Ottoman population studies has a long, venerated history. The field goes back at least as far as Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, a pioneer who made novel use of the imperial state archives. Research has greatly expanded since and now considers many forms of inter- and intra-imperial mobility—travel, pilgrimage, migration, nomadism, etc.—and draws upon a diverse source base. But important gaps persist, and work has tended to be heavily empirical and under-theorized. This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of Ottoman politics and demography by providing new findings on the practice of state-mandated population transfer (sürgün, sawq) in the 16th-century Arab lands—focusing on the experience of urban communities in Aleppo and, secondarily, Cairo. With the aid of narrative sources and state records in Arabic and Ottoman (e.g., biographical dictionaries and deportation orders), the paper will describe and analyze transfers undertaken by Sultan Selim (r. 1512-20) after his defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate and annexation of the Islamic heartlands. While one interpretive model suggests a shift in governing rationale took place at this time, moving from “resource colonization” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to “punitive regulation” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study will argue that transfer practices remained flexible and strategic and that multiple policy goals could be pursued simultaneously. In Aleppo, for example, Selim issued orders that merchants be rounded up and sent to Trabzon, resident Persians be sent to Istanbul, and families guilty of concealing Mamluk Sultan al-Ghawri’s (r. 1501-16) treasure be sent to the capital as well—all in the space of one year! The sources even permit glimpses of the impact such policies had on individuals, and not just impersonal groups. One biographer, Ibn al-Hanbali (d. 1563), describes people being seized at night and door-to-door. My analysis will unpack the local conditions that set the stage for these transfers and affected their implementation. It will also draw in the geopolitical context (e.g., rivalry with the emergent Safavid state) and offer comparative examples (e.g., Cyprus). In Ottoman studies, research on forced resettlement, sedentarization, and the like has tended to focus on the empire’s early and late history and the regions of Anatolia and the Balkans. This paper aims to address this imbalance with new evidence and fresh synthesis, while also speaking to broader interest in “imperial mobilities” during the early modern era.