In a world where passports, identity cards, (e)visas, and work permits remain a ubiquitous feature of our social interactions and shape the possibilities of mobilities available to us, imagining our lives without them requires an extra and, sometimes, imaginative effort. İlkay Yılmaz’s Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility 1876–1908 is just that study that takes its readers on a journey to the last quarter of the nineteenth century when Sultan Abdülhamid II ruled over Ottoman domains. Translated and expanded on her previous work in Turkish, Serseri, Anarşist ve Fesadın Peşinde (Tarih Vakfı Yayınları, 2014), Yılmaz explores the various ways in which the Hamidian Regime devised new administrative practices, bureaucratic techniques, and infrastructural innovations to exert a stronger, a better, and a closer control of the Ottoman subject population. As the Ottoman Empire experienced many setbacks during the long nineteenth century that brought about monumental demographic, financial, and territorial changes, the Ottoman ruling elites and particularly the Sultan suffered from a legitimacy crisis. They now realized that they had “to hold the empire together from within and to make sustainable its existence through diplomatic policies of balance by positioning itself as one of the Great Powers” (p. 38).

While the scholarship has covered the Ottoman diplomatic maneuverings in much detail, less studied are Abdülhamid’s attempts to render his subjects more legible through new regulatory apparatus that increased the state’s “infrastructural capacity to create a space for the administration of society” (p. 75). This is where Yılmaz’s monograph makes a valuable contribution and provides a refined analysis of Hamidian policing vis-à-vis particular ethno-religious groups within Ottoman society. Yılmaz draws on theories of state power, governmentality, and raison d’état to analyze Hamidian elites’ approaches to stability and order. In doing so, she argues that the Ottoman authorities’ attempts at controlling mobility within and without the Empire were “connected to the central governments’ legitimacy crises, rising radical opposition, the increasing use of violence as revolutionary propaganda, and the loss of territories during the age of high imperialism” (p. 10).

In the first two chapters of the book, Yılmaz goes at length to elaborate the conceptual framework of her treatment of the security mentalities of the Ottoman officials as they dealt with the rising challenges of Balkan nationalisms, the Armenian revolutionary organizations, and the migration of provincial populations to urban centers in search of seasonal work. Yılmaz draws on an extensive body of theoretical works to situate the Ottoman case within the larger literature on the formation of the modern state and the manifestations of modernist governmentality. Through an inter-disciplinary approach that combines historical sociology with political science, Yılmaz highlights the crystallization of an Ottoman raison d’état of a state in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that puts its [the state’s] “well-being, its continuity and interests among the most important justifications” (p. 31) for any repressive policies, violent or otherwise. This “produced a new regime of internal passports aimed at controlling the state’s newly defined internal enemies” (p. 10), creating thereby new kinds of marginalities that were detrimental to particular groups in the long term. In Chapter 2, Yılmaz presents a history of the Hamidian Era, in which she introduces the several acts of political violence clustered under the Macedonian and Armenian questions. In fact, this is one of the few studies that deal with the Empire’s two major diplomatic conundrums – in the Balkans and in Anatolia – in tandem. Yılmaz explores how the Ottoman authorities invested in the “regime’s security” (p. 70) to counter what they perceived to be domestic threats to the regime’s stability.

Abdülhamid’s empowerment of security services and practices opened for him the possibilities for international cooperation and solidarity against the anarchist movement rampant in contemporary Europe. In Chapter 3, Yılmaz compares the 1898 Conference of Rome and the 1904 St Petersburg Protocols as platforms where the Ottomans actively participated in the making and sharing of policing practices and innovations. Many of the Great Powers’ shared concern with social disorder and regicide encouraged the development of synchronous and collaborative techniques across Eurasia. The Ottoman delegates followed the conventions with strong interests as they roughly overlapped with major episodes of violence in Ottoman lands including the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896), the Ilinden Uprising (1903), and the Sasun Revolt (1904) among others.

