 The Jewish
Committee objected. First, they tried to convince Mills to give up on Q10 altogether. Katznelson,
the Jewish statistician, claimed that ‘no other census questionnaire contains a similar column’.
This question indeed did not exist in English censuses. However the Indian census of 1931 (held
prior to the Palestine census in that same year) employed the distinction between earners and
dependents. Mills promptly replied that Q10 ‘exists in Indian census’.60
Having failed to eliminate Q10, the Jewish Committee negotiated on its merits. Katznelson
again departed from the scientific norms of the time and argued that Q10 would ‘wrongly cat-
egorize women who work at home or in the field and sons who do not receive wages for their
work on their parents holding as dependents’; instead, he suggested that women should be
recorded as earners doing housework.61 Focusing on the wording of the instructions to enumer-
ators, the Jewish Committee therefore suggested to define an ‘earner’ as ‘one who supports him-
self and others’, ‘one who is temporarily unemployed but who before being unemployed was
supporting himself or others’, as well as ‘women and children occupied in the occupation of the
earner or in home work or in the field’; the residual definition of ‘dependent’ would include only
those unfit for work because of age and infirmities and those with no occupation.62
The issue of Q10 also briefly came up in the last formal meeting between Mills and the Arab
Committee. Referring to Q10 ‘Auni Bey objected that the wife in the house could not be consid-
ered as dependent, and asked as to how a man and his wife who are occupied in agricultural
work are to be treated.’63 It is clear that the question of Auni Bey was based on his sound com-
mon sense and not on a political motive to enhance the number of ‘earners’. In fact his sugges-
tion to record such women as earners was similar to that of the Jewish Committee. In his
answer Mills again resorted to comparative statistics; ‘the same question does occur in India’
where there are identical conditions. The solution was to follow the Indian model and to put
women as dependents in Q10 but in cases where they also helped in the fields to record them
as having a subsidiary occupation in Q12 (discussed in the next section). His answer satisfied the
Arab Committee and no further discussion followed, in stark contrast to the fierce negotiations
with the Jewish Committee over this issue.64
The efforts of the Jewish Committee were partially successful. The final schedule retained the
more common practice of recording women doing housework (who did not have their own
occupation and income) and children who helped ‘in the fields’ without wages as ‘dependents’.
However in his final meeting with the Jewish Committee Mills agreed ‘to include unemployed as
“earners”’.65 The final instructions to the enumerators for Q10-12 were that ‘if any person be out
of work at the time of the final enumeration enter “earner” or “dependent” as if the person were
following his or her previous occupations’.66 In other words, the census could not distinguish the
unemployed from the working population; it only aimed to generate a demographic profile and
ratio of (typically male) ’productivity’ to (typically woman and children) ‘non-productivity’, in line
with the conventional practices at that time.67
The practice of not recording unemployment in a general census had been the norm both in
the Censuses of England and Wales in 1911, 1921, and (with minor exceptions) 1931, as well as
in the Indian Census of 1931. At the time, one exception was the United States where, following
the Great Depression, the Census of Unemployment in 1930 specifically inquired whether the
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 9

person was currently employed and, if otherwise, how long he or she had been without work.
We cannot know if things would have turned out otherwise had the Arab Advisory Committee
exerted its own pressure in this matter. The formal meetings, at least, do not indicate any such
attempt. In the event, the professional exchange over ‘comparative statistics’ allowed Mills to
offer a concession on scientific grounds without seeming to bow to political pressure.

