Ottoman Armenian population

This article about the Ottoman Armenian population presents some statistics of the Armenian population within the Ottoman Empire. Population size within the empire between 1914 and 1915 is a controversial topic. Most estimates by Western scholars range around 2.4 million (according to Samuel Cox, American Embassy in Istanbul from 1880-1886).

Establishing the size of this population is very important in determining an accurate estimation of Armenian losses between 1915 and 1923 during the Armenian Genocide.

While the Ottoman Empire had population records prior to the 1830s, it was only in 1831 that the Office of Population Registers fund (Ceride-i Nüfus Nezareti) was founded. To draw more accurate data, the Office decentralized in 1839. Registrars, inspectors, and population officials were appointed to the provinces and smaller administrative districts. They recorded births and deaths periodically and compared lists indicating the population in each district. These records were not a total count of population. Rather, they were based on what is known as “head of household”. Only the ages, occupation, and property of the male family members only were counted.

The official data derived from extending the taxation values to the total population. Because of the use of taxation data to infer population size, detailed data for numerous Ottoman urban centers - towns with more than 5,000 inhabitants - is accurate. This data was collaborated with data on wages and prices. Another source was used for the numbers of landlords of households in the Ottoman Empire – every household was assumed to have 5 residents.

In 1844, the Ottoman government recorded a total of 2.4 million Armenians. Abdolonyme Ubicini, a French historian and journalist, was one of the first to publish the 1844 figure by adding that he considers it an underestimation of the total Ottoman Armenian population. The Armenians inhabiting Ottoman Empire in Europe are scarcely four hundred thousand, of which more than half reside in Constantinople, the others are scattered through Thrace and Bulgaria. On the other hand, Turkey in Asia contains not less than two million Armenians, the majority of whom still inhabit the ancient territory of their forefathers in the neighborhood of Mount Ararat; the three eyalets of Erzeroum, Diarbekir and Kurdistan contain many villages peopled entirely by Armenians, and in these provinces, notwithstanding frequent migrations, the Armenians preserve a numerical superiority over the Turkish and Turkoman races.

Ubicini states:

A 20th-century Turkish professor, İbrahim Hakkı Akyol, also considers the 1844 as an underestimation of the total Ottoman population because the taxes to be set for each vilayet and kaza would be based on the census result, and the population wanted to avoid them. In 1867, the 2.4 million figure remains unchanged, and was used by Ottoman official Salaheddin Bey in a book published on the occasion of the International Exposition in Paris. On the same occasion, an Ottoman Armenian official named Migirdich Bey Dadian gives a figure of 3.4 million, which the Ottoman government did not contest.

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Wikipedia