In the final decades before its dissolution, the Ottoman Empire experienced massive demographic shifts as a result of migration both to and from the greater Middle East. Increased mobility, associational life, and communication created new travel and exchange possibilities across segments of Ottoman society and to diverse regions of the world. Simultaneously, economic crises and political violence in the empire and surrounding region both pushed migrants towards the empire, and created refugees from within. Ottoman internal and foreign policies reflected demographic shifts, while the migrants themselves complicated and often undermined Ottoman imperial, European colonial, and post-colonial national projects through fluid notions of “Ottomanness.”
Scholarship focusing on migrants and migration in the late Ottoman Empire has tended to focus on single ethnic or religious groups, often associated with post-imperial, nation-state formations. In this context migrants are often portrayed as passive victims, an inevitable product of imperial dissolution, and idly awaiting resuscitation and incorporation by national narratives. The contribution of this panel is in analyzing late Ottoman migrants as dynamic constituents of their new sociopolitical environments, who played instrumental roles in shaping the possibilities of post-imperial, colonial, or national formations that followed the empire’s dissolution.
Bringing together a diverse range of case studies, this panel explores the historical contexts of migration and the migrants’ roles in shaping new Ottoman spheres of influence, notions of sovereignty and loyalty, and the legacy of the empire after fragmentation. The first paper on Ottoman expatriates in Afghanistan examines the role Ottomans played in the formation of modern educational, governmental, and juridical institutions in Kabul. The second researches the lives of two Pan-Turkic Russian intellectuals who shuttled between Russia, Iran and the Ottoman Empire in search of constitutional projects. Studying the Syrian émigré communities in Argentina, the third paper considers how political developments in the Ottoman Empire affected Ottomans abroad, and how migrants employed notions of “Ottomanness” to forge a place in a new host society. Fourth paper sheds light on the ways in which Jewish emigration to the Americas played a role in shaping Ottoman and Turkish attitudes towards citizenship and minority status inside the empire. Finally the fifth paper analyzes the debates on migration from Habsburg Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Ottoman Empire and how these discussions revealed notions of sovereignty and loyalty. Wide-ranging in geographic and socio-political context, the papers highlight the agency of the Ottoman migrant in the midst of transition from empire to nation-state.
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Dr. Faiz Ahmed
On October 1, 1901, the reigning amir of Afghanistan ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan died of natural causes. In what amounted to Kabul’s most peaceful transition of power of the twentieth century, the new amir Habibullah Khan (r. 1901-1919) announced a series of measures designed to attract foreign experts for an array of infrastructural projects in his kingdom. Utilizing archival records from Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and Britain, in this paper I focus on a particularly influential stream of migrants arriving in Afghanistan during this time: the Ottomans of Kabul.
Part I establishes the historical background for Ottoman subjects traveling to Afghanistan amid the convergence of three events in the country’s early twentieth century history: the death of “Iron Amir” ʿAbd al-Rahman Khan, the return of Afghan exiles from abroad, and royal invitations to Ottoman professionals to settle in Afghanistan, a development tied to the exile of dissidents during the Hamidian era. This section pays close attention to the synergistic role of an "Ottoman-Afghan" bureaucrat of Damascus, Mahmud Tarzi, following his emigration to Kabul in 1902. Part II explores the growth of a burgeoning community of Ottoman professionals who followed in Tarzi’s trail, including journalists, physicians, engineers, as well as military officers. By tracing their backgrounds and activities in Kabul, I introduce the complicated but formative role these late Ottoman subjects played in the establishment of varied modern institutions in Afghanistan at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Yusuf Akçura and Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Turkic Muslims born in Russia who are well known in late Ottoman and Turkish historiography for their roles in the “pan-Turkist” movement, have long been seen by scholars primarily as “intellectuals.” Because Akçura and Ağaoğlu are discussed in the scholarly literature mainly in the context of their “ideas” and “arguments,” the published newspaper and journal articles of these two individuals, usually taken from their years in Istanbul, tend to constitute the major source base of scholarship devoted to these figures. Using a different set of sources—including documents from state archives in Istanbul, Baku, and Kazan, as well as publications appearing in the Russian Empire and previously uncited and unpublished personal correspondence—I discuss Akçura and Ağaoğlu not simply within the context of an “emerging” Turkish nationalism, but rather within a broader, trans-imperial milieu of Muslims traveling between Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran. In this setting, Akçura and Ağaoğlu appear less as consistent Turkic nationalists and more like identity freelancers, less like intellectuals focusing primarily upon identity and more like activists devoted principally to constitutionalism and progress. In their mobility, Akçura and Ağaoğlu fell within a well-established pattern of both elite and non-elite Muslims traveling between the Russian and Ottoman empires—often playing the two empires off of one another as they moved between them.