Negotiating the schedule: Q11-Q12: primary and subsidiary occupations

Questions 11-12 distinguished between ‘principal’ (Q11) and ‘subsidiary’ (Q12) means of occupa-
tional subsistence.68 As it was originally presented to the Jewish and Arab Committees, Q11
appeared as ‘principal occupation (blank for dependents)’ and Q12 as ‘subsidiary occupation
(occupations of dependents may be given)’.69 The final version instructed the enumerators to
also include dependents in Q11 and to enter for them the principal occupation of the earners
upon whom they depended.
The contentious part, as far as the Jewish Committee was concerned, was the ‘occupational’
questions which were to be addressed to agriculturalists. The Jewish Committee worried about ‘the
definition that aims in the villages to elicit information concerning the relation of the person enum-
erated to land’. Again alluding to the unreliability of the native population, it argued that ‘under
present conditions replies to this question will not accord with facts’.70 Landlessness – in the sense
of it being a result of Jewish land purchases – was far from being considered as a designated task
of the census; yet the Jewish Committee aimed to prevent any questions about land tenure, rent,
and other forms of land ownership which could yield data concerning Arab landlessness in general.
According to the draft schedule, enumerators were to distinguish ‘ordinary cultivators’ from
‘agricultural labourers’ and also to identify rent payers and receivers. Katznelson objected on
grounds of statistical reliability and argued that it amounted to a ‘land inquiry’. He invoked the
experience of the 1917 Census of Egypt and read from the protocol long extracts of expert opin-
ions that concluded that the results about ‘the mode of tenure of cultivable land’ were ‘entirely
negative’ (‘completement negatifs’).71 The 1927 Census of Egypt, he added, eliminated such ‘land
inquiry’ questions precisely on the grounds of the unreliability of the answers. Katznelson had
been correct in this instance of demonstrating his mastery of comparative statistics. Discussing
the 1917 Census of Egypt, Roger Owen attributes the ‘abortive attempt to quantify different
types of rural land use, in particular the amount of rented land and that cultivated directly by its
owner’, to the reluctance of the Egyptian land-owning elite to surrender ‘too much information
about its position and rural power’.72 In Palestine, the Jewish Committee feared a different type
of resistance – on nationalist grounds – but all the same leading to statistical distortions.
Mills acknowledged the depth of the arguments but insisted that ‘the questionnaire contains
no enquiry regarding Land Tenure but about payment of rent’. ‘It amounted to the same,’
retorted Katznelson: ‘A question as to who cultivates his own land or pays rent is on the face of
it a land enquiry.’73 The final schedule defined a cultivator as ‘a person who is in actual occupa-
tion of land for agricultural purposes and cultivates such land himself either with or without the
help of family or labourers’. This definition – centered around the idea of ‘occupation’ – ensured
that the census could not distinguish between owner-occupiers and other forms of land tenure
(i.e. tenants). The final schedule also did not ask about payment of rent (another measure of ten-
ancy); enumerators had only to record receivers of rent, thereby perhaps allowing some measure
of knowledge about absentee or large-scale land-owners. The influence of the Jewish Committee
in shaping this approach cannot be underestimated. Mills inserted a footnote in the publication
of the final results of the census, stating that ‘while it is a matter of some regret that it was not
possible to differentiate, at the enumeration, between cultivating landlords and tenant cultiva-
tors, the experience of both India and Egypt suggests that no great confidence could be placed
in the results viewed in the perspective of land tenures’.74
10 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

The Jewish Committee also wanted to eliminate Q12 (subsidiary occupation) and to refer it to
a special enquiry. On his part Mills told the Arab Advisory Committee that in line with the Indian
Census women ‘dependents’ who ‘helped in the fields’ would be recorded in Q12 as having a
subsidiary occupation.75 The final schedule went further and permitted ‘dependents to declare
personal occupations, as subsidiary to the occupations of the earners who supported them’, and
this, Mills explained, ‘made it possible to distinguish working and non-working dependents’ in
line with the practice of the Indian Census.76 Unconcerned with this aspect of Q12, the Jewish
Committee wanted Mills to take into account the circumstances of Palestine: a landowning
farmer may work four months on his own land and then for eight months as an agricultural
laborer; asking about his principal and subsidiary occupations may therefore lead to confusing
returns of ‘principal occupation as subsidiary and vice versa’.77
Katznelson weighed in with comparative statistics: ‘Countries like Great Britain, U.S.A., Canada,
New Zealand have omitted this question from their censuses on the ground that information
received is of haphazard nature’; he cited the definition of subsidiary occupation in Austria,
Germany, and Poland (referring to a ‘permanent’ subsidiary occupation) but explained that it
could not apply to Palestine. He also argued that the draft definition of Q12 was insufficient
because it referred to an ‘occupation which actual worker pursues at any time of the year’ with-
out setting any minimum period.78 Mills eventually revised the schedule and Q12 referred to the
‘most important’ subsidiary occupation that the person was pursuing for at least three months a
year. Yet Mills declined to give up on the principled distinction between primary and subsidiary
occupations on the grounds of his alignment with the Indian Census. The 1921 and 1931
Censuses of India distinguished both between earners (‘Workers’ in 1921) and dependents (Q10)
and between principal and subsidiary occupations (Q11-12).79
Challenged with the familiarity of the Jewish Committee with European censuses, Mills felt
compelled to assert the at least equal, if not superior, value of colonial experience. In his last
meeting with the Jewish Committee Mills observed that ‘the questionnaire and the instructions
may not be in accordance with the practice in certain European countries of which the members
had active experience but they were based on the Indian Census and India with one-fifth of the
world’s population, with almost every possible variation in economic structure is a better model
for Palestine. The advice of experts confirms this view.’80 From a British perspective Palestine and
India, regardless of their enormous differences in size and demographics, were both colonies,
and therefore shared more in common with each other than with European nations.

