Ottoman History Podcast - Migrants in the Late Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: September 1, 2017

Episode 331 with Ella Fratantuono hosted by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Though it is often ignored among the many histories of the great migrations of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire experienced the arrival of millions of migrants over the course of its last decades. The migrant or muhacir was therefore not just a critical demographic component of both Ottoman cities and the countryside but also part of and subject to different political projects associated with the empire's transformation. In this conversation with Ella Fratantuono, we offer an introduction to the history of migration in the late Ottoman Empire and seek to understand the muhacir as a legal, administrative, and conceptual figure in Ottoman society. « Click for More »

Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Seyit Yilmaz. Today's program is one of our favorite themes on the podcast, the theme of migration. And specifically, we're looking at the waves of largely Muslim migration into the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and early 20th century. Now, there are a lot of ways we can approach this topic, and in past and future episodes, we do adopt various approaches. Today, we're speaking with a historian who indeed applies these many approaches to her research, and we'll be focusing on a conceptual history of migration

that really hones in on this figure of the Muhajir. It's a term we're going to define in just a second, but first let me introduce our guest, Ella Fratantuono. Ella, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Satchel. Ella's actually been on the podcast before with us. She's never had the chance to present her own research, but a little background on Ella Fratantuono. She's an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her dissertation, submitted just last year at Michigan State University, focused on the history of migrants who came to the Ottoman Empire from the 19th century onward. She's currently working on revising that into a book project. And today, as I've said, our conversation will really focus on the conceptual undergirding of this project in terms of how to think about the figure of the migrant in the Ottoman Empire, to borrow the phrase of Thomas Nile in his recent work,

and to understand some of the institutional and legal specificities of the experience of migration in the Ottoman Empire during this period when really a global revolution, so to speak, in migration is taking place. So Ella, let's situate our listeners before getting into some of these details. Of course, migration was occurring within and in and out of the Ottoman Empire from its earliest history, but during the 19th century, as a result of specific political conflicts, we really see an uptick in certain migration. Can you give us a brief overview of some of the major waves of migration into the Ottoman Empire from the 19th century onward, especially the ones you've researched for your own work?

Sure. So I think, again, listeners to the podcast will know that this is a sort of dramatic change in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, and that likewise, this is really a sort of global moment of increased migration. But what we can really think about in looking at these major waves are two major structural changes or sort of ongoing events, the increased presence of the Russian state in areas like the Crimean Peninsula and the Caucasus, and sort of growing nationalist movements in the Balkans as being major forces of movement throughout the period. And particularly, I guess, my work has focused on migration after 1850, after the Crimean War in particular. To give you a sense of numbers and groups, immediately following the Crimean War, so roughly 1856 to 1862, we see the movement of about 200,000 Crimean Tatars, 50,000 Nogai Tatars in 1859 at the same time as the Russian Empire expands

and finishes its sort of decades long conflict in the Caucasus we see from 1860 to roughly 1864, 1865 the movement of upwards of 1.2 million individuals from the Caucasus who are often called Circassians. Then, after the 1877 to 1878 war, we see major migrations coming from, again, the Caucasus, as well as from the Balkans.

And during that time, again, you see maybe as many as 1.5 million individuals coming from just the Balkans, some of whom had been settled in that area only a decade and a half prior. Right, so people who had already been expelled from like let's say the Caucasus during a slightly earlier period, we find them coming into the Ottoman Empire from territories in the Balkans that the Ottoman Empire is losing in these conflicts such as the Russo-Ottoman War. Precisely, yeah.

