Making a list of sources on depopulation in Ottoman lands, mostly due to failure to maintain or restore infrastructure (i.e., irrigation systems) and to administrative failure that permitted banditry and piracy (Aegean) to become so bad that population declined.
Collecting these for my own purposes as I come across them. Sharing freely. Glad to have examples added to this list.
Moab – a geographic designator for the arable plateau east of the southern part of the Dead Sea, now part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The region has “dense settlement and intensive agriculture in the Byzantine period” and under the Hashemites, but “year round settlement was sparse and agriculture sporadic” in the late Ottoman period. Bruce Routledge, Moab in the Iron Age: Hegemony, Polity, Archaeology, 2004, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 57.
