This chapter focuses on the use of criminal statistics among British administrators and civil servants in colonial Egypt. I argue that British colonial officials working in the Egyptian Government made use of specific types of crime statistics that reshaped their ideas of what Egypt was and how the state should manage its inhabitants. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, British officials championed an ostensibly more rational regime of crime statistics. For this reason, I trace statistical discussions of murders, robberies and thefts to document how British governance in Egypt relied on authoritative methods to control crime. A major conceptual shift in the use of crime statistics occurred during the long 1890s – a period that began with the regular publication of annual statistics on Egyptian crime in 1891 and concluded with the British reorganisation of the Ministries of Interior and Justice before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The use of crime statistics during this period was not mere coincidence, but rather an integral part of a broader political effort to create an impartial state bureaucracy. The production of criminal statistics therefore served not just as an enumerative exercise, but also as a basis for implementing an efficient and empirical form of governance that could manage acceptable rates of Egyptian crime.

Because British administrators in Egypt increasingly relied on crime statistics during this period, the technical manner in which they classified Egyptian crime provides important insight into the raison d'etre of the legal regime they helped to establish in the 1890s. In making this argument, I build on the works of historians such as Roger Owen, Francois Ireton and Timothy Mitchell. However, I depart from them with my focus on select crimes that preoccupied British colonial officials and which they discussed at great length. While these historians have focused on the broader classificatory logic of statistics and their relationship to economic modes of thought, they have paid less attention to the ways in which colonial officials quantified specific criminal offences, such as homicide, robberies and thefts. For the most part, scholars of Egyptian history do not write about the problems inherent in statistical representations or how the British used crime statistics. My contribution to this discussion argues for the importance of a more narrow approach.