Empire of Refugees by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a dazzling and comprehensive account of the North Caucasian Muslim displacement across the Russian and Ottoman empires between 1860 and the First World War. Drawing on an impressive array of multilingual archival materials collected from twenty-four public and private archives spanning ten countries, it traces the North Caucasian resettlement in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant and their afterlives. The book provides a multi-dimensional rendition of the last decades of the Ottoman empire, during which it increasingly became demographically Muslim (82), and connects this history to other empires, especially the Russian empire, through the lens of mobility and property relations. It situates this connected history within a broader transimperial context where one’s background (religion, ethnicity, and so on) was increasingly tied to political belonging and representation (34), facilitating the extension of “extraterritorial protections” to designated groups, informing policies of nationality, land distribution, mass displacement, and political violence, as well as justifying territorial claims and foreign interventions on demographic grounds. With great attention to detail, Hamed-Troyansky complicates easy categorizations and identification-related assumptions based on background and unravels the economic foundations of what he calls “sectarian” conflict (91). Hamed-Troyansky’s work shows how, to varying degrees at the time, the Ottoman and Russian empires sought to expand land use for agriculture, increase taxable land through registration, settle nomadic communities, redistribute land titles in the borderlands to “loyal” settlers, and deploy deeds, while altering local demographic ratios accordingly. This dynamic is set against the backdrop of independence movements, resistance to the expansion of control over different groups, and the development of infrastructure such as railways and print culture that marked this period. Arguing that these dynamics paved the path to the twentieth century genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyrians, the author considers displacements, dispossession, and violence that targeted communities because of their background as earlier versions of ethnic cleansing (10). This far-reaching book will appeal to scholars in various disciplines interested in humanitarianism, sovereignty, displacement, population management, demography, political economy, mobility, political violence, and other related topics, with broader implications for the contemporary world context where ethnonationalism and fantasies of homogeneity are abundant.

The book is divided into three parts, each exploring different facets of the North Caucasian mobility spanning from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, across the Russian and Ottoman empires. Part I focuses on the mass migration of Muslims from the Caucasus to the Ottoman empire following imperial Russia’s policies of North Caucasian dispossession and internal forced displacement. It also examines the shifting policies in the Ottoman management of land, mobility, and resettlement, highlighting the colonial implications in both late Ottoman and Russian cases. Part II traces the resettlement of North Caucasians in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, zooming in on the provinces that hosted the largest number of North Caucasians, namely the provinces of Danube, Sivas, and Damascus. Part III investigates the afterlives of these groups and their activities, such as forming associations or founding newspapers, conducting educational and intellectual advocacy, as well as the eventual return of some of these groups to Russia. The North Caucasian returns demonstrated how some Muslims preferred leaving the Caliphate to live under the tsar’s rule, puncturing the narrative of the sultan-caliph’s protection of Muslims and the Ottoman empire being a refuge for foreign Muslims (224, 242).

Within this framework, Empire of Refugees demonstrates how political interests are intertwined with the notion of “protection,” whether from the angle of “humanitarianism,” demographic engineering, or extending extraterritorial protection to the subjects of other empires. Extraterritorial protection demarcated different groups in an empire as the protégés of another—a demarcation commonly informed by the protégés’ background and aimed at expanding the sphere of influence of one empire over the other. This practice often undermined sovereignty and was instrumentalized to justify foreign interventions and/or territorial claims, while reconfiguring regional, demographic, and imperial power relations. The Russian empire’s intervention in the Ottoman Balkans, with the claim of protecting the Christian populations against Ottoman rule, or the European diplomatic channels extending protection to Ottoman Christians, with consuls officializing the designated groups’ status as European protégés (34, 81–83, 93), can be counted as examples of this transimperial dynamic. In the Ottoman context, such “protection” was extended to the Muslim subjects of the Russian empire and informed what Hamed-Troyansky calls “the Ottoman refugee regime” (4, 19, 56–86), developed in response to European imperialism (57). Protection here is also connected to the Ottoman pan-Islamism that informed Ottoman foreign policy in the last decades of the nineteenth century, in some ways competing with Russia’s pan-Slavic agenda (81–82, 93, 113).