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In 1909, the Islamist reformer, Rashid Rida, published a response to a question about validity of Muslim religious rites in Bosnia Herzegovina, and the necessity of migration to the Ottoman domains in light of the Habsburg occupation of this former Ottoman province. His was yet another important ruling in a discussion that already lasted for several decades and implicated religious decrees, political proclamations, imperial policies, and deliberations among intellectuals. These debates touched upon issues that increasingly concerned Muslims in the nineteenth and twentieth century: whether Islamic religious rites and practices should be related to the status of the state, the notion of sultan-caliph’s political protection of Muslims worldwide, or whether non-Muslim rule over Muslims necessitated migration.
The reasons for Muslim migration from Bosnia Herzegovina after the Habsburg occupation varied from economic and social to political. However, those promoting or discouraging migration exclusively used religious reasoning, rhetoric, and symbolism. In this paper, I analyze the debates about migration from Bosnia Herzegovina among the ulema, intellectuals and notables; as well as the discrepancy between the alleged Ottoman Pan-Islam and the actual state policies regarding migration. Drawing on religious rulings, popular publications, and archival material in the Ottoman Empire and Bosnia, I analyze the many aspects of sovereignty and authority, and abstract notions of loyalty and sentiment intersecting in the issue of migration.
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Dr. Steven Hyland
The 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which restored constitutional rule to the Ottoman Empire, had an indelible and immediate impact on the Syrian émigré communities in the Americas. These subjects of the Sultan produced an outpouring of public support for political transformations in cities and towns from New York to Buenos Aires, renting esteemed venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Casa Suiza. Yet, while much of the encouragement embraced the potential for reform in the old country, many Syrian Ottomans used the political opening in Constantinople to affirm their place in local societies as productive members.
Using the Arabic-speaking colonies in northwestern Argentina as a case study, this paper will demonstrate the dual purpose of the celebrating the Young Turk Revolution. In asserting an Ottoman political identity, these émigrés fashioned an image of a modern nation alongside other democracies of the early twentieth century. In addition, these actors adroitly crafted alliances with the social and political elites of local societies by organizing commemorative events.
This paper uses Arabic and Spanish sources, including newspaper accounts and expressive culture, to better understand the multiple meanings of the Young Turk Revolution for the Syrian émigré communities.
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Devi Mays
Scholars of late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish history have increasingly grappled with the ways in which non-Muslim Ottoman subjects sought to negotiate spaces for themselves in Ottoman and Turkish discourses and practices of citizenship. Such studies have crucially moved beyond nationalist narratives reifying boundaries between non-Muslim and Muslim Ottomans, but have nonetheless focused predominately on Ottoman subjects within the empire itself. This paper, drawing on Ottoman, Turkish, Mexican, and American archival sources, oral histories, and the Ladino press, uses the lens of emigration to explore both Ottoman Jewish émigrés’ experiences of subjecthood/citizenship, on the one hand, and transforming Ottoman and Turkish attitudes toward them, on the other.
For the Ottoman government, monitoring and controlling émigrés abroad provided the impetus for establishing diplomatic relations with the Latin American countries that were attracting an increasing number of Ottoman subjects. It also served as a critical battlefield in state attempts to perpetuate a common Ottoman affiliation amongst divergent émigré communities. Meanwhile, Turkish attitudes toward these émigrés reveal a deep ambivalence about the relation between these individuals and the new Turkish Republic that was undergirded by a transforming Turkish ‘nation.’ Émigré practices of citizenship were likewise ambivalent, marked by a sense of utilitarianism that often remained distinct from affiliation or loyalty. This paper thus seeks to shed light on how emigration and émigrés are crucial to understanding Ottoman and Turkish practices of citizenship among those who did not emigrate, and the ways in which citizenship, in both its inclusionary and exclusionary functions, bleeds into questions of belonging and minoritization.
