Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State explores the history of North Caucasian Muslims who fled to the Ottoman Empire to escape Russia’s ethnic cleansing and persecution between the 1850s and World War I. According to the author Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, approximately one million North Caucasian Muslims left the Russian Empire during this period, making it one of the largest human displacements in Russian imperial history. Hamed-Troyansky beautifully and eloquently narrates the story of these North Caucasian refugees, demonstrating an impressive command of multilingual archival sources—drawn from more than 20 public and private archives—and a remarkable breadth of research.

Engaging with global refugee studies and the history of modern empires, Empire of Refugees significantly revises our understanding of the emergence of the modern refugee system and reveals the analytical value of centering on refugees and their migrations in studying imperial history. The author argues that the ways in which, in their final decades, the Ottoman and Russian empires managed the migration of Muslim refugees “transformed entire regions in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.” At the same time, the trans-imperial movements of Muslim refugees themselves “tied the Ottoman and Russian empires together and created a world of their own,” leaving a lasting legacy in the contemporary Middle East (p. 249).

Hamed-Troyansky employs the Arabic term “muhajir,” alongside “refugee,” to identify North Caucasian migrants to the Ottoman Empire. As he makes clear, “muhajir”—derived from hijra, the journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE (p. 8)—illuminates how North Caucasian refugees understood their displacement and how the Ottoman state conceptualized their resettlement within its territory. According to Hamed-Troyansky, “muhajir” encompasses multiple stages of North Caucasian Muslims’ emigration, immigration, and settlement, thereby challenging the “artificial distinction between forced and voluntary migration” (pp. 8–9).

Empire of Refugees is organized into three parts. Part I outlines the imperial contexts of the North Caucasian displacement, examining the Russian and Ottoman policies that precipitated the migration of Muslims from the Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire. In the late nineteenth century, Russia abandoned its earlier protection of Muslim subjects and adopted a new military strategy to subjugate the Caucasus. Between 1862 and 1864, the Russian military carried out ethnic cleansing in the Northwest Caucasus, expelling around half a million Western Circassians, relocating them first from the highlands to the lowlands—areas often swampy and malarial—and then to the Ottoman Empire. After 1867, Russia halted these expulsions to prevent further Muslim emigration but prohibited the return of North Caucasians from Ottoman territories (p. 24).

Hamed-Troyansky interprets this dislocation not as a mere byproduct of war but as Russia’s deliberate policy to impose cultural homogeneity (p. 32) within the region. Through the conquest of the entire Caucasus, Russia forced many Muslim refugees out of the region while encouraging the migration of Christians from Ottoman Anatolia and Kurdistan into the Caucasus. The Russian government also denaturalized (revoked the subjecthood of ) Muslim emigrants—a rare imperial measure—making their return home exceedingly difficult (pp. 44–45).

Receiving these muhajirs, the Ottoman Empire established the Refugee Commission in 1860 to facilitate their assistance and resettlement, maintaining this system until the empire’s dissolution. Hamed-Troyansky identifies this Ottoman commission as a refugee regime, equipped with “a set of principles, norms, and procedures governing the acceptance and resettlement of refugees” (p. 57). In this sense, he regards the Ottoman commission as a precursor to the international refugee mechanisms later developed by the League of Nations during the interwar period—widely recognized as the foundation of the modern refugee regime subsequently institutionalized by the United Nations after the Second World War.

The Ottoman government conceived of refugee resettlement as a means to centralize imperial authority and fortify the empire amid growing European encroachments. Following its defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878, the empire signed the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin with Russia in 1878. These treaties entrenched ethno-religious demographics as a legitimizing principle of statehood and as the basis for border delineation in the Balkans. Thereafter, the Ottomans employed refugees as instruments of demographic engineering along the empire’s margins. They resettled muhajirs on nomadic territories, turning refugee farmers into agents of the Ottoman mission to “civilize” nomads. The state also strategically placed muhajirs in provinces with large non-Muslim populations. By adjusting demographic ratios in favor of Muslims, the Ottoman government sought to avert territorial losses and counter potential irredentist claims (p. 80).

Part II shifts the analysis from imperial contexts to case studies of refugee resettlement in three Ottoman regions—the Balkans, the Levant, and Anatolia. With limited Ottoman assistance, Muslim refugees often competed with local populations for land, developing distinct social trajectories that invite comparison with other refugee experiences across time and space.