Hamed-Troyansky argues that both the Russian and the Ottoman empires developed a “sectarian logic” (6), gradually leading to the sectarianization of their shared borderlands (10, 34). He also argues that the Ottoman resettlement objective in the Balkans was increasingly sectarian (80)—a calculated attempt to dilute the number of Christians in the Balkans in order to change the demographic ratio. This, in turn, he claims, contributed to a “sectarian violence” in the Balkans in the nineteenth century (89–116), with far-reaching consequences in the making and unmaking of the Middle East, still relevant today. Empire of Refugees further complicates this picture by bringing in the economic conditions (91). Insufficient funds to support resettlement and the scarcity of land for distribution led to the reallocation of seized land from one group to another, which contributed to the tensions among them. Moreover, some North Caucasian Muslims who could not make ends meet joined the militia—brutally suppressing local Christian uprisings and committing massacres in the Balkans, or resorted to banditry (104, 109, 111, 116). As the Russian and British powers stepped in, along with others, the “Ottoman government also drew conclusions from its troubled resettlement of refugees in the Balkans” and “learned the demographic value of settling Muslims in frontier territories and the military use of a poor and loyal refugee population,” recognizing the “risk that a lack of support for refugees posed to the social order” (116). After the Ottomans lost in the Balkans, they relocated the North Caucasian Muslims elsewhere in the empire.

While the “generosity toward Muslim refugees became a way to shore up the Ottomans’ internal and external image as benevolent protectors of Islam” (66), late nineteenth century Ottoman emphasis on Islam as a unifying denominator increasingly became concerned with ethnicity (83, 86). Similar to imperial Russia where ethnic background “had been entangled with faith and political loyalty,” the importance of ethnicity grew over time (37–38, 83), becoming another categorization of difference in the Ottoman empire by the twentieth century (83). The Ottoman government “was anxious about ethnic politics, especially by the empire’s Muslim subjects, as the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 all but confirmed ethnicity as key to sovereignty and border delineation” (195). As Hamed-Troyansky also shows, however, different aspects of one’s identification can be activated strategically. In other words, assumptions of “homogenization” are a fallacy. Indeed, the North Caucasian Muslims were remarkably diverse not only in terms of class and status, but also because this umbrella term included Abkhazians, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, Ossetians, Avars, Lezgins, as well as the Adyghe and the Kabardian, among others. Tensions among people from the same background also surfaced in such matters as slavery, claims to land and subsidies, and concessions. Moreover, the stories of some North Caucasian Muslims from the Ottoman empire returning to the Russian empire cut across such categorizations and demonstrate the strategic mobilization of certain aspects of one’s identification for a variety of reasons, including survival. Their cases disrupt the underlying assumptions of political belonging unambiguously tied to background, which informed massive demographic engineering projects of “unmixing.” Later, in the twentieth century, policies of unmixing found their international medium as a necessity for peace and order, reinforcing the idea of incommensurability and that different groups cannot coexist, as if conflicts do not have complex histories of imperial and colonial aspirations, economic and geopolitical interests, as the Empire of Refugees also shows.

Hamed-Troyansky’s thoughtful efforts to put his work in dialogue with the studies of more recent phenomena are noteworthy. For scholars from other disciplines working on later displacements, certain terms like “refugee,” “refugee regime,” or “ethnic cleansing” might have more specific meanings—conjecturally configured through different institutions, actors, practices, and laws, and each time, reconfigured in response to the changing dynamics, such as the contemporary refugee regime being systematized after World War II and its differential interpretation and applications across time and space. As the book successfully shows, a designated past might have bearing implications for a given present, but assumptions of clean-cut ruptures or unbroken continuities are not realistic and need to be complicated, for in every rupture there is a continuity, and in every continuity shifts and changes. In that regard, this book is a remarkable addition to the rich body of scholarship that engages spatial and territorial demographics, displacement, protection, and mobility in legal, material, historical, social, cultural, and biopolitical terms, which cannot be cited here due to the lack of space. Suffice it to say that Empire of Refugees debunks fantasies of purity and homogeneity at yet another level, simultaneously unpacking the colonial and imperial implications of “protection,” and forces us to ask hard questions about population management, violence, and displacement in the making and unmaking of maps, with deep implications for today, as we witness in Gaza.