Making of a mid-nineteenth century Ottoman gazetteer and mapping and examining late Ottoman population geography

ABSTRACT:This article highlights the absence of historical gazetteers for territories once part of the Ottoman Empire, which hinders modern scholarship. The mid-nineteenth-century population registers (nüfus defterleri) offer a useful foundation for developing a gazetteer of the entire Ottoman Empire, but their use is limited due to the challenging task of geolocating the included populated places. To overcome this issue, two research projects collaborated to map mid-nineteenth-century population data using around 850 Ottoman population registers from the 1840s. The authors utilized historical maps and population registers to geolocate 16,782 populated places, creating the first version of their regional mid-nineteenth-century gazetteer. The article outlines the team's methodology used to build the gazetteer and addresses the notable limitations of the sources. Moreover, it contributes to the study of Ottoman population geography by demonstrating the extensive possibilities of historical GIS methodologies in enriching population density maps by considering environmental variables in the analysis.