David Gutman's book, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885–1915, adds several important dimensions to the scholarship on both Ottoman historiography and international migration. Historians have done a great deal to complicate some social scientists’ assumptions about the “novelty” of several phenomena relating to transnational and international migration, such as the roles of remittances, media, and governments in facilitating immigrant experiences. Donna Gabaccia, Nancy Foner, and Ewa Morawaka have demonstrated that, instead of introducing transnational circulations, modern iterations manifest an intensifying continuity of these phenomena over the last century. Gutman's book builds on this tradition by providing parallels with international underground smuggling networks, which he convincingly demonstrates have existed since at least the late 19th century. He does so by providing a unique perspective on immigration scholarship through his late-Ottoman case study. By drawing persuasive parallels between late-Ottoman and US immigration policies, Gutman expands international migration scholarship to include an overlooked region of the world.
In addition, Gutman's book also provides an important corrective to Armenian migration history by demonstrating that many late-Ottoman Armenian migrants from Harput/Mezre relocated to North America, not from fear of persecution, but rather in pursuit of economic opportunities abroad. Documenting relatively high rates of return, he complicates the existing narrative of Armenian migration out of and back into the late Ottoman Empire.
Chapter 1 introduces the book's first theme, “Migrants, Smugglers, and the State,” and explains the circumstances that first enabled, and then catalyzed, Ottoman Armenian migration to North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Situating Armenians in the milieu of late-19th-century Ottoman reform, Gutman argues that the alignment of three factors—economic development, American missionaries, and steamship transportation—spurred Armenian migration from Harput to North America, particularly port cities in New England. The chapter also unpacks Ottoman restrictions of Armenian migration within the broader context of growing political upheaval and surging nationalism in the aftermath of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. While acknowledging atrocities committed against Ottoman Armenians, Gutman emphasizes instead the role of the Hamidian state, which linked Armenian migration with support for sectarian politics, and therefore implemented a series of bans in order to restrict Armenians not only from migrating to, but more importantly returning from North America.
Chapter 2 provides a thorough treatment of the emergence and development of migrant smuggling networks, which arose as a result of the Ottoman state's efforts to restrict Armenian migration to North America. Gutman unpacks these complex international smuggling networks, which emerged in various port cities on the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Each section of the chapter traces the interwoven routes, which linked Harput Armenians to the port cities on the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, through which they gained passage to North America. The diverse actors working in collaboration with one another included merchants, innkeepers, state officials, consular employees, boatmen, and debt collectors. Gutman demonstrates the high degree of coordination that existed among these “migration intermediaries” in providing Harput Armenians the means to go abroad despite Ottoman restrictions.
Chapter 3 explores the Ottoman state's challenges in enforcing its Armenian migration ban to North America. In stark contrast to the well-coordinated underground “intermediaries,” the central state's inherent contractions limited the officials’ capacity to impose sustained controls. Moreover, given the increasingly profitable and sophisticated underground migration smuggling economy, the state's efforts to restrict migration proved futile. Instead, local officials blamed one another for the systemic failure of the migration ban.
Chapter 4 begins the book's second thematic section, “Fortifying the Well-Protected Domains,” and focuses on return migration and its relationship to Ottoman sovereignty. Despite increasing efforts from the state to barricade and militarize its borders, several Armenians managed to return to their homes deep in the Anatolian interior from the late 1880s until 1908. Because Ottoman authorities linked Armenian reentry with revolutionary politics, several state officials sought strenuously to limit this stream of migrants by militarizing its borders. Despite these new restrictions, Gutman shows that Ottoman Armenians employed creative routes and strategies to overcome barriers and return to their ancestral lands.
Chapter 5 analyzes the efforts of the Ottoman state's diplomatic corps in the United States. The chapter provides fascinating details on the many ways, directly and indirectly, the Ottoman ambassador and others sought to restrict Armenian reentry. Against the backdrop of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States, several American officials, including President Grover Cleveland, proved sympathetic to Ottoman diplomats’ perceived concerns regarding Armenians spreading revolutionary politics under the protections of US citizenship. While outcry against Ottoman atrocities ensured extraterrestrial protections for many naturalized returnees in the mid-1890s, by the opening years of the 20th century, US and Ottoman policies barring “seditious” Armenian returnees had largely aligned. Encouraged by this alignment, and by Armenians’ loss of extraterritorial protections, Gutman argues that increasingly paranoid Ottoman officials began deporting Armenian returnees following the assassination attempt against Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1905.
