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.
[2] 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.
[2] Ubicini states: It is difficult to form an exact estimate of the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
The statement which I have given from official calculation and which raises the number to an average of two million and four hundred thousand, is only an approximate computation, and probably below the truth [...][2]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 [citation needed].
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.
A first attempt was delegated to Karekin Vartabed Srvantsdiants in 1878, who made two trips to Armenian vilayets in 1878 and 1879.
[2] Samuel Cox at the American Embassy in Istanbul from 1880 to 1886, estimated the Armenian population within the empire to be of 2.4 million.
Numbers of both male and female subjects are given in ethno-religious categories including Muslims, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Latins, Syriacs and Gypsies.
His figures were also used to establish the ability of the Ottoman Empire to pay its debts, Cuinet eager to get precise numbers was finally forced to conclude that it was not possible to get them, he gives two main reasons for this.
An example often referred by the critics, was Cuinet's statistics drawn from Ottoman authority numbers and information that they provided him regarding the Vilayet of Aleppo (classified in those works as the sandjak of Marash).
Cuinet at the beginning of his work, cautioned the reader by declaring: "The science of statistics so worthy and interesting, not only still is not used in this country but even the authorities refuses, with a party line, to accept any investigation."
"[7] Britannica itself takes the figure of 1,750,000 as "a reasonable representation of the Armenian population in Anatolia prior to 1915.
"[8] Istatistik-i Umumi Idaresi conducted a new census survey for which field work lasted two years (1905–06).
There was no official census in 1914, contrary to some sources, but a mere approximation of figures taken from the 1905-06 Ottoman census based on official yearly birth and date figures (leaving villages unreported) along with a religious grouping as opposed to an ethnic one, equating all Muslims in one single column and undercounting native Christian population growth rates, because of the Ottoman Court's deliberate omission of the Ecclesiastical statistics, which included actual denominational baptism and death rates.
In 1992, Raymond H. Kevorkian and Paul B. Paboudjian published a book containing figures drawn from the Armenian Archives and based on the archives of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, ranging from February 1913 to August 1914, that contains the figures for each Ottoman province in detail.
[12] Ludovic de Contenson, present the figure of 1,150,000 for Asiatic Turkey, and call them “statistics” without any sources.
[citation needed] The fact that the 1912 records are based on a census that was conducted under the Hamidian regime, according to the critics, makes it dubious.
Turkish records as also suggest that sultan Hamid might have intentionally under-counted the Armenian population.
[15] Lynch himself report similar incidents: “Pursuing our way, we meet an Armenian priest—a young, broad-shouldered, open-faced man.
A soldier addresses him in Kurdish; the poor fellow turns pale, and remarks that he was mistaken in saying seven; there cannot be more than four ...Such are a few of our experiences during our short sojourn at Mush.”[16] Sultan Hamid apparently considered the under evaluation presented to him of 900,000 as exaggeration.
[17] The German chief of staff of the Ottoman Third Army, Colonel Felix Guse, complained that "The Turks knew only poorly their country, on top of that the possibility of getting reliable statistical figures was out of the question.