A nineteenth-century urban Ottoman population micro dataset: Data extraction and relational database curation from the 1840s pre-census Bursa population registers

Abstract

In recent decades, the “big microdata revolution” has transformed access to transcribed historical census data for social science research. However, the population records of the Ottoman Empire, spanning Southeastern Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa, remained inaccessible to the big microdata ecosystem due to their prolonged unavailability. This publication marks the inaugural release of complete population data for an Ottoman urban center, Bursa, derived from the 1839 population registers. The dataset presents originally non-tabulated register data in a tabular format integrated into a relational Microsoft Access database. Thus, we showcase the extensive and diverse data found in the Ottoman population registers, demonstrating a level of quality and sophistication akin to the censuses conducted worldwide in the nineteenth century. This valuable resource, whose potential has been massively underexploited, is now presented in an accessible format compatible with global microdata repositories. Our aim with this dataset is to enable historical demographic studies for the Ottoman realm and beyond, while also broadening access to the datasets constructed by our large research team.