Negotiating the schedule: concluding the negotiations

We began this section of the article writing that the most glaring evidence of the asymmetry of
expertise between Arabs and Jews surfaced during the deliberations over questions 10-12.
Professional disagreements notwithstanding, the painstaking deliberations with the Jewish
Committee over Q10-12 practically flew over the head of the Arab Committee. The third meeting
between Mills and the Arab Committee took place on 4 July 1931 and was dedicated to these
questions. The protocol recorded that roughly mid-way through the meeting Mills raised the issue
of the questions ‘which deal with occupation and the economic foundation of the livelihood of the
population’.81 As aforementioned, one member of the Committee asked about women as earners/
dependents and Mills replied that according to the Indian model the issue would be dealt with in
Q12. This reply was followed by a brief discussion about the schedule’s English and Arabic versions.
The protocol then noted that ‘after further explanatory discussion the members agree that columns
10-13 were important and did not desire to offer suggestions as to their amendment provided that
the Arabic was made to correspond with the English’.82 The Arab Committee had therefore
accepted the suggested questions and schedule without any discussion, let alone reservations,
about their potential connection to, or severance from, issues of landlessness and unemployment.
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 11

We can only speculate that the Arab representatives may have assumed, or had been led to
assume, that they could trust British statisticians to extract this data from the results.
All in all, the Jewish Committee felt it was successful in ensuring that the census would not
record unemployment; the instructions to enumerators were that ‘persons temporarily out of
work should be returned under the principal occupation previously followed by them’. The
Jewish Committee also ensured that the census would not generate data about land tenure. For
his part Mills revised the schedule according to the Indian model to only enquire about
‘economic’ relation to land. Reporting to the Colonial Office, Mills wrote that he told the Jewish
Committee that he was ‘bound to try to elicit such information as Government might decide
was necessary’; however he also wrote that his own opinion was that ‘it was not possible to
ascertain the facts about landless Arabs through a general Census. A special enquiry would be
needed.’83 Mills did not explain what kind of ‘facts’ could not be disclosed by the census, there-
fore satisfying both his superiors and the Jewish Committee.
On 3 July 1931, Palestine’s High Commissioner informed the Colonial Office that he communi-
cated to Mills the concerns of the Jewish Agency that the results of the Census might fuel ‘anti
Zionist propaganda’. He also observed that ‘Mills was aware of the danger and is not putting in
the Schedule questions as regards nature of tenure of land, so that no replies on the question of
“landlessness” will be recorded.’ Comparative statistics had again been invoked: ‘Mills,’ the High
Commissioner wrote, ‘is taking the Indian Census laws as his model.’84 A follow-up letter had the
final word in this matter, stating that the ‘schedules of questions to be put … have been care-
fully drawn up as to avoid any inquiry regarding “landlessness” or “unemployment”’.85 These
exchanges sounded a triumphant note – in line with Jewish demands – which was not only a far
cry from the expectations of Hope-Simpson and Lord Passfield but even from the clarifications of
the MacDonald Letter.
In his introduction to the final Census Report, Mills congratulated both Advisory Committees
on helping to produce ‘a schedule which caused no controversy, and which gave no opportunity
for distortions in census information’.86 The battle over the census ended in a way which seemed
to have been in line with the demands of Jewish statisticians and campaigners.

Agriculturalists under the census-scope

Preparations for the census began on 1 May 1931. About 4,000 enumerators were recruited,
mostly from the general public, and trained over the summer. Houses throughout the country
were numbered and blocks of 50-80 houses assigned to each enumerator. Given the amount of
information to be collected, the enumerators could not complete their task in one night.
Therefore, they started preparing drafts of their census schedules on 1 October, and would later
update them – adding newcomers and deleting those no longer present – on the night of the
census, 18 November 1931. The next morning, the enumerators met with their supervisors and
handed in the final schedules, which in turn were passed along to sub-district and district offi-
cers. Within twenty hours, a provisional number for the whole population of Palestine was
declared.87 The total population of Palestine was 969,268: 693,159 Muslims, 174,610 Jews, 91,398
Christians, and 10,101 others. In what follows we focus on the Muslim population because it
comprised the bulk of those occupied in ‘ordinary cultivation’ (406,520 Muslim earners and
dependents of a total population of 440,084 earners and dependents).
The results of the Census were first tabulated in 1932, consisting solely of population counts
by gender and religion for each town and village. A complete two-volume report followed in
1933. The latter consisted of twelve chapters ranging from demographic patterns and trends
(e.g. population composition and distribution, natural growth, migration, and marriage) to social
and economic characteristics (education, languages, infirmities, and occupations). A final chapter
focused on the nomadic population. Chapter XI of the Census dealt with ‘Occupations and
12 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

Organised Industry’ and classified both earners and dependents under 181 occupations. The
Census relied on a modified version of the French statistician Jacque Bertillon’s classification
scheme, which had been ‘used by the census authorities in India since 1911’.88 Occupations
were divided into four main classes and agriculturalists belonged with the general class of
‘production of raw materials’.
Table XVI offered an elaborate listing of the population’s ‘Occupation and Means of
Livelihood’.89 A sub-category of ‘Ordinary Cultivation’ appeared as part of the general section of
‘Pasture and Agriculture’. This sub-category classified ‘ordinary cultivation’ into five groups:

1. Income from rent of agricultural land

2. Ordinary Cultivation
3. Agents, Managers of Estates, Clerks, Rent Collectors, etc.
4. Agricultural Instructors not in Educational Institutions
5. Farm servants and field labourers and watchers.

