Ottoman Population, 1830-1914
Kemal H. Karpat
University of Wisconsin Press
The Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century was a society in transition. The traditional religious communities were gradually displaced by ethnically distinct and economically self-sufficient nation states. The rise of those states would ultimately dismember the once far-ranging empire. In this seminal study of Ottoman population statistics and demographic trends from 1830 to 1914, Kemal Karpat offers an important new perspective on an empire's passing. Drawing primarily on Turkish archives, he presents a wealth of nineteenth-century census records, many of them previously unavailable, that help clarify both the Ottoman population's composition and the demographic shifts that finally split the state. The outcome is a ground-breaking work that social and economic historians and serious students of Turkey, the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa will find invaluable. |