The United States of America entered World War I in 1917, but it never formally declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, President Wilson’s mass mobilization for the Selective Service draft prompted the legal reclassification of a quarter million Ottoman subjects living in the United States as “enemy aliens,” a complex status that prohibited them from military service and made them subject to heightened public suspicion. Government concerns about the movements, commerce, and nationality status of Ottoman immigrant nationals produced new obstacles for the large Syrian and Lebanese communities in particular. And in the context of the War, American nativists accused Syrian immigrants (who were exempt from the draft) of being “alien slackers,” and of capitalizing on the U.S. government’s hesitance to employ them militarily. At this critical juncture, questions about 1) Syrian Americans’ eligibility for military service and 2) Syrian immigrants’ potential for U.S. naturalization and citizenship merged. As a result, immigrant activists promoted military service as the best possible means towards obtaining American citizenship and shedding their Ottoman nationality. This paper assesses a series of campaigns by immigrant political societies to enlist Syrian Americans into the U.S. Army as a means of obtaining U.S. citizenship. Using the records of Syrian immigrant fraternal societies in New York City and Boston, the paper argues that immigrant leaders developed clandestine networks of recruitment, funneling Syrian Ottoman nationals from across the Americas into the military and participating in a quasi-legal trade in American visas and passport documents in the meantime. During the War, Syrian immigrants stood upon a fraught legal frontier between Wilson’s America and the Ottoman Empire. The ambiguities concerning the nationality, naturalization, and mobilization of Syrian immigrants created new fissures within the community, fracturing Ottoman loyalists from Syrian, Lebanese, and Arab nationalists in ways that influenced this diaspora’s politics for years to come.

Over the course of the late 1920s and into the 1930s, states tightened their borders, cracking down on migration and on transnational trade as a response to global economic turmoil and racialized discourses of immigrant inassimilability. In Mexico, popular discourse increasingly attributed economic decline to the presence of immigrants whose nationality, race, and religion marked them as undesirable. Sephardic Jewish migrants who emigrated from Ottoman and once-Ottoman states had begun to arrive in Mexico at the turn of the century, and relied on their connections with coreligionists in, and frequent travel to the eastern Mediterranean, France, and the United States for social and economic upward mobility within Mexico. Growing xenophobic discourse and restrictive economic and migratory policies in Mexico, the United States, and Turkey threatened the livelihoods, and sometimes the lives, of these migrants. This paper argues that Sephardic Jewish migrants responded to immigration and commercial restrictions along the various nodal points of their diaspora by mobilizing commercial, familial, and patronage networks that traversed the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. Drawing on court, immigration, secret police, and consular records, as well as press sources from Turkey, France, the United States, Cuba, and Mexico, this paper traces the development of the illicit trafficking of silk, heroin, and people, which followed preexisting Sephardi commercial and familial trajectories and which was sometimes literally embedded within licit merchandise. It thus explores how migrants circumvented legal regimes at local, national, and international levels, the fluidity with which they played divergent legal systems against each other, the persistence of deep transnational ties in spite of state attempts to legislate against precisely this type of behavior, and how such ties enabled individuals to adapt when their merchandise, and they themselves, became illegal.

Between 1885 and 1908, tens of thousands of Armenians migrated from communities in the eastern provinces of Anatolia to North America. Throughout this period, the Ottoman state endeavored to prohibit this migration on the grounds that Armenian migration to North America posed a political threat to the empire. This paper explores the emergence and evolution of smuggling networks that developed in response to this prohibition on Armenian migration. Over time, these dense networks, which together comprised a veritable industry, grew to involve a surprisingly wide and diverse array of actors including local bankers cum migration agents, muleteers, boatmen, boardinghouse patrons, employees of foreign consulates, state officials and debt collectors operating from Harput to Worcester and everywhere in between. In addition to focusing on the various actors that comprised this migration industry, this paper will also focus special attention on its rapidly shifting geography. Networks dedicated to smuggling North America-bound Armenian migrants out of the empire initially emerged in the late 1880s and early 1890s out of preexisting socioeconomic linkages that connected communities in eastern Anatolia to port cities such as Istanbul, Samsun and Mersin. As the Ottoman state intensified its efforts to interdict this migration, however, these surprisingly adaptable networks responded by growing in density and geographic scale. By the early 1900s, they connected communities such as Harput and Palu deep in the Anatolian interior to port cities on the Levantine coast such as Latakia and Beirut, regions that historically possessed few social and economic ties. It is a central contention of this paper that the social and spatial adaptability of these migrant smuggling networks were key to the continuation of Armenian migration to North America in the face of state prohibitions. Furthermore, it argues that even at the height of the Ottoman state’s modernization and centralization efforts, these migrant smuggling networks, by linking subjects from a variety of geographic, economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds across vast swaths of the empire’s territory, produced a distinctly “Ottoman” space that challenged rather than reinforced the power of the state.

This paper explores the conflicting international and imperial regulations and practices governing passports, quarantines, shipping firms, pilgrimage guides, camel drivers, and even the legal interpretation of Islamic ritual itself. In both the high diplomatic negotiations and on-the-ground contestations over these questions, Pan-Islamic rhetoric became the inter-imperial lingua franca of solicitude for the welfare of pilgrims. Rather than inspiring dramatic humanitarian reforms, however, Pan-Islam generally undermined and contradicted Ottoman efforts to impose modern forms of governmentality, underscore the empire’s territorial sovereignty, and fully apply biopolitical documentary practices and border controls. For the Indian Ocean pilgrims caught in middle, it was precisely this vicious cycle of legitimacy claims that ensured British caution and lax safety standards even in the face of ghoulish rates of morbidity and mortality. Neither side was willing to risk being accused of interfering with pilgrims’ sacred obligations to perform the hajj. The collective failure to regulate the hajj opened space for the institutionalization of suffering, corruption, and monopolistic business practices on local and global scales. The weak chains of inter-imperial regulation were easily evaded and conditioned through the collaboration of the Sharif of Mecca, Ottoman provincial administrators, European steamship companies, elements within the European consular community in Jidda, and the trans-oceanic networks of Indian and Hadrami commercial interests controlling the pilgrimage transport and brokerage industries linking Mecca and Jidda with India, Singapore, and Java. At the center of these networks stood the autonomous Sharifate. This autonomous space at the heart of the steamship-era pilgrimage combined with the presence of large numbers of non-Ottoman Muslims controlling the commercial and financial services of the region simultaneously underscored the gaping holes in Ottoman sovereignty and attracted increasing levels of British attention to the “maladministration” of the Hijaz and hajj.