As already mentioned the total number of Muslim ‘ordinary cultivators’ (earners and depend-
ents) was 406,520. As can be seen from Table 1, of this total, 17,586 were listed as receivers of

Table 1. Occupations or means of livelihood (Muslims). Reproduced from Table XVI (Mills 1933: II: 281–314).
Earners
Total following each
Total earners occupation as principal Partly agriculturalists
and
dependents Males Females Males Females
I. Pasture and agriculture 465,541 106,745 8,448 3,741 156
(a) Ordinary cultivation 406,520 90,000 7,337 1,796 62
1. Income from rent of agricultural land 17,586 3,609 1,418 226 16
2. Ordinary cultivators 297,761 59,798 3,392 1,259 33
3. Agents, managers of estates, clerks, rent 143 42 0 4 …
collectors, etc.
4. Agricultural instructors not in educational 6 1 0 … …
institutions
5. Farm servants and field labourers 91,024 26,550 2,527 307 13
and watchers
(b) Growers of special products and market gardening 35,058 8,719 711 1,615 84
6. Orange growers 7,357 1,917 83 199 …
7. Fruit, flower, vegetable, vine, etc., growers and 27,701 6,802 628 1,416 84
pickers. Floriculturalists and nurserymen
(c) Forestry 1,532 383 24 24 …
8. Forest officers, rangers, guards, etc. 187 47 4 1 …
9. Woodcutters, firewood collectors and 1,345 336 20 23 …
charcoal burners
(d) Raising of farm stock and stud service 22,199 7,589 300 304 10
10. Cattle and buffalo breeders and keepers 2,250 500 77 90 1
11. Sheep, goat and pig breeders 8,983 2,123 209 163 9
12. Breeders and trainers of other animals 209 36 2 2 …
(horses, mules, camels, donkeys, etc.)
13. Advisers in stock raising and dairy production … 0 0 … …
and poultry breeders
14. Herdsmen, shepherds, goatherds, etc. 10,757 4,930 12 49 …
(e) Raising of small animals 189 40 76 2 …
15. Breeders of birds, bees, silk worms, and 189 40 76 2 …
poultry farmers, rearers and sellers of leaches
(f) Agricultural machines service 43 14 0 … …
16. Owners, lessors, and drivers of 43 14 0 … …
agricultural machines
‘The column headed “Partly Agriculturalists” gives the details of earners who derive their principal livelihood from one
form of occupation, and who augment their means of subsistence by following, as a subsidiary occupation, one of the fol-
lowing agricultural pursuits:– Group (1) Income from rent of agricultural land; Group (2) Ordinary cultivators; Group (3)
Farm servants and field labourers and watchers.’ (Mills 1933: II: 281).
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 13

