Over the last few years, the field of Ottoman migration has significantly expanded our understanding of how foreign Muslims became Ottoman subjects through their arrival in the empire as refugees, immigrants, and pilgrims, as well as of Muslims’ claims to space and sovereignty.Footnote ¹ In the book Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire, Ella Fratantuono participates in this new conversation by approaching the question of who was an ideal Ottoman migrant by following the paths of Muslims coming from the Caucasus under the Russian Empire. By centering three concepts—governmentality, social engineering, and failure—the book makes several important claims about how immigrants shaped Ottoman governance and society, as administrative, economic, and infrastructural restrictions determined the empire’s capacity to govern migration. The immigrant became a figure who exposed the gap between imperial goals and their implementation, as well as the boundaries and inequalities of Ottoman belonging. The author also underlines how muhācir (immigrant) defined the relationship between the empire, land, and people: settling people went hand in hand with mapping the land, as the state attempted to understand and categorize both land and people, and make them governable.

The question of vocabulary is crucial to the book yet, at times, remains vague and ambiguous. The term muhācir became an umbrella term encompassing Muslims, Jews, and Christians fleeing coercion, as well as European settlers. Using immigrant and refugee sometimes interchangeably in her narrative, Fratantuono continues the ambiguity and permeability existing between those concepts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even in 1918, the distinction between a refugee (mülteci) and immigrant (muhācir) remained ambiguous. The general director of tribes and migrants in the Ottoman parliament defined an immigrant as someone “who arrived in the empire officially and in accordance with the empire’s treaties with other states,” and therefore was entitled to free land as well as tax and military exemptions; whereas a refugee was anyone fleeing a war (1). In practice however, the two categories often overlapped. For example, in discussing the arrival of Crimean Tatars fleeing the Crimean War in 1856, the author explains that the Ottoman state sought to invest in their well-being as potential colonists, and therefore determined that Crimean immigrants would be entitled to military and tax exemptions. At the same time, the instructions sent to the local governor who settled them in Silistre, recognized the more “precarious position of the refugees” by granting them more exceptions (48). Fratantuono argues that these efforts to “turn refugees into colonists contributed to the consolidation of a meaning of muhācir attached to certain rights, resources and behaviors” (50). A few pages later, she reiterates that “to facilitate their integration and economic success, immigrants received exemptions from taxation and military conscription” (71). Before World War II, the distinction between a migrant and a refugee did not exist internationally, but the United Nations Convention on Refugees in 1951 introduced a much more restricted and politicized understanding of a refugee. A refugee had become someone who could not return to their country due to a fear of persecution. The term refugee came to denote a “policy-oriented” status, as it raised a sense of urgency (2).

The first chapter approaches the muhācir as a colonist. When hundreds of Prussian families asked to settle in the Ottoman Empire to ameliorate their living conditions, the members of the Tanzimat Council, the empire’s central legislative body, took the opportunity to standardize, manage, and publicize immigration to inspire a larger group of European settlers. The first migrant regulation in 1857 was liberal and pro-immigration, as Ottoman officials regarded colonization as a route to “economic development and agricultural productivity and as a means to overcome debt” following the Crimean War (35). By facilitating immigration in an era of mass migration, Ottoman officials believed that they could qualitatively and quantitatively develop the Ottoman population. The problem was how to identify and administratively locate and render the population legible, before manipulating and shaping it.

The second chapter conceptualizes muhācir as a problem by exploring the attempts of the director of migrant settlement in Rumelia, Nusret Pasha, to define and allocate space for newcomers. By describing migrant settlement from the perspective of a bureaucrat, the author attempts to personalize Ottoman state-building. Although by welcoming Muslim refugees coming from imperial Russia and the Balkans and extending them Ottoman subjecthood, the Ottoman sultan was making a political statement about his leadership in the Muslim community, the Ottoman administration did not anticipate such large numbers of refugees in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Ottoman Immigration Commission had to provide emergency aid such as food rations and temporary housing for a larger population than expected, requiring assistance from the local population. When coupled with harsh winters and famine, these pressures led to conflicts between local populations and newcomers, as the belief that immigrants were bringing crime and epidemics became widespread. Settlement plans faltered when migrants were sent to malarial lowlands, a failure resulting in high mortality rates.