We see a lot of the major settlement in the 1860s was into Rumeli. And so, yes, when the 1877 to 1878 war finishes up, those individuals are likewise moved, along with some of the longer term residents of the area. Another episode would be after 1898, again, maybe as many as 90,000 individuals from Crete. And then of course, as we move into the 20th century, we have a half million coming from the Balkans after the Balkan Wars. Right. 1912, 1913. Precisely, yeah. And so all told, if you look at this period from 1850s, 1856 to 1913,

I've seen estimates ranging from 5 million to 7 million people, which is obviously why these migrations have prompted a very rich historical literature, because they simply are rapidly changing and massively changing the demographics of the Ottoman Empire throughout the period. Right. And those numbers alone indicate the massive scale. And of course, there's a lot of complications in actually counting because of like double migration, kind of as you described, or how many people survived the journey, how many eventually go back. These are all issues that historians continue to try to address in historiography. But, you know, what's important for our listeners to realize is

that we're talking about many different regions from the area surrounding the contracting Ottoman Empire, with many different ethno-linguistic communities, the Caucasus alone, full of dozens of them, as well as all these other parts of the Balkans, and as you said, Crete and other areas. This is truly a massive scale of migration of a very heterogeneous population of people who share little more than the fact that almost all of them were Muslim. Yeah, and I think even as we begin to talk about it and begin to talk about the state response, that very heterogeneity is part of how the Ottoman Empire or officials within the Ottoman Empire are attempting to understand these

movements and understand how to best take advantage of these movements, or at least to create situations of stability in response to major movement or major displacement. Right. So Ella, we are basically talking about a massive change in the course of almost a half a century. And I'm sure there are many different ways and approaches to study this type of migration and motion. I'm really curious about what's your perspective? How did you study this?

And how are you planning to frame this in your book project? Yeah, it's a huge topic. And I'm frequently confronted with the fact that it is a huge topic, deserving of many different sort of methodologies and really granular studies. And that's actually not what I'm trying to do is develop this kind of granular study that is very important to our understanding of the experience of migrants themselves, of these various waves. Instead, my project is a study of what I see

as an emerging and evolving migration and settlement regime. What I mean by regime here is the sort of cumulative policies, projects, infrastructures, and institutions that are meant to control mobility into, within, and out of the empire. And so my project spans actually 1850 to 1910, so a couple years prior to the Crimean War and then to these few years prior to the beginning of the Balkan Wars. The reason for that is because, as I said, I'm interested in this kind of emergence of a migration regime. And I think it's at this particular moment that you begin to see officials defining or conceiving of migration as an issue that is best organized from the center. In 1860, you see that, as we'll talk about in a few minutes, the emergence of the Migration Commission

or Migrants Commission. And what I think we can see here, again, it's a period spanning the Tanzimat through the Hamidian period. It's a period spanning the Tanzimat through the Himidian period. It's this period of centralization in many capacities within the Ottoman Empire. So this is one example of a changing relationship between state and subject. And migrants become a sign of this or particularly useful in kind of assessing this change because they could be used in ways such as reorganizing space on imperial or regional or local levels. The extension of resources could be used to kind of create loyalty between migrants and the central state. And of course, again, the kind of

creation of a broad infrastructure from the center but as a network into the provinces is another one of the ways in which we can think about the increasing presence of state institutions in people's daily lives. Also would you agree in that context that this is kind of also the element of migrants, the Mahajir is also kind of like a defining element of the Ottoman Empire as a modern empire in the sense that in a particular historical context, and if you use like the term the age of empire, if you borrow it from Habsburg, the empire is like a territorially expanding political context whereas for the ottoman context it's actually shrinking and shrinking but population wise it's increasing and increasing

so there's sort of like a paradox there yeah that's a very interesting way of framing it particularly because that kind of shrinking territory of the empire matched with this influx of migrants is creating all sorts of problems and changes, again, on an empire-wide scale, but certainly on a local scale as the state goes about trying to find places for people to settle. And as migrants themselves and other individuals kind of begin to articulate claims over this shrinking availability of particularly arable land. Right, like imperial bureaucrats now like face-to-face to invent or become creative about their governmental capacities

to basically deal with the problem. Right, and this is something that I try to point out in some of my work, that it's really interesting to look at an empire that is in some ways expanding yet territorially contracting because their settlement frontiers, I mean, that's how I conceptualize it, is kind of within the borders. So it's a little harder as a colonial power

to be colonizing territory within your own borders than to be kind of sending some of those processes overseas, as was the case for most European empires. So given that this Ottoman experience of the age of migration does have its specificities, let's get into the specific vocabulary and practices a little bit further and specifically reintroduce this term that we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast of muhajir. Of course, many scholars astutely point out that the word muhajir and its sort of various etymological roots are there with us from the earliest periods of Islamic history. Indeed, the Islamic calendar is called the Hijri calendar, which refers to the migration of the prophet and his followers from Mecca to Medina. And those people who went with him were called the Muhajirun, which is literally the same word that was used in the 19th century to describe migrants coming from the Caucasus and Balkans and elsewhere.