rent (4.32 per cent) (group1), 297,761 as ordinary cultivators (owners and tenants) (73.25 per
cent) (group 2), and 91,024 as laborers (22.4 per cent) (group 5).90 The Table also listed 97,337
Muslim ‘earners’ (male and female) whose primary occupation was ‘ordinary cultivation’; of this
total, 5,025 were receivers of rent (group 1) (5.16 per cent), 63,190 ordinary cultivators (owners
and tenants) (group 2) (64.9 per cent), and 29,077 laborers (group 5) (29.9 per cent). Overall,
these numbers accorded with Hope-Simpson’s estimates a year earlier. Although population
counts were higher in the census compared with previous estimates, the number of laborers
reflected a remarkable 29.9 per cent of the Arab (Muslim) population subsisting on agriculture as
a primary occupation (compared with Hope-Simpson’s 29.4 per cent).
A few months earlier, challenging the findings of the Hope-Simpson Report, Jewish statisti-
cians argued that it was a mistake to equate agricultural laborers with landlessness, creating
some confusion about the number of those among them who had some form of land tenure.
Anticipating the forthcoming census, the Jewish Committee indeed fought hard to ensure that it
would not ask questions about tenancy. Still, the final tabulation left no doubt that tenants were
counted as ordinary cultivators alongside land-owners (Group 2). Further, the final schedule
defined a ‘labourer’ as a person who ‘derives his livelihood from being employed by a cultivator
on the land from which the cultivator derives his livelihood’. While the definition of a ‘cultivator’
in the census was therefore less detailed than the one employed in the Johnson-Crosbie Report,
the definition of a ‘labourer’ was tighter. It was clear that the class of ‘labourers’, in and of itself,
did not include tenants (who were included in the general class of ‘cultivators’). This did not
mean that laborers were necessarily landless because it could still be the case that some laborers
(according to their primary occupation) were also tenants (or even owners or receivers of rent)
according to their subsidiary occupation (at least if it provided them with their most important
source of income for at least three months a year). The attempt to identify such cases may have
been a reason for one of the novelties of the final tabulation, one which had not been discussed
during the meetings of Mills with the Advisory Committees.
Table XVI of the Census of Palestine, unlike the Indian census, created a special column for
‘partly agriculturalists’. In his accompanying explanation Mills wrote that ‘the Column headed
“Partly Agriculturalists” gives the details of earners who derive their principal livelihood from one
form of occupation, and who augment their means of subsistence by following, as a subsidiary
occupation, one of the following agricultural pursuits: income from rent of agricultural land
(Group 1), ordinary cultivators (Group 2), or farm servants, and field labourers and watchers
(Group 5)’.91 The class of ‘partly agriculturalists’ lumped together groups 1, 2 and 5 and therefore
could not distinguish, in and of itself, the exact type of relation to land. However, we looked at
the number of ‘partly agriculturalists’ among the earners who were listed as ‘labourers’ in their
primary occupation. Among those ‘labourers’, only 320 people (out of 29,077 or 1.1 per cent)
were also ‘partly agriculturalists’ and therefore may have had some form of ownership or ten-
ancy.92 In other words, the 1931 Census yielded a count which indicated that the number of
agricultural laborers quite strongly approximated the size of a ‘landless class’.93 In this sense, the
efforts to totally eliminate the issue of landlessness had not been entirely successful. Still, as was
the case with the Hope-Simpson Report, the Census provided no additional information as to
the circumstances of those laborers neither with respect to previous land tenure nor with respect
to the scope of unemployment among them.

Conclusion
The scientific considerations and political struggles which shaped the 1931 Census of Palestine have
to date received little scholarly attention.94 In this article we focused primarily on the relation of the
Census to the politically explosive question of Palestinian-Arab landlessness, a matter which has
also been understudied. A recently published study examined the issue of landlessness throughout
14 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

the 1930s, considered its treatment by British policy-makers, and identified their collusion with
Zionist institutions in its ‘political suppression in 1931’.95 Here, we provided an account tracing the
struggle over the attempts to translate the political notion (i.e. intuition, lived experience, tacit
knowledge, partial data) into a scientifically validated statistical category. Our archival reconstruction
demonstrates the role of experts and the weight of asymmetrical statistical expertise in determining
the shape of the census and, specifically, the statistical career of landlessness. Beyond the specifics
of the Census, our analysis therefore also contributes to the literature on the role of statistical and
demographic experts in the Jewish colonization of Palestine.96
Our findings also highlight the crucial role of British colonial experience with census-making
in India. The Indian blueprint provided a way for recording ‘economic relations’ to land (i.e.
‘occupational’) while avoiding politically sensitive ‘legal’ ones (i.e. ownership). The language of
comparative statistics allowed the Jewish Advisory Committee (and Jewish campaigners in gen-
eral) to score a political success: the Census did not measure unemployment and altogether
avoided the statistical category of landlessness. At the same time, the language of comparative
colonial statistics afforded the British Superintendent of the Census a legitimate ‘apolitical’ scien-
tific way for approximating the size of that otherwise not-be-discussed landless class.
Our point is not that Jewish expertise trumped British expertise or vice versa. Our point is that
the asymmetry of expertise between the Arab Advisory Committee on the one hand and Jewish
and British experts on the other hand allowed the latter to effectively translate politics into the lan-
guage of science. By positioning themselves on a par with the British in the matter of statistical
expertise, the Jewish Advisory Committee had been able to successfully collude with the British in
presenting the census as a purely scientific demographic endeavor, thereby frustrating both Arab
expectations and earlier British intentions. Absent Arab expert demands to the contrary, the Indian
Census provided a convenient way to satisfy Jewish demands without appearing ‘political’.
Although the final results yielded some approximations of landlessness, the figures were by
and large buried in the ocean of occupational data. Consequently, while both Arab leaders and
British administrators kept suggesting that Jewish immigration and land purchases contributed
to the emergence of an Arab landless class throughout the 1930s, the category of landlessness
as such had never been statistically established.97 Whatever the political value of these figures
had been, they were obscured by a subsequent British ‘special enquiry’ about Arab landlessness
which could directly be attributed to Jewish colonization. The Landless Arab Inquiry of 1931 pro-
vided another strong example of the influence of Jewish experts. It adopted the definition of the
Jewish Agency for landless Arabs, counting only those who were displaced from lands they had
previously held because those lands passed into Jewish hands (and they were not the sellers),
and did not obtain another holding or find an equally satisfactory employment. The result was
that very few Arab farmers qualified under this restrictive definition.98
In sum, Arab landlessness failed to become a valid and statistically potent category although
as a political contention it ‘continued to creep back into view’ throughout the 1930s.99 In 1933,
with the rise of Nazism in Germany, a massive wave of Jewish immigration changed the demog-
raphy and scale of Arab-Jewish confrontation of the country forever. The British administration
of Palestine never attempted another census.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes
1. For a comprehensive analysis see Shalom Reichman, Yossi Katz and Yair Paz, ‘The Absorptive Capacity of
Palestine, 1882–1948’, Middle Eastern Studies 33, no. 2 (1997), pp.338–61.
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 15

