Comment by seventhtiger
3 days ago
This is true of most old empires. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, early Ottomans generally don't setttle areas they conquer. They don't engage in industrial extraction either. They form a ruling class and collect taxes. Any cultural influence that have was because of longevity rather than any interest in forced conversion. People project their impressions of more modern empires to pre-industrial ones that didn't have the same aspirations or even institutions to accomplish those aspirations.
That's really not true, e.g. the wikipedia page on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[1]. This dates way back to the Assyrian and Persian empries explicitly moving conquered peoples around in their empires in order to safeguard their rule. This book on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[2] explicitly states, with references, that the Ottomans habits were inherited from the steppe Turks, the Byzantines (=the Romans) and the Arabs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Population_transf... [2] https://websites.umich.edu/~gocek/Work/ja/Gocek.Muge.ja.popu...
There were of course population transfers, but there mathematically could not move enough people from the Arabian Peninsula into conquered regions.