And so many scholars have said various many things about this, but in short, the vocabulary for this new phenomenon that we witnessed in the 19th century is arising from the sort of indigenous vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire and its own historical experience and the longer experience of Islamic history. And so it's actually when trying to translate this word muhajir into English, that we run into all these sorts of tensions in the historiography. Are they migrants? Are they immigrants? Are they refugees? How do we do this? So, you know, Ella, if you could sum it up for us, what are some of the different ways that people have conceptualized this term? And, you know, give us a little preview of the one that you prefer okay well i mean i think historians have

yeah have rightly struggled with this uh in part because of the insufficiency of of these labels generally i mean this kind of distinction between migrant and refugee whether you're looking at migrations in the 19th century or prior to that, or contemporary migrations, we see it's a very sort of tenuous distinction or frequently tenuous distinction in terms of how people are traveling, in terms of why they are traveling. And it really is sort of a rights-based response. And so that's why I think we can see historians using interchangeably these terms of immigrant and emigrant and sometimes refugee and sometimes even sort of anachronistically an asylum seeker or internally displaced person. And especially these last three terms, of course,

have very coherent legal meanings, even though they don't really apply to the past necessarily. But in terms of like a sort of historiography of the study of the Muhajir, we see several different sort of modes of studying. So one would be to kind of engage with the reasons why people were leaving, again, the Russian Empire or leaving the Balkans. Was it because they were sort of forced? Was this overall a forced migration in which we would think of refugees? Or can we understand sort of fluctuating policies? This is something you see in the Crimean Peninsula,

sort of a change from encouraging immigration to actually trying to prevent immigration in the 1860s. We also see officials and migrants and historians kind of mobilizing the term Muhajir and recognizing its sort of religious overtones to provide a framework for why they were leaving or the directionality of their movement, right. In this case, we would see maybe, on the one hand, some sort of older historiography suggesting that the framing of migration as that of the hijrah is very much a sign of the kind of fanatical identity of these Muslim migrants.

Others might suggest that the use of the word muhajir migrants. Others might suggest that the use of the word muhajir is instead sort of an empowering gesture by these migrants. And again, it's just kind of a lending a directionality to their movement into the Dar al-Islam. Other perspectives, I think, instead of looking at those reasons for emigration are instead fixated, this is sort of more my field, are interested in sort of politics of acceptance and the actual, again, kind of policies that the Ottoman state is developing, where you might see, I think, Bashak Kale and Kamal Karpat have talked about how we see from the 1860s through to the early 20th century, a kind of shift from a very liberal and open policy of acceptance to an increasingly narrow and religiously defined tendency

to accept exclusively Muslim migrants. And then there are also these tendencies, again, to kind of by emphasizing that religious identity to argue that these migrants and the demographic change they caused led as well to the sort of Islamization or potentially even Turkification of Anatolia and sort of narrate a very easy assimilation of sort of Muslim migrants as Muslims. There has been some really useful analysis instead of return migration, of circular migration, of ongoing use of the word Muhajir,

not as a route to assimilation, but instead as a route to kind of a cohering identity within the Ottoman state. I think this is, again, a useful perspective. And more recently, Issaumi has, in his work, Ottoman refugees, sort of suggested that what we really need to do is kind of think about the ways in which settlement of migrants created new local nodes of political power.