Chapter 6 introduces and unpacks the book's third set of themes—“Revolution, Genocide, and Legacies of Migration.” In this sprawling chapter, the author opens with the post-revolutionary Ottoman period (1908) and ends by describing migration-restricting continuities of the Turkish state in the decades following the Armenian Genocide (1915). The liberalization of migration policies in the post-Hamidian period inopportunely coincided with increasing migration restrictions put into place in the United States in the same period. So, while a record number of Ottoman Armenians sought to migrate to and return from North America between 1908 and 1914, many became stranded in European port cities due to the tightening of US immigration policies. Gutman also demonstrates the re-emergence of internal tensions in central state planning, as growing migration caused a crisis among military and anti-immigrant state officials. The chapter ends with a discussion of circumstances leading up to the Genocide and its aftermath. Gutman argues that, even after the fall of the empire and in the aftermath of the Genocide, the Turkish state's return policies echoed those of the Hamidian state; the state implemented legislation that seriously undermined the ability of dispersed Ottoman Armenians to return to Harput and to reclaim properties lost during the Genocide.
Gutman's text provides an important intervention in the scholarship on migration. It compellingly parallels Ottoman immigration policies to those of the United States in the same period and to those that would shape most of the 20th century. Also, in terms of Ottoman historiography, Gutman's case study of Armenian migration and the underground smuggling networks (or “intermediaries”), which arose as a result, details the demise of the empire from a distinct vantage. For these reasons, the book makes important contributions and theoretical interventions to the existing scholarship.
But the text also possesses some conspicuous shortcomings. A minor shortcoming occurs in the introduction, where the author claims, “only in the past two decades…have scholars begun to study in earnest how migration intersects with other dynamics central to the modern nation-state such as citizenship, race, sovereignty, and biopower” (p. 3). In fact, sociological scholarship has been working on related themes since at least the late 1980s. The pioneering work of Rogers Brubaker (1989 and 1992), for example, reflects this long-standing tradition. A far more significant shortcoming of Gutman's manuscript, however, relates to sources. The author relies largely on non-Armenian language sources—in particular, Ottoman language documents from the Commission for Expediting Initiative and Reforms as well as consular records from the US National Archives and Congressional and State Department documents. To be sure, Gutman does provide some information from translated Armenian documents, which consist of “village histories, memoirs, and letters” (p. 15). But the predominance of Ottoman official documents gives the book a particular slant, one that does not meaningfully unpack the experiences of the internally complex Ottoman Armenians themselves. For example, what prompted Ottoman Armenians to migrate—and later return—to their ancestral homelands, particularly those who had married and acquired U.S. citizenship? One of the book's main claims is that fear of violence and persecutions did not drive their migration—as compared to pragmatic considerations. This may be true, but the author does not sufficiently prove this claim with archival data that document Armenian migrants’ personal motivations and experiences. Even after the revolution of 1908, when Ottoman migration restrictions had been lifted, why did Armenians continue, albeit in diminished numbers, to rely on expensive underground smuggling networks? The author himself notes that this question puzzled Ottoman authorities (p. 172), but without access to Armenian sources, he seems unable to answer the question adequately. As such, the text relies on smuggling networks and Armenian migrants to help explain the gradual demise of a weakening Ottoman state. But it leaves several gaping holes in the migration story itself. For this reason, Gutman's book, while a valuable resource for late Ottoman historiography, does not enrich the specific history of Armenian (American) migration as substantially as it might have.
Nevertheless, Gutman's manuscript contributes meaningfully to the scholarship on late Ottoman historiography and expands international migration scholarship through its original framework and case study. For this reason, the text will prove particularly enriching for late Ottoman historians as well as scholars of international migration. By inserting the late Ottoman state into discussions of increasingly fraught border-making policies and the emergent smuggling networks arising as a result, Gutman's book provides scholars in various fields an opportunity to broaden and sharpen their analyses.
