Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million Muslims from the Russian Empire’s Caucasus region sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. In his new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. Empire of Refugees argues that, in response to Muslim migrations from Russia, the Ottoman government created a refugee regime, which predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. The book further revises our understanding of how Russia used migration policies to govern the Caucasus and its Muslim populations.

This will be an online event. 

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About the speaker

Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). His articles appeared in Past & Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Slavic Review, Kritika, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute.

 

Southeast European Studies seminar series

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