And actually, Oktay Ozel does this as well, that we can see migrants using the term Muhajir or using the identity of Muhajir to accrue certain resources and to be active in developing administration you know it's striking in you know in some of the most more loose discussion of the experience of Muhajirs and particularly like when we're trying to translate into English how and I think you point this out in your own work, how maybe an inclination to use the term refugee, for example, would appeal to certain sensibilities about how refugees are supposed to be viewed today in the present. Refugee emphasizing that perhaps they're victims of a sort of expulsion, which indeed many

of them were, but sort of like it's a more empathetic term perhaps than migrant, which sounds more neutral. But as you're saying here, and as I think we'll discuss for the remainder of this podcast, it's very important to look at how this term actually functioned both socially within the context of Ottoman society, but of course, within an administrative and legal apparatus. We'll get to that in just a second. But first, we'll have a little music break and be right back with Ella Fratentwono talking about a conceptual history of migration and the Muhajir in the Ottoman Empire. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton and Cecilia Yilmaz here with Ella Fratentuono talking about her research on migration in the Ottoman Empire.

We've already alluded to a lot of great works, and so I want to remind our listeners that if you want to learn more about this topic, you can find the publication of Ella Fratentuono, as well as other relevant scholars on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. Brat and Tuono, as well as other relevant scholars on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. So Ella, you're actually making a very provocative and compelling argument about how to conceptualize the figure of the Muhajir in the Ottoman Empire, which is to say that in order to understand what the word signifies, we actually have to understand the institutional and administrative context within which this word is being sort of deployed and reconfigured over the final decades of the Ottoman Empire's history.

And a lot of that labor, at least from the state side, takes place through the Muhajirin Commission or its various iterations as it transforms with subsequent waves of migration. So let's talk about that commission, its origins, and the various iterations it did come to take. Sure. So again, if we're looking at this moment in the post-Crimean war era, we see a sudden influx of individuals, and it's in response to this influx of individuals that we eventually, again, see the kind of creation or conception of the Muhajir or the migrant as an issue that needs a central administrative structure. So if you look structure. So if you look in that period between the end of the Crimean War and 1860, which is significant as the kind of starting date of the Mujadjir and Kinshino, we see a tendency

towards sort of ad hoc responses to the beginnings of these mass migrations. And by ad hoc, I mean also concentrated in particular localities where migrants tended to arrive or where it was intended to place migrants. So for example, in 1857 or 1858, you see sort of a long set of instructions sent to the governor of Sallustra, encouraging him to take steps X, Y, and Z to respond to the migrant crisis there. You also have a very large number of migrants accruing in Istanbul, and really the main institutions responsible for dealing with immigrants in Istanbul

were the Şehremanetli and the Zaptiye, and to some extent the Ticaret Nezareti, or the trade ministry, and the,, and to some extent, the,, the trade ministry, and the police, and the kind of new entity responsible for municipal governance within Istanbul. So these were, again, sort of individual entities that were responsible for dealing with migrants

on an ad hoc or disaggregated way. In 1859, the Istanbul municipality asks for assistance, basically asks for more resources, asks for more personnel, in order to deal with the existing migrants as well as sort of this anticipated 40,000 to 50,000 more individuals coming from the Caucasus. Instead of just deploying those resources to the municipal government, instead the Ottoman state decides to kind of create a new entity, again this migration commission.

And Chris, you're right, when we look at the migration commission, or when, you know, I sort of use this clunky expression of migration administration, and the reason for that is because the Migration Commission, or Migration Administration generally, is a series of institutions that kind of reappear and disappear and are reorganized and renamed throughout the period from, again, 1850, really through to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

And those changes, those institutional changes, are to some extent in response to, again, kind of a emergence and then disappearance of moments of refugee crisis, I guess, or migrant crisis. So I argue this is a major change, that this change from an ad hoc administration to a centralized administration is something new and therefore something perhaps important. And I guess what I see as important is the kind of tactical measures that the state can now envision or that officials can now envision in terms of dealing with this new migrant population. What I mean by that is that actual ideals about settlement, for example, that migrants should be allotted a certain amount of

land, doesn't really change all that much throughout the period. But having a central administration means suddenly you are attempting to collect information about migrants in terms of population numbers, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of class, skill set, and using that kind of information to, first of all, reduce expenditures, but second of all, to kind of carefully and increasingly carefully place migrants throughout the empire. In terms of what this does for us conceptually, or what revisiting this kind of administrative entity or the Ottoman archives does in terms of conceptual definitions of the migrant,

