Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Turkish and Ottoman Studies
Source ID
SRC-123
Citation
Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Turkish and Ottoman Studies
URL or path
research/Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914.pdf
Type
Scholarly monograph reproducing official Ottoman census returns
Hierarchy tier
3
Published
1985
Accessed
2026-08-16
Snapshot
HELD SINCE 29 JULY 2026, 24 MB, 129 pages, text layer present. Opened 16 August 2026 with PyMuPDF.
Claims
CH4 endowment; FIG-04-027 to FIG-04-033
Status
READ
Version history
The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.
READ AT THE TABLES 16 August 2026, AND ITS NON-OPENING WAS ITSELF A FINDING. The book sat in research/ unopened from 29 July while Chapter 4 v1 printed seven figures from it at second hand, taken from the source manuscript; the v1 figures pass raised that as blocker B11. WHEN IT WAS OPENED, ALL SEVEN FIGURES AND ALL FOUR YEARS VERIFIED, so the first limb of B11 was false and the retrieval that would have settled it took one search. TABLE I.18, 'Summary of Ottoman Census Reports, 1893-1914', PRINTED PAGE 190, which is the locator the source manuscript gave and the chapter had dropped. The Suriye (Syria) row reads 400,748 / 400,748 / 620,943 / 620,943 / 551,134 / 478,775 / 918,409 for 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1906 and 1914. The Zor row reads 34,250 / 38,652 / 132,328 / 132,830 / 51,260 / 60,854 / 66,294. THE GEOGRAPHY IS THE LIVE RISK AND THE CHAPTER GOT IT WRONG UNTIL v3: the table's row is headed SURIYE (SYRIA), a province of which Damascus was one sancak, and the chapter called it 'the province of Damascus' four times. TABLE I.16.A AT PRINTED PAGE 165, the 1906/7 summary, lists the province's sub-districts as '18 Suriye / Hama / Kerk / Havran', returns LAZKIYE UNDER BEYRUT, and puts MARAS AND URFA under Haleb. TABLE I.7.A AT PRINTED PAGES 120-121 gives the 1877/78 composition as the Sam, Hama, Trablus, Havran, Akka and Belka sancaks. So the Ottoman province of Syria reached into what is now Jordan, Latakia was counted with Beirut, and Aleppo ran north into what is now Turkiye, each confirmed at the book rather than inherited. AND KARPAT SUPPLIES THE CHAPTER'S OWN ARGUMENT ABOUT HIS FIGURES, in the notes to Table I.18: 'The figure for Basra given in the 1897 column is much higher than that for other years because that figure is from the Statistical Office. The Statistical Office was less conservative than the Population Directorate and would publish figures gathered by other means than actual count.' READ THE SCOPE OF THAT PRECISELY: it concerns BASRA and the 1897 column, a row nine places from Suriye, so it is the shape of the answer for the Suriye and Zor jumps and not Karpat's answer for them. An independent cross-check that holds: Total, Suriye at page 165 sums to 478,775, matching the 1906 column of Table I.18.
PATH GLYPH CORRECTED 17 August 2026: the row wrote a straight apostrophe or a hyphen where the file on disk carries a curly apostrophe or an en dash, so THE PATH DID NOT RESOLVE and the row could not be checked by anyone following it. The file is unchanged.