İlkay Yılmaz, Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
İlkay Yılmaz (İY): I was interested in the discussion on state formation, social movements, and the public sphere. I wanted to write about state-society relations in Istanbul during the Hamidian era (1876-1908). But when I started my research in the Ottoman archives, I was amazed by documents of police files and the reform commission, which was founded after the Treaty of Berlin (1878). There were a lot of documents about passports and geographic mobility in the archives. And I was also puzzled by the discourse in those documents, which used concepts of fesad (seditious), vagrant, and anarchist to label certain groups, mostly Armenians, Bulgarians, and seasonal and foreign workers. When I started to read in depth on the political context of the Hamidian era and the literature on state formation, I focused on how macro politics affected the lives of ordinary people through trans-imperial police cooperation, modernization of the state apparatus, and regulations on geographical mobility. I investigated Ottoman control methods during this period and tried to answer three questions: First, what political context shaped Ottoman security policies on geographical mobility? Second, which discursive traditions did the authorities draw on to define suspects, and how did they craft discourses to cast these groups as serious threats? Finally, which mobility restrictions were enacted, and how did these measures play out in practice? To answer these questions, instead of investigating the political borders or a specific region, I analyzed a particular set of practices. Trying to understand how the state refashioned the definition of “threat” in relation to the Macedonian and Armenian “questions” after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, I investigate regulations and practices related to passports and travel in terms of everyday security issues and situate such practices in the context of the Armenian and Macedonian questions, as well as widespread anti-anarchism to bridge global history and sociopolitical history.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
İY: One of the significant questions in my research concerns how the Ottoman government concentrated on improving the state's capacity to create knowledge of the Ottoman population and implement political decisions throughout the realm using its administrative infrastructure. Unlike existing works, which have focused on these two political problems separately, I analyze them together, which has allowed me to draw on the history of both mobility restrictions and state control—for instance, regulations on passports and internal travel permit systems—within the context of a rapidly expanding Ottoman police state.
This book provides a global institutional history of mobility restrictions and state documentation, analyzing travel regulations and other security practices within the tumultuous political climate of the late Ottoman period. It explores the Ottoman government's mobility restrictions as part of its attempt to collaborate with joint European security efforts, especially after the assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary.
In addressing my questions, I focused on interpreting significant administrative changes within the state. Drawing from influential works by Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens, and Michael Mann in historical sociology, I delved into conceptual debates. Michel Foucault's insights on surveillance, discipline, and governmentality also guided my exploration of raison d’état discussions, shedding light on state elites' perspectives during the Hamidian era. To understand state intervention in daily life through those theoretical discussions, I discussed security through two problematics: geopolitics and biopolitics. Through this approach, I aimed to decipher the historical context influencing perceptions of threat and security under Abdülhamid II, shaping the framework detailed in the initial two chapters of my study. The way that I wrote this book was a bit unconventional since the first chapter contains a theoretical discussion.
I tried to intertwine Ottoman attempts to control geographic mobility and security practices with global discussions at that time. I wrote about the Ottoman experience of employing the new administrative technologies of filing and circulating information about people. Some technologies, like photographs, were also relatively new in the contemporary European empires.
In this study, I proposed two main arguments. Firstly, the Ottoman regime's control over mobility was closely tied to its legitimacy crises, the rise of radical opposition, revolutionary violence, and territorial losses during the age of imperialism. Secondly, restrictions on movement served as indicators of the regime's power and reflected long-term shifts in Ottoman administrative practices. Sovereignty, modern power, and security created new kinds of marginalities and helped the state define new classes of subjects. These marginalities were usually attached to an ethnic and/or class identity, which can be traced in emerging Ottoman passport practices. Challenges to sovereignty gave rise to new attempts to restrict mobility. I explored how, especially in the Armenian case, the discussions on population numbers and marginalization process started long before the 1913 reform proposal. The practices of population policies are visible in the regulations of travel bans towards the Armenian population. In that sense, the book is also in discussion with works on Armenian massacres, the history of violence in Macedonia, migration history, and the history of policing. I think the works written in the last decade by a new generation of scholars are critical.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
İY: This book is a reviewed and re-written version of my Turkish book, published in 2014. Unfortunately, except for some Ottoman historians, that book was mostly invisible in the international academic sphere because it was written in Turkish. I used new archival findings in this new version and widened the referred literature by citing to the new works mainly in the history of violence and migration. I have also benefitted from the brave work of many scholars on the history of the Armenian massacres and the Armenian genocide. I hope I did not miss any crucial contributions in those fields.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
İY: I hope students of the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, migration history, history of violence, state formation, and critical security studies will engage with the book in the Anglophone academia. I hope the book becomes part of the discussions on placing the Ottomans in global history, especially among scholars working on comparative empires, state formation, and structural violence. Moreover, considering today's discussions on geographic mobility and migrations, I hope policymakers also read it to analyze the impact of marginalization through mobility controls.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
İY: I am working on a new project funded by the German Research Foundation. This project examines the history of security policies in eastern Anatolia from 1878 to 1952. I am trying to unfold the layers of long-term violence in the region by investigating the securitization of the Eastern provinces. From the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, the administration of these provinces was deeply affected by the security concerns of state elites and the changes in state governance from the empire to the nation state. Although the conceptualization and institutions of security changed during the historical process, there is also a long-term continuity in both the security mentality of the state elites and the administration of these provinces in the framework of the Armenian and Kurdish questions.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 198-201)
Passports as Tools to Prevent the Entry of Unwanted Foreigners
Another noteworthy type of practice one encounters in documents of the period has to do with preventing unwanted foreigners from entering the country. Determining which foreigners were undesirable was based on two main concerns. First, foreigners arriving in the country were not to cause any internal-security problems. Second, anyone who might disturb the internal public order was to be barred from entering.