is again, when we look at this word muhajir, migrant is, again, when we look at this word muhajir, most of the time we think of it as meaning Muslim and meaning something akin to forced migrant or refugee. But when you actually look at the way the term is used, again, that is typical. That is what we expect to find very frequently, Muslim migrants frequently coming under conditions of great distress and oftentimes with very sort of horrific results in terms of loss of life and sickness. Nevertheless, when we actually look again at the Ottoman documents, we see individuals

who of sort of varying religions and ethnicities, Jews, Armenians, Germans. We see even the word Muhajir used to describe individuals who were basically acting as colonists. Prior to the emergence of the Muhajir in Cristiano, we had in 1857 the regulations on migration and settlement, which was this invitation issued to basically anybody who wanted to come from North America or South America or Western Europe to come as long as they had a certain amount of capital and were were willing to pledge loyalty to the Ottoman state, to the Ottoman sultan, regardless of creed, they were allowed to come and should likewise be given land to settle on.

And even though, as far as I can tell, the actual regulations didn't use the word muhajir, state officials, when they sort of began to process these individuals, did use the word muhajir. So then, yeah, I mean, that's sort of radically different notion of what it means to be a muhajir, to see that it means potentially a non-Muslim, what we might say economic migrant now, or we might say colonist now. So that's sort of one truth that emerges when we look at these kind of different depictions. truth that emerges when we look at these kind of different depictions. Another thing that emerges, I think, as we look at this attempt to organize and administer settlement is that some of the very ways in which historians would likely attempt to kind of disaggregate this notion of migrant are present in the state's very attempt to make this an efficient process. So again, things like class. If you had a certain amount of money, you weren't really eligible for aid from the state. If you had different skill sets, that is, if you were sort of more educated

or you're a religious figure, you were more likely to be settled in a urban environment or at least in a town center, or at least that was the ideal. If you are an unaccompanied woman, the sort of plan would be to have you work in some sort of state-generated capacity, like sewing uniforms for the army. So there are these ways in which the state is already beginning to kind of disaggregate what it means to be Muhajir in order to best distribute resources. And in that way, again, looking at this kind of institutional history or administrative endeavor helps us think about what various experiences may have been. Right. And so some of the points that come out of that,

to sort of summarize it, is that the word of muhajir within the Ottoman lexicon, indeed, as you said, it's broader than Muslim in many cases, but it does connote a certain permanence of migration, someone who's going to stay, and someone who is implicitly under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Empire, not just by virtue of the fact of living there, but that their future life in this new land they've come to will be to some extent dictated through the policies derived by the migrant commissions

that determine where and how people will be settled. Yeah. And I think, I mean, your point about sort of permanence, I think is a very useful way to try and gain some sort of coherence when we think about this category. This is some sort of permanent or ideally permanent settlement. The only thing I would add is that they're also using the term to describe people who have left as well, a semi-permanent. Permanently gone. Permanently gone. Yeah, exactly. So permanence is more important than sort of the fact that they have sought, I guess, refuge or that they are now subjects of the Ottoman Empire. So would you agree with the statement that the Ottoman officials, on the basis of the political context that they've been kind of dragged into in the second half of the 19th century. They just re-Islamized the concept of Muhajir.

Okay, so this is a really interesting question. I think certainly again, you know, individuals like Kemal Karpat and Bashar Kaleh have certainly seen a narrowing of the meaning of Muhajir, particularly in the Hamidian period period i do think there's some truth to that i mean i think you can look again at these administrative endeavors and certainly see articulated within them first of all the sultan's role as caliph you can see as well this idea that migrants and Muslim migrants in particular, especially following that 1877 to 1878 war,

are used as ways to change the demographic balance in particular areas. Whether or not the Ottoman state could always sort of do this on border areas, it could at least do it in the interior. Or even I've seen documents that suggest, you know, these migrants are leaving, let's say, Bulgaria, and it's sort of like Bulgaria's loss is our gain. These courageous Muslims have left Bulgaria and are coming here and sort of are contributing to the benefit of the Islamic state. But I don't think it's the only thing going on here.

