During the era of Arab-Mameluk-Ottoman rule, Egypt was swept by wars
and plagued by repeated economic crises and famines, so much so that when
Napoleon’s scientists wrote their Déscription de l’Égypte in 1798–1801 they es-
timated the size of the country’s population at only 2.46 million. The reign
of Mohammed Ali brought an end to the chaotic conditions and introduced
a time of political stability. By 1846 the population had nearly doubled and
was estimated at 4.476 million. The growth rate increased during the Brit-
ish colonial period, when in the thirty-five years between 1882 and 1917 the
population rose from 6.804 million to 12.751 million. The next doubling took
forty years, so that Egypt had a population of 26.1 million in 1960, after which
the doubling of the figure gained further impetus and subsequently took less
than thirty years. In 1990 Egypt had about 55 million inhabitants, in the year
2003 nearly 70 million. During the 1980s the population growth rate was 2.8
per cent annually, dropping to 2 per cent in the 1990s. This was partly as
a result of decades of intensive governmental campaigns propagating birth
control, but must also be attributed to other factors like increasing urbaniza-
tion, growing female employment, the deterioration of housing conditions,
the high rate of inflation and the increase in poverty among the majority of
the population.