The Ottoman state’s security concerns were based foremost on the fear of secession or the partition of the empire. As such, the Ottoman government saw as a threat those elements that were involved in or seen to have the potential to support the Armenian movement or nationalist movements in the Balkans. In particular, the perception of threat from Armenians who were citizens of foreign states, in particular Russia, was very high. Here, the perception of threat from Bulgarians was related to transitivity at the borders, which had not yet become fixed even if Bulgaria had gained its independence. This transitivity made it hard to define a “foreigner” and was a problem in itself, even without the threat of nationalist movements, for an empire trying to transform itself into a centralized modern state. A third group seen as a threat to security was made up of foreign anarchists. Alongside the international fear of anarchists, a possible alliance between the three groups—Armenians, Bulgarians, and foreign anarchists—was the stuff of nightmares for state elites. In terms of public order, the most unwanted were people belonging to the lower classes who generally entered the country with the aim of finding work and were defined as vagrants.
To prevent unwanted foreigners from entering the country, it was necessary to put in place practical plans for carrying out the state’s central administrative apparatus through regulations—which is to say, plans for how border controls were to be carried out and how entries were to be prevented. Equally necessary were effective staff to implement the procedures. Passport officers with knowledge of the appropriate languages were stationed in the townships of Grebene and Alasonya and at six gates along the border with the aim of preventing banditry (şekavet), disorder, conspiracy, sedition (mefâsidat), and the entry of pernicious materials (muzır eşya) from Greece. A request was made to increase the officers’ pay, which can be seen as a preventive measure against bribes. Thus, measures were taken to ensure that officials—who can be seen as a part of the infrastructural apparatuses of securing rule—would act in the manner stipulated.
A warning sent to all Ottoman representatives advised that they were to investigate all Armenians applying to them for visas on foreign passports and that they were not to issue visas to those whose entry had been prohibited. Although it was made known that Armenians arriving from Russia without passports would not be let in, in practice this restriction was not always possible to enforce. In fact, Armenians did arrive in the Ottoman Empire and in Istanbul specifically without passports or visas. The entry of Armenians from Russia, even those holding an Ottoman passport, was entirely forbidden again in 1899. In response, Russian Armenians requested permission to enter and leave the empire with a passport. Subsequently, passports and visas were not issued to Armenians either to come from Russia or to go there—yet their exits and entries continued.
The administrative network created by the state gained visibility through regulations, decisions, orders, and official documents such as identity cards and passports as well as through the mediation of registries and records related to these documents, through stored information, and through the personnel that the state employed. Thanks to this network structure, the state, when in need of intelligence, was able to make use of the information it had encoded and stored. Keeping these records and administrative processes directly affected the lives of ordinary people. After security and economic crises propelled migration among the lower classes, the difficult situation faced by those who wished to return to their homelands can be seen as the dark side of the administrative network.
One of the state’s basic worries related to security was that those who came from the outside might engage in political activity. Thus, for instance, there was intelligence that a conspirator (müfsid), Ohannes Avadisian, was traveling from Filibe to Dersaadet to provide instruction and supplies to the “seditious” communities in Beşiktaş and Beyoğlu in Istanbul. Or, in line with intelligence received from the emirate, the decision was taken to block members of a group of “bandits” who had escaped from the Ottoman Empire to Eastern Rumelia and who, as ordered by their committee, had returned to the empire to apply for passports in order to foment unrest. Or there was a decree—based on intelligence that the Sofia Bulgarian Resistance Movement was planning to send a committee of coachmen to Istanbul to incite sedition—that these individuals should not be allowed entry.
The potential of attacks by anarchists was high on the list of official security concerns. Practices similar to those directed at non-Ottoman Armenians were also carried out against lower-class foreigners and focused on political suspicions. In this period, incidents of propaganda by the deed were occurring across Europe and leading to new regulations related to migrant laborers. The Ottoman government in particular made use of new security measures against anarchists and socialists. The aim was to prevent such elements from entering the empire, and to this end the state began to administer controls. The use of internal passports and individual declarations to be obtained by foreigners from the consulates of the states to which they belonged as well as denial of entry to those whose activities were seen as suspicious or to anarchists and similar revolutionaries clearly reflect the empire’s stance on this matter.
If someone from socialist or anarchist circles did happen to enter the Ottoman Empire and were taken into custody, they were photographed and a record created before they were deported. In the 1890s, photography became part of the Ottoman surveillance system, along with other documentation of individual identity. Although the use of photography was not widespread because of the lack of technical personnel and budget, the Ottoman Empire was one of the first governments to practice new filing and storing technologies using photographs. This use of photography and the circulation of photographs in pursuit of anarchists were also part of the interimperial antianarchist cooperation in which the Ottoman Empire was involved. In one case, an investigation was launched into a Greek subject named Rano, who upon suspicion of being a socialist was deported from France, denied entry into Russia and Romania, and then attempted to come to Istanbul. He was found to be without a job and always in pursuit of politics. It was ordered that “Rano the son of Rusi who had been expelled even from such a country as France, administered as a republic,” and other socialists and anarchists like him be denied admission, photographed, and sent away. A further instance of the use of this new technology was to send photographs of anarchists to the places where they were expected to arrive based on intelligence about their movements.