In the Balkans, where more than 300,000 North Caucasians were resettled, refugees faced land scarcity and economic instability, leading to tensions with local communities. Hamed-Troyansky links these conditions to the economic roots of sectarian conflict and argues that the burdens of refugee relief and the resettlements contributed to the Ottomans’ loss of the Balkans and, ultimately, the empire’s decline. Under worsening economic pressures, some impoverished muhajirs turned to banditry or joined the Ottoman gendarmerie and irregular troops. In the late 1870s, many enlisted in the bashibozuks, undisciplined auxiliaries the Ottomans employed for rural security. During the Bulgarian uprising of 1876, the Ottoman state relied on local muhajirs and bashibozuks, who also carried out sectarian violence against Christian communities (p. 110).

In contrast, Muslim refugees in the Levant prospered through alliances with local nomadic groups, while those in Anatolia aspired to recreate the Caucasus but remained isolated and stagnant.

Finally, Part III examines how, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalism, North Caucasian refugees formed new associations to pursue cultural autonomy and political advocacy. The term “North Caucasian refugees” in this book refers not to a single ethnic group but to diverse ethnic, linguistic, and regional communities. In the early twentieth century, they sought to forge unity across their multiple origins, working to “mold their disparate refugee groups into one community” (p. 187). Because these subgroups lacked a shared language and could not easily communicate, Hamed-Troyansky traces village networks and other communal institutions that facilitated this process of constructing a unity. The first North Caucasian association was the Society for Circassian Unity, founded in Cairo in 1899 (p. 195). The second, the Circassian Union and Support Association, was established in Istanbul after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and became the largest and most influential North Caucasian organization in the Ottoman Empire between 1908 and 1923. These associations promoted initiatives such as developing a Circassian script and advocating for the abolition of Circassian slavery (p. 204).

Part III also explores the return migration of North Caucasians to Russia and the evolution of tsarist reimmigration policies in the Caucasus. In 1861, Russia instituted a formal ban on the return of North Caucasian Muslims. Yet regional authorities later devised mechanisms to readmit some muhajirs, following the Chechen “returnee refugee crisis” of 1865 and the Abkhazian one of 1880. Drawing on research in multiple archives, Hamed-Troyansky reconstructs Russia’s unwritten reimmigration policy (1867–World War I), under which many North Caucasians were readmitted to their homeland and restored to Russian subjecthood. This policy, kept secret from the Ottoman government and North Caucasian muhajirs, sought to discourage mass return. Between 1860 and World War I, ~40,000 Muslims returned to the Caucasus (p. 237).

I have three questions about this magnificent and compelling book, posed to further clarify its contributions to the history of refugees, migration, and empires.

First, regarding the Ottoman origins of the modern refugee regime: It is true that the Ottoman Empire developed an elaborate system for the relief and resettlement of Muslim refugees. The establishment of the Refugee Commission in 1860 marked a shift from earlier open-door policies that had accepted diverse religious, ethnic, and tribal groups to a more centralized framework that prioritized Muslim muhajirs in registration and assistance. In what sense, then, might this narrowing of the refugee category—defined primarily through religion—be seen not merely as an imperial strategy but as a stage in the evolution of a modern refugee system seeking to offer humanitarian relief irrespective of ethnic, religious, or political affiliation?

Second, concerning the role of Muslim resettlement in the Ottoman collapse: Hamed-Troyansky persuasively shows that the relief of Muslim refugees intensified the empire’s financial burdens, while resettlement generated local conflicts and sectarian violence, particularly in the Balkans, where refugee militias clashed with local communities. Yet, within broader interpretations of Ottoman decline, could these refugee policies also be seen as prolonging the empire’s survival, rather than hastening its fall? Might the fundamental problem have lain less in the instability caused by muhajir resettlement than in the empire’s inability to construct a new political framework capable of accommodating its diverse ethnic, religious, and political constituencies? Could the author clarify further how the book’s emphasis on Muslim resettlement offers a more compelling explanation for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire than existing interpretations?

Third, regarding refugee identities, who did the North Caucasian associations of the early twentieth century represent? Why did they pursue the cultural and political autonomy of North Caucasian refugees, even by reinventing a sense of collective unity? It appears that many Muslim refugees maintained loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, cultivating what the author describes as “overlapping affiliations for muhajirs” (p. 198), while others returned to Russia to reclaim their former subjecthood. Was this pursuit of cultural unity shaped primarily by the nationalist framework of the Young Turks, or did it emerge from the refugees’ own initiatives?

Furthermore, is it appropriate to understand these associations as representing muhajir orientations dispersed across multiple regions—communities that had assimilated into the Ottoman system yet continued to interact with local actors? Did they preserve distinct identities as refugees, and if so, what motivated these aspirations? What might such efforts reveal about the political consciousness and social disposition of refugee communities in this period?