AHC: Have Ottoman populations recover from the Little Ice Age as fast as Western Europe's

Yeah, but Hungary and Egypt would be huge losses.

Yes, of course (well, at least in the case of Hungary it seems that the Ottomans had been capturing the locals and 'exporting' them as slaves) but my point was that if the Ottomans were truly looking for the new agricultural lands for colonization they definitely could use at least some of the territories they controlled directly or through vassal states for a colonization (as in moving the Turkish settlers into these areas). But, with the few exceptions (I know about Dobruja but this happened in the early XVI) they were mostly into the taxation.
 
What about this?

http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/russia/eurrusdemhist17961917.html

It says that the population grew between 3.5 and 5 times every 50 years in the long 19th century(up to 1914) in Astrakhan and the Don basin(meaning that, if the math is right, the population in 1914 was 12 to 25 times the 1810 one).

How about reading what was already posted on the issue before coming with such a "discovery"? Or an attempt to figure out what I'm talking about before start arguing? You are just confirming my point about population growth inside old Russian borders and a very weak link between that growth and Asiatic acquisitions (with their "vast steppes", which is hardly the case with Astrakhan and Don; none of these areas is big even within framework of European Russia). I already produced relevant data in my 1st post. BTW, data in that site are rather irrelevant to the time table set in the original post because they start only from 1810 and limited to the European Russia.

FYI, Astrakhan (conquered in 1556) and Don (recorded Russian settlements started in 1549) are within 1646 Russian borders. In other words, their conquest happened when population of Tsardom was quite small (7M). Population within these borders kept growing at a high rate (more than 10 times increase between 1646 and 1914) while migration into the Russian Asia remained (with very few exceptions) quite low. So how that acquisition of the "vast Eurasian steppe" (most of which is in Asia and was acquired in the late XVIII - XIX century) was relevant to the Ice Age or growth of the Russian population in XVI - XVIII?
 
I didn't say that the Balkans were desert, but rather that Scandinavia has cold and heavy soils which is exactly where agricultural technology had room to grow 1500-1800, unlike the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, which had already been heavily cultivated nearly to their preindustrial maximum. The Balkans were a warzone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, so of course they did not see the same kind of growth as other parts of Europe. The cold climate of the Little Ice Age certainly hurt European agriculture, but New World crops and new techniques arrived at the same time that increased productivity and cutting down forests allowed the cultivation of more land.

I wouldn't put it all down to climatic factors either, but mismanagement alone can't be the sole cause. Russian Empire was probably even more mismanaged, as during the eighteenth century, there were no fewer than forty-four pretenders in Russia.

With a single exception of Pugachev, these pretenders were not causing any serious trouble. Well, one can add so-called "Princess Tarakanova" but the trouble she caused was outside Russian borders (and had been dealt with in a rather nasty way by "Alexan" Orlov).

However, putting aside the pretenders, mismanagement was an endemic problem in the Russian Empire stretching all the way to 1917. When Peter I decided to issue a decree according to which a person who stole a sum big enough to buy a piece of a rope should be hanged, his "Attorney General" (Procurator of a Senate) told him in public: "You'll find yourself without the subjects because all of us here are stealing". And the most glorious (in the terms of acquisitions, international influence, etc.) reign of the XVIII, time of Catherine II, was an epitome of mismanagement and corruption and it is not just about the exaggerated stories of Potemkin villages. When Paul I became an emperor, the #1 item in his "program" was to establish a strict order in a military and civic administration. He tried really hard but had neither brain nor tools needed for accomplishing this task. By the time of Nicholas I corruption was so endemic that (a) Nicholas told his son Alexander that they are probably the only two persons in the empire who are not taking the bribes and (b) his Minister of Justice gave a bribe to his own subordinate for preparing an official document confirming minister's daughter (absolutely legal) marriage. Famous poet of the XIX, A.K. Tolstoy, wrote a satiric poem on the Russian history where reign of each monarch, starting with Rurik, was concluded with a comment "and there still was no order". x'D

So, yes, a country can survive seemingly successfully with a high degree of mismanagement and even with a very backward agriculture (by 1914 many of the Russian peasants still did not have modern ploughs), with a very slow introduction of the new cultures (potato had been forcibly introduced only during the reign of Nicholas I), with the regular famines and with a relatively limited expansion of the agricultural territories.
 