The third chapter explores the muhācir as a victim through the lenses of health and philanthropy. Following the disastrous defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the hands of Russia in 1878 and the subsequent influx of refugees, public health and migrant welfare became areas in which the Ottoman Empire had to assert its legitimacy among European powers. The emergence of the quarantine system, along with discourse framing the muhācir as a threat to public health, spatially separated “the diseased migrant [from] the healthy city dweller and [imposed] a boundary on migrant mobility” (111). Although humanitarian care for the displaced was an active concern in philanthropist Ottoman circles, portraying the muhācir as a public health issue that the Ottoman Empire was not capable of addressing enabled European states to justify their intervention in Ottoman sovereignty.

Refugees did not settle on empty land. Local populations complained about refugee settlements and asserted their right to space. Refugees also opposed the settlement plans of Ottoman officials, whose capacities were constrained by the availability of land and ecological conditions. Although the Ottoman administration saw settlement plans as an opportunity to “remake Anatolia,” the gap between their goals and the outcome was steep. Rather than recognizing failure as “external to the process of reform,” Fratantuono sees it as “inherent to the project of governance” (169). The fourth chapter describes failure as a generative force, as the borders between the officials, migrants, and locals were porous. All groups contributed and responded to the ongoing chaos, conflict, and negotiation.

Although the definition of muhācir encompassed a broader group, the next chapter follows the ideal refugee from the Ottoman perspective, namely, a Muslim. Following the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War and the significant territorial loss in the Balkans, new demographic and territorial dynamics emerged. Coupled with non-Muslim emigration to the United States and the anti-Armenian massacres, these developments reshaped the understanding of who belonged to the empire. The Hamidian regime prioritized Muslim immigrants and settled them in the eastern provinces to undermine the local power of Kurdish landlords and to dispossess the Armenian community. A separate commission for Muslim migrants (Muhacirin-i Islamiye Komisyonu) was created in 1897 under Sultan Abdulhamid II to facilitate Muslim migration and settlement. This was a year after the government issued a decree permitting Armenians to emigrate to the United States if they renounced their Ottoman subjecthood, signed a document attesting that they would never come back, and sold their properties. Although the government was defining its non-Muslim subjects as outsiders and labeling their mobility as suspicious and dangerous, it allowed foreign Muslims to become Ottoman legal nationals.

The book concludes by considering the muhācir as possibility. Following the 1908 revolution, the failures of migrant settlement under previous regimes were measured in economic terms. The new government under the Committee of Union and Progress framed the problem not as immigration but the state’s incapacity to manage this flow, and this perspective left room for potential improvement. In Ottoman state correspondence, in parliament, and in newspapers, fundamental questions were debated regarding the rights and obligations of refugees, the local population, and the state. Members of the parliament and refugees themselves took part in discussions about the Ottoman Empire’s own poverty and its inability to take care for its own subjects, as well as whether Muslims should remain in the Balkans to sustain a Muslim presence or emigrate to Anatolia. What was not questioned, however, was the state’s role in manipulating and socially engineering refugees. Although the new government rejected the Hamidian past, it did not produce a definitive break with its policies and continued to make a case for an organic relationship between population and governance.

Governing Migration in the Late Ottoman Empire is a thought-provoking and conceptually grounded book. The book’s structuring of each chapter around a distinct theme related to the refugee demystifies the state perspective. Also particularly striking is the book’s attention to local populations and refugees and how their articulated demands around space and community contributed to the making of Ottoman subjecthood. The book’s chronological scope is constrained; it touches the 1908 revolution and its aftermath, but does not extend to the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. These wars likely reshaped debates about whether Muslim refugees should remain in the Balkans. That note aside, the book is a remarkable contribution to scholarship that centers mobility in Ottoman history, including inspiring novel research. It is also a valuable source for graduate training, as Fratantuono demonstrates a combination of meticulous archival work and careful engagement with secondary literature, resulting in a valuable addition to the discussion regarding who was considered an Ottoman and who could (never) become one.