To combat “domestic threats,” the Hamidian Regime established a discursive field where it used particular concepts and articulations to associate Armenians with sedition. In Chapter 4, Yılmaz provides a meticulous analysis of the various formulaic expressions, legal codes, and tools employed to mark Armenians as potential troublemakers at best and perfidious elements at worse. She shows how the Hamidian administration mobilized existing concepts of social turmoil in the face of newly perceived threats to state legitimacy. Drawing from an older imperial vocabulary on vagrants (serseri) and sedition (fesad), Hamidian bureaucrats conflated in their official correspondence and reports the threats of anarchism, sedition, and Armenian separatism. Rendering Armenians a matter of security discourse, the Hamidian Regime created an atmosphere of fear and discrimination based “on the suspicion that every Armenian could be associated with a revolutionary organization” (p. 143). Consequently, when the perpetrators of violence were Muslims, Ottoman documents provided a detailed contextualization (see justification) whereas Armenian acts were simply ascribed to the latter’s essential nature. Such “discursive tropes” (p. 142) eventually accelerated the marginalization of the Armenians from the legal channels and institutions of the Empire.

In the final three chapters, Yılmaz provides a longue durée survey of the Ottoman authorities’ passport policies from earlier times until the Hamidian period. She discusses the effects of the Internal Passport Regulation (1887) that “laid out the requirements for permits to travel inside the Ottoman Empire” (p. 187). Building on earlier practices of mobility control, the Hamidian authorities combined old and new techniques to monitor those they classified as migrants, suspects, and criminals. In doing so, they expanded the security and political implications of certain categories, which were increasingly assigned exclusively negative connotations in official documents. Whether geographical mobility was available or restricted to a particular individual or a group of imperial subjects was an indicator of how the state perceived them and the threat assessment it made.

By the turn of the century, the Hamidian administration had become a veritable record-keeping apparatus that gathered data on its population. From denying internal travel permits (Mürur tezkiresi) to poor Macedonian and Armenian migrant workers to limiting the access of undesired foreigners to Ottoman lands, the various branches of the state engaged in an intensive archiving process. In the seventh and final chapter, Yılmaz explores the birth of the Ottoman passport system and its links to the government’s conception of security at a time when mobility within and without the Empire was becoming a matter of strict policing. Here, she makes another contribution to the field by discussing the usage of photographs as an effective tool of identification that developed “in synchronization with physical violence” (p. 235).

Drawing from an impressive range of Ottoman sources, from the interior (dahiliye) and foreign (hariciye) ministries, the Council of the State (Şurayi Devlet), and the Yıldız Palace collections among others, Yılmaz’s work is not only a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on late Ottoman history but also provides a fresh and a critical perspective for scholars working on the emergence of modern security orders in the Middle East and beyond. She makes the compelling case that as much as the Ottoman authorities learned from their European counterparts about the latest policing techniques, they also institutionalized “local” ways of monitoring, surveying, and documenting an empire that remained extremely heterogeneous. While Yılmaz’s work is laudable, the title of the book does not do full justice to the breadth and scope of the issues that the author is tackling. Not only does the treatment of passports come in the final two chapters, but after a quick glance at the table of contents, the reader would immediately understand that Yılmaz’s argument is not merely limited to identity papers but rather pertains to the emergence and consolidation of an entire regime of security, of which identification documents were an important, yet only one component. Her overemphasis on the Ottoman authorities’ anti-criminal usage of passports accounts perhaps why she omits a brief discussion of how numerous Ottoman subjects acquired European passports during this time and the whole range of extraterritorial problems that derived from such acts. Finally, Yılmaz’s narrative arch would have been more powerful had she ended with a short passage on the Hamidian legacies of state security, not only for the Turkish Republican government in the twenty-first century, but also for its immediate successors, namely the Young Turks whose threat perception of non-Muslims and especially the Armenians went far beyond mobility restrictions. During the Empire’s final war, they made sure that Armenians were completely removed from that actual geography, rather than limiting their movement.

Despite such minor comments, Ottoman Passports is a fascinating read, particularly when the reader learns about the author’s personal experiences with the Turkish security services and the mobility restrictions she suffered in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016. The book is a great resource for scholars and graduate students of late Ottoman history as well as those working on thematic fields such as mobility and migration in a global context. Finally, as turmoil continues to engulf the Middle East and many communities remain vulnerable to several forms of destruction, Yılmaz offers a historically grounded study of how institutional investments and engagements are crucial to hampering the gradual marginalization of certain segments of society and to exposing them to violence. In this regard, Ottoman Passports would also be appealing to scholars of legal anthropology and genocide studies whose work ranges from empirical case studies to broader conceptions of state power and mass violence.