2. Talal Asad, ‘Ethnographic Representation, Statistics and Modern Power’, Social Research 61, no. 1 (1994),
pp.55–88; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 2006), p.184; Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. The British in India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p.8; Alain Desrosi eres, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History
of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History,
and the Emergence of Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (1997), pp.163–83.
3. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (eds),
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp.314–39;
Anderson, Imagined Communities; Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015), p.5; Asad, ‘Ethnographic Representation’, pp.55-88; Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of
Knowledge; Nicholas Dirks, ‘Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India’, Representations 37
(1992), pp.56-78; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2002).
4. Mara Loveman, ‘The U.S. Census and the Contested Rules of Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century
Puerto-Rico’, Caribbean Studies 35, no. 2 (2007), pp.79–113; Tim Rowse, ‘Rooted in Demographic Reality: The
Contribution of New World Censuses to Indigenous Survival’, History and Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2014),
pp.246–62; Jacqueline Urla, ‘Cultural Politics in an Age of Statistics: Numbers, Nations, and the Making of
Basque Identity’, American Ethnologist 20, no. 4 (1993), pp.818–43.
5. Roger Owen, ‘The Population Census of 1917 and Its Relationship to Egypt’s Three 19th Century Statistical
Regimes’, Journal of Historical Sociology 9, no. 4 (1996), pp.457–73; Matthew C. Snipp, ‘Racial Measurement in
the American Census: Past Practices and Implications for the Future’, Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003),
pp.563-88; Nandini Sundar, ‘Caste as Census Category: Implications for Sociology’, Current Sociology 48, no. 3
(2000), pp.111–26.
6. Anderson, The American Census; Harvey M. Choldin, ‘Statistics and politics: The ‘Hispanic Issue’ in the 1980
Census’, Demography 23, no. 3 (1986), pp.403–18.
7. David Kertzer and Dominique Arel, Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National
Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
8. The population of Palestine had been classified according to religious affiliation: Muslims, Christians and Jews.
However, Muslims and (most) Christians identified as Arabs. British refusal (and Arab urging and Jewish
reluctance) to classify the population according to ‘race’ (i.e. ethnicity/nationality) merits a discussion which is
beyond the scope of this study.
9. We analyze the files of the Colonial Office (CO) in the British National Archives, mainly focusing on the
protocols of the meetings between the Superintendent of the Census and the Advisory Committees. The
protocols mention, yet do not include, the record of some informal meetings which had taken place between
the parties.
10. Hillel Cohen, Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1929 (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2015), p.XI.
11. Walter Shaw, Report of a Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929 (London: His Majesty’s
Stationery Office), p.117.
12. Ibid., pp.123–24, 180.
13. William Johnson and Robert Crosbie, Report of a Committee on the Economic Condition of Agriculturalists in
Palestine and the Fiscal Measures of the Government hereto (Jerusalem: Government of Palestine, 1930), p.21.
14. Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1984), p.109.
15. Johnson and Crosbie, Report, p.21.
16. For a critique of British failure to fully understand the Musha system see Amos Nadan, ‘Colonial
Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Musha Tenure in Mandate
Palestine, 1921–47’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 46, no. 3 (2003), pp.320–54.
17. Estimating the amount of cultivable land proved difficult. Zionist experts supplied the Shaw Commission with
their own calculations but Hope-Simpson disputed them and instead adopted the Commissioner of Lands’
strict definition of cultivable land (taking into account ‘the labour and financial resources of the average
individual Palestinian cultivator’). Reliable statistics were scarce and in his haste to aid the commission Major
C. H. Ley, Director of Surveys, carried out an aerial survey.
18. For a critique of this ‘dubious extrapolation’ see Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, p.109; Issa Khalaf,
Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939-1948 (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), p.253.
19. John Hope-Simpson, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development (London: His Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1930), p.142.
20. Arthur Ruppin, The Statistical Bases of Sir John Hope Simpson’s Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and
Development in Palestine (London: Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1931).
16 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

