Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (VHT): Empire of Refugees is a transimperial history of migration that reveals the origins of organized refugee resettlement in the Middle East. It explores how the Ottoman government reshaped the empire through refugee migration. The book focuses on the Ottoman resettlement of about a million Muslim refugees from Russia and the emergence of the North Caucasian (Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, etc.) diaspora, among the largest diasporas in the contemporary Middle East.
The book started as a doctoral dissertation that examined the methods and objectives of Ottoman resettlement. I conducted extensive fieldwork for three Ottoman refugee microhistories: in the Balqaʾ region in today’s Jordan; in Dobruja, now split between Bulgaria and Romania; and in Uzunyayla, roughly in the middle of Turkey. Respectively, they are located in an arid semi-desert, a steppe region by the sea, and a mountain plateau.
When transforming my dissertation into a book, I realized that my collected material tells two other, larger stories. First, the Circassian refugee crisis of 1863–65—the greatest in Ottoman history at that point—served as a catalyst for how the Ottoman government would resettle refugees over the next half-century. In response to the arrival of Muslim refugees from Russia, the Ottomans created a full-fledged refugee regime. Second, Ottoman and Russian migration policies followed a certain logic through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both imperial administrations used migration policies to consolidate imperial authority, especially in their borderlands. The resulting book examines migration both on the level of the two empires’ policies and through in-depth regional studies of how resettlement proceeded on the ground.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
VHT: Empire of Refugees places Ottoman refugee resettlement within broader global and migration studies. The book argues that, between 1860 and World War I, the Ottoman government constructed a refugee regime for incoming Muslims. The Ottoman Refugee Commission, the chief executor of the regime, resettled between three and five million Muslim refugees in that period. When we talk about refugee regimes, it is usually with regard to international refugee regimes of the League of Nations and the United Nations. This book tells how and why the Ottoman Empire constructed a comprehensive system of refugee protections. Twentieth-century refugee regimes were structured around citizenship in a nation-state and an international commitment to reduce statelessness. The Ottoman refugee regime was based on the sultan-caliph’s responsibility to protect muhajirs (Muslim refugees) who fled religious persecution.
The book contributes to the literature on the end of the Ottoman Empire. Historians typically explain the demise of Ottoman rule in two ways: either because the Ottoman Empire was losing wars, notably the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and World War I; or because of cultural forces, such as sectarianism and nationalism that destroyed how the empire’s many subjects related to the state and to each other. This book adds Muslim refugee resettlement to the mix, showing that it both accelerated the collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and fortified Ottoman authority in the outlying regions of the Levant and Anatolia. In the Balkans, the economic collapse of refugee resettlement contributed to the outbreak of the April Uprising of 1876 and ensuing sectarian violence in 1876–78, ejecting the Ottomans from the northern Balkans. Farther east, refugee resettlement bound entire regions closer to the empire, as refugees entrenched the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 and reinvigorated local economies.
The book further interrogates the interplay of ethnic cleansing and refugee resettlement, which forged the modern Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. In the tsarist Caucasus, the expulsion of Muslims in the 1860s proceeded alongside the arrival of Christian settlers, from Russia and from abroad. Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire, after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 and especially after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the settlement of Muslim refugees went hand in hand with the displacement of Ottoman Christians. The two processes were intertwined, by design. Muslim refugees were often victims of European colonialism and ethnic cleansing. Those same refugees were settlers from the perspective of many Ottoman communities, settled (Bulgarians, Greeks, Armenians) and nomadic (bedouin, Turkic nomads), which complicates the view of refugee resettlement solely within humanitarian frameworks.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
VHT: Empire of Refugees extends my research on refugee migration and connections between the Ottoman and Russian empires. My earlier work focused on legacies of North Caucasian displacement, with articles on: Circassian refugees and the making of Amman in 1878–1914; refugees’ letters clandestinely traversing the Russo-Ottoman frontier, which contributed to Russia’s pan-Islamic panic and restrictions on Muslim migration between the two empires; and the North Caucasians’ attempts to return to the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation from Turkey, Syria, and Jordan since the 1960s. I also wrote on Ottoman and Egyptian quarantine reforms and the emergence of a sanitary regime in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, and on surprising conversions of Muslims, Jews, Yazidis, and others into the Armenian faith in the late tsarist Caucasus.
The book expands the scope of my research geographically and conceptually. Geographically, it covers the displacement of about a million refugees from the entirety of the North Caucasus, plus Abkhazia, and their resettlement throughout the Ottoman Empire, including Anatolia, the Levant, and the Balkans. Conceptually, the book tells how the two empires managed Muslim mobility and scrutinizes the category of “refugee” in the imperial era.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
VHT: I hope that my colleagues—historians of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire—read the book. Empire of Refugees, hopefully, enriches how we understand the end of Ottoman rule. Muslim refugee resettlement transformed the demographics and political economy of the empire and played a major role in strengthening Ottoman authority in parts of the empire. I also hope that migration and refugee studies scholars read the book, as it intervenes in how we think about global refugee protections. The Ottomans inaugurated a refugee regime on a massive scale well before the internationalization of refugee protections in the twentieth century. Historians of Russia and Eastern Europe might find the book helpful, especially amid renewed commitment to decolonization in the field. This book demonstrates how, through migration policies, Russia solidified its control over the North Caucasus, which helps to explain why the North Caucasus remains within Russia today.