So again, this is where I think it's very useful to sort of move away from the notion of refugee and to, or at least conceive a muhajir, something that, again, can sort of incorporate this element of colonizer. And it's merely just at various moments, what is the kind of ideal colonizer? Whereas in 1857, the ideal colonizer was anybody who had some capital and was willing to come. Yeah, I think increasingly that sort of definition narrows as to who is the ideal, especially because there are plenty of Muslims coming. Right.

So Muwajar is kind of the site of the making of the modern subject and then citizen of the Ottoman Empire, in a way, is what you're saying. And when we use the word colonizer here, we have to remember the 19th century. Colonizing was not used in the pejorative sense that it is today, right? But, you know, what we're really talking about is people who are serving the interest of states that are all, to various extents, operating on a physiocratic logic, meaning that the maximum use of land is for agricultural production, and that that is to be the ultimate goal of the empire. So maybe we need to backtrack a little bit to this whole shift from, as you said, municipal and police ministries administering

migrants to the creation of a separate commission by looking at the effort to channel migrants away from the cities like Istanbul into the countryside and specifically define parts of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire with either sparse population or a room or land that could be cultivated and how the economic goals of the empire, leaving aside those other demographic engineering goals, sort of play into the way in which migrants are administered. Yeah, certainly. And I guess I would say, again, I mean, not to keep harping on this sort of 1857 moment, but even that 1857 moment is also employing, I think, officials from the sort of war ministry, I guess we could say, to likewise go out into the countryside and begin to survey land and to then inform the central state as to its availability. And basically throughout the period in question,

this doesn't change. What changes is the extent to which land is available and the perhaps changing definition of who is best able to use it. I know something your research has touched on, Chris, and my research has revealed something somewhat similar, is the ways in which Ottoman officials were, I mean, they're looking for land that's available, and they're looking for land that is also sort of suitable, that is arable,

that is maybe just sort of hospitable on the one sense in the 1860s, but increasingly it's not only hospitable, but is ideal for certain sets of migrants, depending on their place of origin or their sort of particular ethnicity. Even if you're not sort of placing migrants just for this kind of agricultural component, if you're placing them there for security, we see a distinction between the use of, say, security, we see a distinction between the use of, say, Crimean Tatars or individuals from the Balkans who are seen to be these more settled, potentially developed or advanced technologically individuals versus individuals from the Caucasus who are who are seen to be sort of more in need of of settlement but sort of ultimately more I guess warlike and therefore martial yeah precisely and and therefore

more useful and kind of of taming some of the frontiers of southeast Anatolia that you've written about right I mean that's an important thing to point out that some of the migrants in question are sort of fleeing from the most economically productive parts of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe. Whereas, you know, as you said, others are coming from real frontier zones where, you know, their own migration is only a consequence of, say, the Russian state attempting to really put its foot down in this region for the first time. So coming out of very different contexts in many cases. So this particular moment, especially post-1857 context,

what we see in the Ottoman administration, the general administration, is also like big reforms regarding how to govern the empire, particularly the velayats. regarding how to govern the empire, particularly the villages. So I was wondering whether the coming in population was complementary to these reforms from the point of view of Istanbul, or was it at odds? Sure, so I'll just,

maybe I'll answer yes to both components of the question so okay ways in which it was it was complicating this effort or obviously i mean this is a throughout the period it's a huge expense over and over and over again that necessarily are kind of undermining the resources with which the state might attempt to kind of do things like expand schools, for example. To use the same example, I guess, would be also how is it complementary? It's complementary in the sense that creating

all these sort of individual migrant settlements in the 1870s and 1880s sort of creates a very logical placement of new schools and school infrastructure. And so that kind of tension, I think, exists in multiple capacities. multiple capacities. The Ottoman officials also learn over time, have to deal with this as they kind of bring in the institutions, the other sorts of institutions, more like what we maybe can call, or what we can call like welfare institutions, like hospitals.

