VMax
Junior Member
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Nice Strawman!You started out claiming Palestine's population was mainly in the cities, and somehow extrapolated a verse describing Ramle's country as 'waste' to mean Palestine had no population. Now after you've done a quick Wiki search, you contend with the 80-75% rural range for the 16th century. Thank you for playing along my side. The only next step left for you is to open a book.
Ottoman rule was not a uniform period by any means, and similar to the rest of the region the population contracted and increased depending on many variables.
You seriously thought "only 6 towns" was the jaw breaker when, in fact, Bernard Lewis himself says that Palestine only had six major administrative centers which retained an urban status during that period:
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What happened after the mid-16th century is a fast development of the urban centers of Palestine - akin to all of Syria.
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Now going to Scholch, the population was still overwhelmingly rural in the mid-19th century as mentioned above. The 85-90% range was a mistake on my part, as it was only for the districts of Nablus and Jerusalem, which I had misremembered.
However, much of Palestine was still rural c. 1849 after the urbanization that ensued in the 18th and 19th centuries
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Roughly 670 villages and cities in Palestine were included in the census of 1871. A 'wasteland' indeed!
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Scholch adds - the rural population, in fact, underwent a reverse process of decline pre-1870:
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With the rise of Yusuf Effendi al-Khalidi, the power of rural shaykhs was basically diminished. What happened then? Scholch tells us:
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It's amazing what opening a book can do.
Let's also not forget that none of this - absolutely none - justifies Zionism and the colonization that's going on in Palestine at the moment.
No, I started out with a basic point as a response to DrWho33's comment that Palestine was 'inhabited and settled.'
Here is my first remark on the subject: Palestine was sparsely inhabited and very much so only in the main towns except Jerusalem and a few others. It was very very underdeveloped as any travelogue will tell you and any early footage.
Nowhere did I say 'Palestine had no population' except the main towns. It is clear that I said that it was sparsely populated except a few main towns like Jerusalem and a few others.
You then responded to that post with this:
"Not only was Palestine as a whole well-populated during the 18th-19th century, which was recorded by many travelers who visited the area, the rural population comprised ~85-90% of the total population. Anyone even a tiny bit familiar with the Levant's demography and history knows that."
I then went on to show you how all those highlighted points were wrong using your own data to show how it was not 85-90% in the rural areas. I used a quote from an 18th century travelogue to show how it was sparsely populated between the coast of Jaffa and Jerusalem - two main towns. And I gave you the upward bound of the total population of 500k in 1880 to show how that is not as you said 'as a whole well populated' for a land the size of Palestine.
And that was done besides all of your insults along the way. I have one of my own - I don't have time for liars or fools who can't follow their own context and the posts of those they argue with. Go play on X (formerly twitter) or Tik-tok where you belong. Being able to post picks of book pages attached to your strawman does not impress me.
As I said using your own sources:
Yeah, 30% in 13 Towns - just like I said. There was more than 13 towns. Now what does that look like in an area the size of Palestine. It looks underdeveloped and underpopulated.
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