Nothing would make me happier than this book finding an audience in the Middle East. It looks at the Ottoman experience of managing refugee crises and tells a history that is personal to many citizens of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and beyond. I hope that the book will be available in Turkish and Arabic soon.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
VHT: I am working on a new book that explores the history of hijra, or Muslim refugee migration, in the modern era. Hijra denotes the journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 CE to protect the nascent Muslim community. Throughout Islamic history, many Muslim refugee communities that fled a non-Muslim territory for a Muslim territory because of religious persecution described their journey as hijra and themselves as muhajirs, in emulation of the Prophet’s companions. This vocabulary remains salient today. My new project examines the evolution of hijra as a concept and its role in reshaping the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since the nineteenth century. It is a transnational history of Muslim refugee migration.
J: What were the challenges in conducting multi-sited archival research?
VHT: Research for this book took me to ten countries, with the bulk of archival work in Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, Georgia, the United Kingdom, and Russia, including the autonomous North Caucasus republics of Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia-Alania, and Dagestan. Primary sources for the book are mostly in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Russian, with some in Bulgarian, French, and English.
Navigating over twenty archives, making sense of the overwhelming amount of evidence, and constructing a complex yet clear narrative were all challenges. However, transnational research was essential for a project that, by its very nature, was trans-imperial and transregional. Multi-sited fieldwork helped me to tell, first, how the two empires regulated Muslim migration, with their evolving legislation and unwritten practices, and, second, how refugees were responding to Russian migration bans and Ottoman resettlement—a story greatly aided by refugee petitions, family letters in private collections, and interviews with descendants of Circassian and Chechen refugees in Turkey and Jordan.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 118–22)
Second Circassian Refugee Crisis, 1878–80
The flight of at least 300,000 muhajirs from the Ottoman Balkans during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 turned into the second Circassian refugee crisis, in 1878–80. If the first Circassian refugee crisis, in 1863–65, had unfolded on the shores of the Black Sea, the second one engulfed the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean coastlines. Circassian refugees spent months in the ports of Varna, Istanbul, Salonica, and Kavala, waiting for ships that would take them to safety farther east. Most North Caucasian refugees, alongside Turkish-speaking refugees from the Balkans, were sent to Anatolia, especially the provinces of Kastamonu, Aydın, Hüdavendigar (Bursa), and Ankara. The Ottoman government sent the rest to the Levantine provinces of Damascus and Aleppo, which had been spared the earlier refugee crisis because the authorities found it too expensive to send refugees there in the 1860s. In 1878, as the Ottoman government scrambled to find enough space for incoming refugees, it designated all ports between Alexandretta (now Iskenderun, Turkey) and Haifa as recipients of North Caucasian muhajirs. In February 1878, the first 1,000 Circassian refugees disembarked in Beirut, 1,500 in Acre, and 2,000 in Tripoli. The following month, 8,000 refugees arrived in Tripoli alone. By September 1878, over 45,000 muhajirs, most of them Circassians, were present on the Levantine coast; 25,000 of them would be resettled in Damascus Province and 20,000 in Aleppo Province.
The arrival of thousands of refugees spelled a humanitarian catastrophe in Levantine port cities. Accommodation was scarce, and thousands of refugees slept in mosques, tekkes (Sufi lodges), and army barracks. As those filled up, refugees were forced into bazaars and streets. Refugees who had already experienced the horrors of displacement in 1863–65 had to live through a new one. The refugee crisis contributed to food shortages and rising inflation throughout the Levant. By March 1878, the price of an okka of bread in Tripoli reached 175 para, whereas the regular price was 60 para before the war. Meanwhile, Ottoman funding for resettlement did not rise alongside inflation. The available funds for refugees were so few that, by early 1880, the village councils of Jableh and ʿArab al-Mulk (now in Syria), which hosted over 2,000 refugees who disembarked in Tripoli and Latakia, could provide food to only 10 percent of their refugee population. Typhus and smallpox broke out and decimated starving refugee communities. By December 1878, sixty muhajirs had been dying daily in Tripoli.