If we look at the T Tanzimat and Hamidian periods and things like the reorganization of the Villayets or the land laws of 1858, this is all I think you can sort of map it onto this attempt to better know the population. And again, when you think about millions of people coming in, some of whom stay put after you put them in place, and some of whom continue to roam the countryside, and some who, yeah, many of whom die. We can see these as various state failures. die. We can see these as various state failures. But if you look at it from that sort of governmental perspective, sometimes failure is a route or the articulation of failure is a route to continue to

extend infrastructure and whatnot into the countryside or into various locations. And so what I would mean by that is, again, if you look at these settlement projects, you can see sort of increasingly granular and detailed information emerging about migrants in this kind of idealized attempt to place them, to cater to their needs, to determine the exact amount of land necessary for them to survive and ultimately become productive citizens. I mean, you have, I mean, this was true in the 1860s as well, that you have sort of the development we see a lot of this stuff that began in the Tanzimat sort of becoming more extended and sort of more successful you could say in the Hamidian period. I think the same is true for the very projects that the state is engaging in with these migrants. Welcome back to the Autumn History Podcast.

Chris Graydon and Sece Yilmaz here with Elafrat Entwono talking about her research on migration during the late Ottoman period. You know, I want to tell our listeners that the conditions of this recording are very particular. Of course, the Autumn History Podcast is a nomadic podcast. We've recorded in many places and we can record just about anywhere where there's no background music or loud pulsating noises, which in Istanbul isn't as easy as it sounds sometimes. But in this episode, we're actually recording what might become a series of interviews sort of at the bedside of our own such a yilmaz such unfortunately was in a serious bus accident the details of which we won't get into and we're

very glad she's okay we're very glad she wore her seat belt i'm very happy to be here um even though um i'm a little immobile as opposed to our millions of Mohajers within the history. I'm looking forward to be back on my feet, but I'm very happy to be part of this podcast today. Yeah, we're very glad that Sechel is all right. And while she is nursing her injuries in bedrest over the next couple of weeks,

we've got to take the podcast to her. But Sechel has still been productive even while she's out of commission, so to speak, not able to do all the traveling and archive visits that she wanted to do. Thanks to my Ottoman history podcast team friends for their generous donations of Tanzimat novels, which kept me very busy during my recovery process.

Helped me to read Tashiq-e-Talat and Fitnat and Nabi Zadeh Nazim Zehra and a bunch of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar's novels. So although I was away from the archives, I feel like I was very close to social fabric of the late Ottoman Empire, even more close. And after hearing about her experience reading all these novels in this very condensed period,

there's some that I'm looking forward to reading myself, and especially this set of novels, I guess, that begins with Mahur Beste by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpanar. So I have a question. During this reading period, it was really interesting, especially in the context of Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar novels, the trilogy of Mahur Beste

and Sahnin Dışındekiler and then Huzur. Ahmed Hamdi brings in muhacir as a topology in the later Ottoman Istanbul. And it's an element of the society and he talks a lot about it. It is a character in urban life. So outside of its conceptual and institutional context, what was a muhjir for an everyday life for ottoman citizens well okay so my resource has mostly engaged with with state sources so i'm eager to hear more about uh what san pinar has has written and the fruits of your of your novel reading but what i i guess what I could say is I think there are certain tropes evident within the state sources or within, say, the British sources that might lend themselves to understanding how sort of your everyday Ottoman interpreted Muhajirs. And again, I mean, I think, first of all, it is important to keep in mind, I think

there were other factors at play. For example, we talked a little bit about this kind of martial stereotype of the Cherkes, or what have you. So I think to some extent, what we have to think about is whether we can say for all Ottomans, there would have been a kind of ideal trope of the Muhajir as such, or if it would have been very much informed by sort of the specific group that had kind of settled down in the neighboring village, so to speak. Aside from that kind of martial component, the other comment I'll make is that eventually you see people, again, within petitions and elsewhere, kind of making their own claims to be a migrant with the notion or with the idea that that comes with certain resources

or maybe resources blending into rights. And a good example of that I think is, I mean first of all there are petitions of course, but then as we move into sort of the second constitutional period for example, you actually see the development of sort of ethnically based aid societies, again for Circassian, for example.