21. CO 733/204/4 Confidential letter of Hope-Simpson to Shuckburgh, 7 June 1931. In 1928 Sir Russell also
commissioned an independent report by Dr A. T. Strahorn from the U.S. Bureau of Soils, which was also
considered and rejected by Hope-Simpson.
22. Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p.155; Jacob Metzer, ‘The Economy of Mandatory Palestine: Reviewing the Development of Research in the
Field’, in Avi Bareli and Nahum Karlinsky (eds), Economy and Society in Mandatory Palestine (Sede Boqer: The
Ben-Gurion Research Center, 2003), pp.7–57 (Hebrew).
23. Metzer, ‘The Economy of Mandatory Palestine’, p.14; Cf. Said Himadeh, Economic Organization of Palestine
(Beirut: American University, 1938).
24. For example, see CO 733/207/12 letter of Major C. H. Ley, Director of Surveys, to Acting Chief Secretary,
defending the aerial survey, 10 July 1931.
25. CO 733/204/4 Confidential letter of Hope-Simpson to Shuckburgh, 7 June 1931.
26. Ruppin, The Statistical Bases of Sir John Hope Simpson’s Report.
27. Sidney Webb Passfield, White Paper: Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom
(London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930).
28. Hope-Simpson, Palestine: Report on Immigration, p.142.
29. Ibid., p.11.
30. See full text of the Passfield White Paper at https://ecf.org.il/media_items/441.
31. MacDonald letter available at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-macdonald-letter-february-1931; see also
Carly Beckerman-Boys, ‘The Reversal of the Passfield White Paper, 1930–31: A Reassessment’, Journal of
Contemporary History 51, no. 2 (2016), pp.213–33.
32. MacDonald letter.
33. Charles Anderson, ‘The British Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness, 1929–1936’, Middle Eastern
Studies 54, no. 2 (2018), pp.171–215. Anderson concludes that ‘the minimization of the landless issue had
been a shared aim of the government and the Jewish Agency since the Passfield White Paper debacle’, p.217.
Also Stein, The Land Question in Palestine.
34. CO 733/206/5a Letter from the Jewish Agency (sgd Brodetsky) to Shuckburgh, 8 June 1931.
35. CO 733/206/5a internal memoranda June 1931.
36. CO 733/206/5a Letter from the Jewish Agency (sgd Brodetsky) to Shuckburgh, 8 June 1931.
37. CO 733/206/5B Letter of RZO to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 11 November 1931.
38. See Hacking, The Taming of Chance, pp.16-17 on the different ‘flavors’ of national and colonial enumeration.
39. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 1931, p.2.
40. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 23 July 1931, p.7.
41. CO 733/206/5a internal memoranda, June 1931.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 1931, p.2.
46. CO 733/206/5B, printout of ’Hamedina’, 25 September 1931.
47. Tom Segev writes that ‘one of the bitterest moments’ in Mills’s life ‘was when he, an Englishman, saw what
had happened under the British flag’ during the riots of 1929, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under
the British Mandate (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p.325; on the adherence of Mills to Malthus’s theories see
Alon Tal, The Land is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), p.227;
on the 1933 appointment of Mills as Palestine Commissioner for Migration and Statistics see CO 733/255/4.
48. Choldin, Statistics and politics, p.403.
49. Omnia El Shakry, ‘Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 3 (2005), p.355; Owen, ‘The Population Census of
1917’, p.461.
50. Cf. Choldin, Statistics and politics – The Census Advisory Committee on the Spanish Origin Population for the
1980 US Census, comprised of Hispanic-origin experts.
51. Jews were 16.9 per cent of the total population according to the 1931 Census, see CO 733/206/5B
‘Declaration of Superintendent of Census of Provisional Total Population by Religious Confession’.
52. CO 733/206/5B, Memorandum submitted by the Superintendent of Census, 23 October 1931.
53. Ibid.
54. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 1931, p.2.
55. For biographical details see: https://www.paljourneys.org/en/biography/9835/awni-abd-al-hadi, https://www.
paljourneys.org/en/biography/9851/jamal-al-husseini, https://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/dictionaries-thesauruses-
pictures-and-press-releases/mogannam-mogannam-ilyas.
56. For biographical details see: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/katznelson-reuben.
57. CO 733/206/5B, confidential letter from Mills to the Chief Secretary, 16 June 1931. Mills reported to have
approached Mussa Nasir who had ‘some mathematical training and an accurate mind’, Mr F. Saba who was
 MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 17

