A new book tells the story of one of the world’s refugee protection systems which saw hundreds of thousands of Muslims from surrounding lands were given sanctuary by the Ottoman Empire.

‘Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State’, by US academic Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, tells the little-known story of how roughly a million Muslims from Russia sought refuge in the Middle East.

This resettlement of Muslim refugees from Russia changed the Ottoman state.

Between the 1880s and WWI Circassians, Chechens, Dagestanis, and others established hundreds of refugee villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia and the Levant.

Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman – the largest city in the Levant — established in 1878 by Circassian refugees.

Muslim refugee resettlement reinvigorated regional economies, but also intensified competition over land and, at times, precipitated sectarian tensions, setting in motion fundamental shifts in the borderlands of the Russian and Ottoman empires.

‘Empire of Refugees’, published by Stanford University, reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East.

It offers the historiographical corrective, that the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Based on archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, the book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book, which started as an award-winning doctoral dissertation at Stanford, examines the establishment of more than 1,000 new villages.

“As I was working on the book, I realized that the Ottoman resettlement of refugees from the Caucasus captures an important moment in global history — the origins of organized refugee resettlement in the Middle East,” Assistant Professor Hamed-Troyansky said.

Drawing primarily from sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Russian, the book contends that the Ottoman government constructed a refugee regime to accommodate incoming Muslims well before the international refugee regimes of the 20th century.

“The comprehensive system of refugee protections that the Ottomans had put in place was unprecedented at the time. This book investigates what led the Ottoman government to create a refugee regime and how it used refugees to fortify imperial rule,” said Professor Hamed-Troyansky, a historian of refugee migration in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

‘Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State’
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
Stanford University Publishing
$US32