The 19th century is chosen as a period for a static section study of the population of Kedah for a number of reasons. The most important is perhaps the feasibility of the study at all, for as with the other states of Malaysia, no statistically based discussion on population or landuse can be undertaken for periods earlier than the 19th century. Secondly, the population of the State during that century provides us with a picture of what the situation was like, and what it might have continued to be, with regards to numbers, composition and distributions, prior to the drastic demographic and economic upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The existence within the State's population of certain elements and situations peculiar to the century alone provide other points of interest. Examples were the presence of a large Thai element and of the Jawi Pekan community, both of which became conspicuously absent after the census of 1911.