Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

Between the 1850s and the First World War, the Ottoman Empire welcomed about a million Muslim refugees from Russia. These refugees established hundreds of villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. Dr Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky will present his new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, which examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. Empire of Refugees demonstrates that the Ottoman government created a refugee regime that predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. It offers a new way to think about migration and displacement in the Middle East.

SPEAKER

Dr Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). He is currently working on a book that examines hijra, or Muslim refugee migration, in global history. Dr. Hamed-Troyansky's articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.