While many local residents provided humanitarian aid to alleviate refugee suffering, some turned against refugees, blaming Circassians for high inflation, outbreak of disease, and a purported rise in crime in port cities. On separate occasions in 1878, port authorities in Beirut and Acre refused new ships with refugees in their ports. Fear of refugees, perhaps owing to muhajir involvement in the “Bulgarian horrors” of 1876, spread widely. A British consul reported a local rumor that, upon leaving Bulgaria, Circassian refugees had abducted Christian girls and sought to sell them into slavery in Syria. The Beirut authorities investigated and found only one Christian woman living among muhajirs. She claimed to have voluntarily followed a young Circassian man by the name of Ismaʿil and wanted to marry him and convert to Islam. The governor put her under house arrest, and the Greek Orthodox clergy tried to change her mind, to no avail. The Tripoli Christians also complained to local consuls that the Circassians had assaulted and robbed a Christian merchant. The ensuing investigation found that the aforementioned merchant was drunk at the time of the incident and harassed a Circassian woman, incurring the wrath of her compatriots.
The second Circassian refugee crisis, while breeding misery for many, provided financial opportunities for a select few. The Refugee Commission largely footed the bill for muhajir expenses, which meant that municipal authorities could claim reimbursement for their incurred expenses. City councils contracted with private vendors to provide services for refugees. Bakers supplied tons of bread, pharmacists prescribed medications, and boaters and drovers transported refugee families. For example, in 1878, a Tripoli bread merchant, Mustafa Aga al-Shermene, received 309,851 kuruş for two and a half months’ worth of bread and dry biscuits for refugees. Contemporary observers noted nepotism and embezzlement of funds earmarked for refugees, as municipalities awarded generous contracts to local businesses on the Istanbul money.
Municipal officials sought to move refugees out of port cities to interior locations as soon as possible to open space for new refugees and to prevent the further spread of the epidemics. The government would dispatch refugees from Beirut to Damascus, from Acre and Haifa to Nablus, from Tripoli and Latakia to Homs and Hama, and from Alexandretta to Aleppo. From those cities, North Caucasians were sent to surrounding Palestinian and Syrian villages, where they waited for several months for the government to find inland areas for their permanent settlement.
Refugee Resettlement in the Levant
… The second Circassian refugee crisis, in 1878–80, coincided with a change in provincial leadership in Syria. Midhat Pasha, who had served as governor of Danube Province between 1864 and 1868 and grand vizier during the First Constitutional Era in 1876–77, after a brief exile in Europe was appointed governor of Damascus Province in 1878. In his career, Midhat Pasha oversaw two Ottoman provinces, designated as major resettlement regions, during the two Circassian refugee crises. His vision for what muhajirs could do for the province remained the same. Midhat Pasha planned to double the revenues of Damascus Province by boosting agricultural production on the fertile but uncultivated miri lands, especially in southern Syria, and the new refugee population, whom he had previously settled as farmers in the Balkans, perfectly fit his agenda. The resettlement procedure was different the second time around. Midhat Pasha must have reflected on what happened in the Balkans, and his administration did not settle Muslim refugees into villages with other populations, especially Christians, but rather allowed them to choose where to settle. North Caucasians either joined their kin in the refugee villages established before 1878 or founded new villages near rare wells and creeks on the outskirts of the Syrian Desert.
The Ottoman government pursued a more intentional refugee resettlement strategy after the Treaty of Berlin of 1878. With massive territorial losses in the Balkans and Russia’s looming threat in the east, the Ottomans sought to fortify their rule in the Arab provinces. The government used the second Circassian refugee crisis to place refugees where it wanted them to be. The resettlement policy was both religiously conscious, especially in Christian-heavy regions of Anatolia, and ethnically conscious in Muslim-majority parts of the Levant. North Caucasians, as outsiders with no local allegiances, were expected to help Istanbul to strengthen its authority and even reclaim more territory for the state.
North Caucasian refugees settled in five clusters in the Ottoman Levant: Circassian and Chechen villages around Amman in Transjordan; Circassian, Chechen, and Ossetian villages around Quneitra in the Golan Heights; Circassian, Balkar, and Karachay villages around Marj al-Sultan in the Damascus area; Dagestani and Circassian villages between Homs and Hama; and Chechen villages around Raʾs al-ʿAyn in the Jazira region. Circassians also revived the ancient town of Jerash in Transjordan and established the villages of Manbij and Khanasir in northern Syria and of Kafr Kama and Rehaniye in Palestine. Furthermore, a mixed Circassian, Chechen, and Ossetian population settled in northern Syria in Raqqa, a city that would be catapulted to global prominence in 2014 as the capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Between 1866 and 1908, up to 70,0000 North Caucasians arrived in the Levant.
The North Caucasian resettlement proceeded along the Ottoman nomadic frontier in the Levant. Although refugee villages were located at a great distance from each other, one could draw a line going through most of them. This imaginary line was not random: it went along the western edge of the Syrian Desert and separated sedentary Levantine communities from nomadic ones. This line at times overlapped with the old pilgrimage caravan route connecting Aleppo with Damascus and Medina. The Ottomans pursued several interrelated goals in settling muhajirs there: to expand agricultural production eastward, to assert state control over nomads’ land, to increase travel security in those areas, and—ultimately—to enforce taxation on both nomadic communities and nearby fellahin (peasants or villagers) who had shirked their responsibilities.