Empire Of Refugees (north Caucasian Muslims And The Late Ottoman State)

By (author) Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir
Description:

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state. Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires.

Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Table of contents:
Illustrations and Tables
Notes for the Reader
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: Refugee Migration
1. Muslim Migrations from the North Caucasus
2. Ottoman Refugee Regime
PART II: Refugee Resettlement
3. Inequality and Sectarian Violence in the Balkans
4. Real Estate and Nomadic Frontier in the Levant
5. Building the Caucasus in Anatolia
PART III: Diaspora and Return
6. Making the North Caucasian Diaspora
7. Return Migration to Russia
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Review quote:
"A brilliant tour de force. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed, revisionist understanding of the beginnings of the modern refugee regime."
—Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford
Review quote:
"Magnificent and magisterial. Empire of Refugees not only reveals the emergence of a new template for refugee flows in the modern world, but it also captures the human experiences of the refugees themselves: their sorrows, hopes, failures, and successes. A prodigious achievement."
—Michael A. Reynolds, Princeton University
Review quote:
"Empire of Refugees is a meticulously researched and imaginatively conceived history of mass migration that represents a genuinely fresh contribution to both late Ottoman history and global refugee studies."
—Laura Robson, Pennsylvania State University
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"Through an impressive approach to history from below, Hamed-Troyansky provides voice and agency to the refugees who have so far been silent on the pages of history. Through meticulous use of archives, diaries, letters, interviews, and petitions in multiple languages, he provides new ways of understanding the refugees'' experience(s).... The fascinating book should not only be considered a significant contribution to Russian, Ottoman, Caucasian, and Middle Eastern studies but also to the disciplines of refugee studies, diaspora studies, and genocide studies."—Bedross Der Matossian, American Historical Review
Review quote:
"Empire of Refugees offers a fresh take on the late Ottoman state and how the refugee question was a factor in many important events towards the end of the empire. A unique perspective on an under-explored topic, the book enriches Ottoman studies and makes for compelling reading for anyone interested in history."—Usman Butt, Middle East Monitor
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