Err... "the process of managing something badly or wrongly" :teary:

In the case of (almost any) government involves bribes, incompetence, misuse of a power, etc.
Well in the context of the conversation it would be useful knowing what exactly that is(as in the particular example or thing the ottomans did wrong), because that's the point of the AHC.

How about reading what was already posted on the issue before coming with such a "discovery"? Or an attempt to figure out what I'm talking about before start arguing? You are just confirming my point about population growth inside old Russian borders and a very weak link between that growth and Asiatic acquisitions (with their "vast steppes", which is hardly the case with Astrakhan and Don; none of these areas is big even within framework of European Russia). I already produced relevant data in my 1st post. BTW, data in that site are rather irrelevant to the time table set in the original post because they start only from 1810 and limited to the European Russia.

FYI, Astrakhan (conquered in 1556) and Don (recorded Russian settlements started in 1549) are within 1646 Russian borders. In other words, their conquest happened when population of Tsardom was quite small (7M). Population within these borders kept growing at a high rate (more than 10 times increase between 1646 and 1914) while migration into the Russian Asia remained (with very few exceptions) quite low. So how that acquisition of the "vast Eurasian steppe" (most of which is in Asia and was acquired in the late XVIII - XIX century) was relevant to the Ice Age or growth of the Russian population in XVI - XVIII?
You said those area(lower Volga in particular) didn't experience noticeable immigration until like the early to mid 20th century, I was indicating that even in the 19th century that seems to have been the case(without knowing the absolute population values of those governates)
 
Denmark have heavy soil, the rest of Scandinavia doesn’t. It have a thin layer of acidic top soil on top of the basement rock.

Also no Russia wasn’t really mismanaged in the same manner as the Ottoman Empire. The Czars incompetent as they were on other points, did a great job creating a monopoly of force. They also invaded foreigner in to develop Russia, and mostly kept it promises to those foreigners. The Czars was fundamental rulers from whom all power came, the Ottomans was fundamental bandits living of loot of their empire and bribing smaller bandits to stay loyal.

Probably you meant “invited” and not “invaded” (actually, they did both) :)

But what (terminology aside) was different is in the case of Russia is that the target was a direct acquisition (which allowed to exercise “power” from top to bottom) while in the case of the Ottomans it was often a fight for loot (as was the case with the 2nd siege f Vienna) and their conquests were quite often creating the vassal states. While, as you said, in many aspects it was more or less the same, however, it was leaving local military power and administration (and taxation) in the hands of the local rulers, which was less effective in the terms of money squeezing and concentration of a military power than a system under which the governors had been just state officials with no military power of their own (as was the case in Russia) and a very limited freedom of administrative actions. How many rebellious governors can you name in the Russian empire? This strong centralization, while being quite often a deterrent to the economic development, was an advantage as far as keeping the empire together was involved.
 
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Well in the context of the conversation it would be useful knowing what exactly that is(as in the particular example or thing the ottomans did wrong), because that's the point of the AHC.


You said those area(lower Volga in particular) didn't experience noticeable immigration until like the early to mid 20th century, I was indicating that even in the 19th century that seems to have been the case(without knowing the absolute population values of those governates)

Ah, I see the reason of confusion. Most of the European part of lower Volga region (Astrakhan - Don) was conquered by Moscow in the XVI century and is included in the numbers related to population growth of the territories within 1646 borders and into your article. However, the areas to the East of Volga were subdued later and remained relatively unused until Khruschev’s “Tselina” program. Most of these areas are in Asia, not Europe, and are not covered by the article your quoted (they are in yellow on the maps).

The areas further to the East, even if a big part of them formally became Russian in the XVII century or even earlier (aka, when Russian population in general was quite low), I’m talking about ‘Siberia’, started getting serious increase of population only in the early XX century. Conquest of the CA was triggered not by a need of migration from overpopulated European areas but by the different factors.

Edit: Even now in Astrakhan Oblast only 64% of land are taken by agriculture and only 7% are grain-producing area. Agriculture is mostly vegetables, watermelons and meat production (climate is rather hard: very hot dry summers and extremely cold winters as the soil, as far as I could observe, is not very good). In the late XIX the main occupations were: fishing (mostly herring), salt extraction, herding, gardening (watermelons had been exported to the rest of Russia and once had been even sent to Frederick II as a present). Grain production was quite limited with a resulting need of import from the neighboring areas. So it is not like it was a great agricultural region capable of solving national food supply problems.
 
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