Scholars of Ottoman history have long recognized that Russia’s massacres and deportations of Circassians and other North Caucasian Muslims during the nineteenth century had profound and long-lasting demographic, economic, and social effects throughout Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Levant. These were the three regions to which Muslim refugees from the Caucasian borderlands found themselves transferred and in which they often went on to establish new villages or revive abandoned settlements; the most prominent example of the latter is modern Amman’s emergence as a town that would grow in importance alongside the Hejaz Railway. Such scholars have also recognized that the influx of large numbers of Circassians, Chechens, and other Muslim peoples, hardened after years of fighting an aggressive Christian great power, had significant and sometimes devastating consequences for other ethnolinguistic communities in the areas they settled. From the early to mid-nineteenth century to the demise of the Ottoman state after World War I, displaced North Caucasian Muslims entered into protracted conflict over land and resources with the Armenians of the Anatolian highlands, the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, and the Arab Bedouin and Druze of the southern Levant.

Less closely understood, even among those with the requisite linguistic skills (which are notoriously difficult to acquire given the exceptionally hard-to-learn languages of the North Caucasus), are the institutional and administrative dimensions of the Ottoman state’s efforts to integrate Circassian and other refugees. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Caucasian muhacirs produced logistical, financial, and legal problems that the Ottomans were able to manage only by developing new institutions to coordinate their settlement and facilitate their transformation into loyal, productive, rights-bearing, and tax-paying subjects of the sultan who would guard frontiers, suppress revolts, cultivate unused land, and further the state’s efforts to entrench a modern land regime. It is here that Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State breaks new ground by analyzing the activities of the Ottoman Refugee Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu), established in 1860 in response to the mass expulsions that followed Russia’s push to “pacify” the North Caucasus and make it available for further colonization by Christian settlers after the Crimean War. Hamed-Troyansky argues that this Ottoman system of refugee resettlement was both non-Western, arising in reaction to European imperialism, and non-secular, devised to assist Muslims from the Caucasus as well as Crimea, the Balkans, and elsewhere. He argues further that it constitutes a key link in the historiographical chain that traverses the population transfers of the Ottoman Empire’s final decade before ultimately culminating in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Operating in tandem with Tanzimat-era land codes and immigration legislation, the inadequately resourced but progressively bureaucratized Refugee Commission worked in an environment shaped by international agreements between Russian and Ottoman officials to coordinate transboundary movements and domestic instruments depriving specific categories of emigrants of their nationality and right to return.

Empire of Refugees’ first two chapters survey the forced migration of Muslims from the North Caucasus and examine the activities of the Ottoman Refugee Commission. Its third, fourth, and fifth chapters chart the experiences of Caucasian refugees in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Levant. A sixth chapter deals with debates and developments within Caucasian diaspora networks and organizations in the Empire. A seventh and final chapter discusses attempts by some refugees to return to Russia, where state authorities attempted to restrict or otherwise control their readmission. Throughout the book, Hamed-Troyansky fuses social histories of particular Caucasian families, including insights culled from private letters detailing the frustration of relatively well-to-do Circassians who struggled to establish themselves in Anatolia and eventually left for the southern Levant, with panoramic appraisals that situate refugee lives in the military defeats, political upheavals, and social transformations that accompanied the late Empire’s incorporation into the capitalist world economy and colonialist state system. By tracking their movements across the Black and Mediterranean seas, their plight in port cities as far afield as Varna and Haifa, and their involvement in everything from banditry on the banks of the Danube to horse breeding on the plateaus of Sivas province, he explains how Circassian and other Caucasian Muslims – slaveholding peoples who were themselves reduced to slavery in many cases – sought to negotiate their dispersal across the Ottoman countryside even as their social hierarchies were scrambled and customary legal traditions (‘adat) diluted. The Ottoman state brought technologies of demographic engineering and economic development to bear upon the task of settling these dislocated and deeply desperate refugees, whose chances of establishing themselves in their adopted lands often turned on their ability to serve and protect the state.

That relations between law, land, and language are protean is never any more evident than in the experiences of those who are expelled from or forced to flee their homelands. My mother’s grandmother was among hundreds of thousands born in the Empire around the turn of the twentieth century to families of North Caucasian refugees. Among the few details about her life that have made their way down to me is that she was Kabardian, that she spoke the language fluently, that her family had spent some time in Romania (likely Dobruja) before being moved to Bor in the central Anatolian sancak of Niğde, and that carpet-weaving had allowed them to earn something of a living after most of what they had been able to take with them was stolen in transit (the key to their village home in the Caucasus was one of the few items they managed to retain along the way). She married into a family of local Turkish notables that produced Niğde’s representative to Mustafa Kemal’s Sivas Congress in September 1919 and one of the town’s deputies to the first provisional government in Ankara the following year. (To the end of her days, my grandmother would point with pride to these facts whenever someone was bold enough to suggest that Circassians had failed to support Kemal’s nationalist movement during the struggle against occupying powers.) The only relevant memento in my possession is a black-and-white photograph of her with my uncle, then five or six years old, on her lap. Unhappy that she is being photographed, her deep Muslim convictions objecting to the creation of images of human beings, she sits, hair covered tautly, with a deep frown on her face.

Empire of Refugees is a remarkable book, perhaps above all for helping to open another window on the lives of people like my great-grandmother. Measured in its claims and meticulous in its research, it will be of lasting use to students of forced migration, diaspora nationalism, international legal history, and Ottoman and Russian diplomacy. Much has been written over the past several decades on the multiple and overlapping histories of genocide, state-building, and ethno-confessional homogenization, in and beyond the Ottoman lands. Hamed-Troyansky has given us a welcome addition to this large and growing body of scholarship.