Historians of the Ottoman Middle East are increasingly emphasizing connections, and comparisons, with other parts of the world. Trade, disease, migration, art, empire, and the environment have all recently taken center stage. This panel, however, turns back to rethink one of the longest-recognized means of contact between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors: war and diplomacy. The presenters do not aim to reproduce traditional military and diplomatic histories, and they reject narratives of the Ottoman Empire as a "near-perfect military society," or of the Ottomans as fundamentally outside the European diplomatic order. Instead, the papers consider conflict, and the conversations that accompanied conflict, as a means of political, cultural, and human interchange. In particular, all four papers emphasize the linkage between warfare, labor, and migration, as conflict brought people into contact. The papers range from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, and draw on a wide variety of sources--including Ottoman, Russian, British, Sicilian, Spanish, and Venetian archives. They thus bridge empires, and historical periods, that are often artificially separated in historiography. The first paper considers the ransom economy of the early modern Mediterranean, using a case study of one particular ransom agent who brokered deals across empires to free captives even while he engaged in covert diplomacy, secret intelligence gathering, and Ottoman factional politics. The paper thus uses captivity and ransom to connect Ottoman and Mediterranean history. The second paper moves from the early modern to the modern, examining the late eighteenth century--and here, connections are forged not by captives, but by quarrelsome and mutinous sailors. This paper uses a multi-archival case study to show how the everyday management of military labor could affect inter-imperial diplomacy in wartime. The third paper combines diplomacy and captivity in a different way, considering the Ottoman state's changing attitude toward subjects held captive in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ottoman state concern for captives increased, the paper argues, reflecting and foreshadowing deeper changes in the relationship between the state and its subjects. Finally, the fourth paper moves from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, considering Ottoman subjects in British custody during World War I. Here again, captivity emerges as a way to examine questions of governance, identity, and belonging, as the Ottoman state used international treaties to advocate for its subjects--and then those subjects found themselves trying to redefine their citizenship when the war, and the empire, ended.