not a statistician but ‘attempts some of the statistical work for the Arab Executive’, and an Egyptian official
who was somewhat ‘familiar’ with statistical methods. He also approached Mr. Gurevitch, a statistician for the
Jewish Agency and Katznelson.
58. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 6 July 1931, p.2. The protocol recorded a member of
the committee warning against ‘a sheer inflation of an undesirable class’. This may have been a typing error
and the reference was to an ‘unproductive class’. In the matter of unemployment, Bertillon’s occupational
scheme included an ’unproductive’ class consisting of jail and hospital inmates, beggars and vagrants, and
persons without any occupation. Upon Jewish insistence that principal occupation be recorded irrespective of
current employment, which coincided with English census conventions at the time, the latter was reduced to
an empty definition. In all of Palestine, Muslims ‘without any occupation’ numbered 31 of a total population
of 693,159.
59. Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought’, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, no. 3 (1991), pp.463–84.
60. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, p.2.
61. Ibid.
62. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 1931, p.4.
63. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Arab Committee, 4 July 1931, p.2. Mills also suggested two more
informal meetings with the Arab Committee to discuss ‘other matters’.
64. Ibid., p.2.
65. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 1931, p.4.
66. Eric Mills, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I (Report) & vol. II, (Tables) (Alexandria, Egypt: Whitehead Morris, 1933),
vol. I, p.269.
67. Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife’.
68. Stating that ‘persons temporarily out of work should be returned under the principal occupation previously
followed by them’.
69. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 6 July 1931, p.2.
70. Ibid., p.3.
71. Ibid., p.5.
72. Owen, ‘The Population Census of 1917’, pp.463-4.
73. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, p.6.
74. Mills, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I, p.289.
75. See note 62, above.
76. Mills, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I, p.284.
77. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 6 July 1931, p.3.
78. Ibid., p.4.
79. In India, dependents could not have a principal occupation as it was taken from the earner supporting them.
In the 1931 Census dependents were allowed to have their own subsidiary occupation and the 1931 Census
of Palestine allowed it as well.
80. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Jewish Committee, 8 July 31, p.3.
81. CO 733/206/5a, meeting of Mills with Arab Committee, 4 July 1931, p.2.
82. Ibid., p.3 (Q13 recorded non-agricultural occupations).
83. CO 733/206/5B, Memorandum Submitted by the Superintendent of Census, 23 October 1931.
84. CO 733/206/5 handwritten letter of High Commissioner Chancellor to Shuckburgh at Colonial Office, 3 July
1931. Also handwritten letter of High Commissioner to Shuckburgh, 10 July 1931: ‘I have just seen Mills who
has been discussing the questionnaire with his Jewish and Arab Advisory Committees. He tells me that
yesterday in succeeded in obtaining from both committees understandings that they would both cooperate
in the carrying out of the census on the basis of the questionnaire to which they have agreed. Mills deserves
much credit for having brought his committees along, for their ingenuity and malevolence in imagining base
motives which they impute to Government are hardly credible’.
85. Ibid., letter from High Commissioner Chancellor to Shuckburgh, 8 August 1931.
86. Mills, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I, pp.2–3.
87. Eric Mills, Census of Palestine (populations of towns, villages, and administrative areas) (Jerusalem: The Greek
Convent & Goldberg Presses, 1932).
88. Mills, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I, p.273.
89. Ibid., vol. II, pp.281–314.
90. On the grouping of owners and tenants under the category of ‘ordinary cultivators’ see Anderson, ‘The British
Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness’: ‘the census failed to distinguish between sharecroppers
and owner-cultivators’ and ‘the extent of sharecropping, the missing variable, was never ascertained with any
precision’, p.188.
91. Ibid., vol. II, p.281.
18 I. SASSON AND R. SHAMIR

92. Of the total number of ‘earners’ with a primary occupation of ’ordinary cultivation’, 1,858 were also listed as
‘partly agriculturalists:’ 242 (group 1), 1292 (group 2), and 320 (group 5). The column numbering changed in
the final schedule from C10-12 to C12-14, respectively.
93. For another indication of the statistical proximity between ‘labourers’ and landlessness, see Mills’s comment
that ‘indebtedness to the money lender may quickly reduce the ordinary cultivator to the status of
agricultural labourer’, Census of Palestine 1931, vol. I, pp.291–292, and footnote 77.
94. For general commentary see Edward Hagopian and A. B. Zahlan, ‘Palestine’s Arab Population: The
Demography of the Palestinians’, Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 4 (1974), pp.32–73; Yehoshua Porath, ‘The
Land Problem in Mandatory Palestine’, The Jerusalem Quarterly 1 (1976), pp.18–27; Stein, The Land Question in
Palestine; Tal, The Land is Full.
95. Anderson, ‘The British Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness’, p.173.
96. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine; Metzer, ‘The Economy of Mandatory Palestine’; Sandra M. Sufian, Healing
the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
97. Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘From Poverty to Revolt: Economic Factors in the Outbreak of the 1936 Rebellion in
Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 3 (2000), pp.93–113.
98. Lewis French, Supplementary Report on Agricultural Development and Land Settlement in Palestine (Jerusalem:
Department of Development, 1932); Stein, The Land Question in Palestine.
99. Anderson, ‘The British Mandate and the Crisis of Palestinian Landlessness’, p.202.

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