But then also ones that do take up the sort of notion or label of Muhajir itself. So a nice one that Chris told me about a couple years ago is this newspaper Muhajir itself. Let me see if I can remember the name of the society that printed Muhajir. It was the Islamiyeh Muhajirin Jamiyati, right? The Society for Eastern Rumelian Muhajirs. So something that's interesting there is that, of course, they aren't necessarily conceiving of Muhajir as something that encapsulates as well the Caucasus experience. Nevertheless, they are using the word Muhajir

sort of self-consciously, Nevertheless, they are using the word Muhajir sort of self-consciously, making that reference to the kind of religious significance of the term from the very first issue. But then they're using this platform to kind of, again, articulate to the state times at which officials have fallen short of providing the necessary resources. But they are also in many of their issues, I mean, doing something very similar to what I see officials doing in the sense of kind of thinking of migrants as this tool or vector for remaking the ideal Ottoman society. And again, that can be because sort of these migrants from the Balkans are more technologically advanced. But it can also be because they are, again, sort of more available for resources like education.

That again, they can kind of be catered to first and then deployed right in the creation of a better Ottoman society more fair I recruited into the bottom of modernity besides the make yeah yeah but so that doesn't really answer your question of what the everyday individual thought of Mohajir's and and I think that that's a wonderful avenue as I continue to reframe my dissertation into an actual book project. I think that that's a wonderful angle to take.

Forward to reading more. Whatever I write. But I mean, in asking that question, it's interesting to think about how the ways in which the Ottoman government chose to govern migration impacted the formation of that identity. Because in the United States, the United States is a country, of course. The troop is a country of immigrants.

Everyone came from somewhere else, almost, except for the Native American population. May have been voluntary, may have been involuntary, but we all share that history of migration. may have been involuntary, but we all share that history of migration. And yet, you know, if you look at the policies regarding migrants in the U.S., there are, you know, whether assimilation policies and the various types of institutions that were used to address incoming migrants, you realize that the U.S. government response actually really shaped the ultimate self-identification of migrant communities, the ways in which they either preserved or did not preserve certain markers of past ethnic identities and the way in which those were articulated. So I'm really curious, you know, the Ottomans handled their migrants differently in some ways from the United States and other

empires of the period. So do you have any examples of how that plays out of how i mean i think that's that's a very complicated question if only because you know i very conveniently end my my sort of topic uh 1910 right and of course the very next decade is characterized by perhaps even sort of larger or more concentrated migrations. It's characterized by the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the Turkish Republic. And in turn, an even more concentrated effort to employ those migrants towards a specific political project.

So an intensification in a way of the processes you look at. One more way to think about this again is I think all these categories sort of particularly in terms of print or the written word gain particular meanings when they are attached to resources and Setshul before I think brought up

the sort of idea of like a welfare state that's being developed, or not a welfare state, but the distribution of, or attempt to create welfare. And the attachment of certain resources, I think, again, makes this a term that is very useful to mobilize. Something I've only begun to look at is the extent to which individuals were sort of applying for recognition to be Muhajirs in order to then be recognized as well or to sort of receive the official paperwork of being an Ottoman subject. Right. So again, yeah, I mean my research continued needs to sort of continue to to engage with with this question of of of how migrants self-identification

emerged potentially from sort of administrative categories but nevertheless i think the beginnings are there within within records, even though the rest of the story certainly remains to be researched and told. Right. You see it definitely in petitions, for example. The language that people use to argue for the things they want to receive often almost too uncannily mirror the discourse of the state as it changes from the Hamidian period to sort of, you know,

emphasizing the Islamic component to the post 1908 period, emphasizing like constitutionalism. You see how migrants very quickly adapt to that. And it really, you know, brings a deeper context to present day refugee situations. You know, if we see how Iraqi refugees from the from the u.s invasion of iraq

and now syrian refugees may either choose to register or not register as refugees for various reasons for the various or to identify that way for various reasons because of what comes with that label in the administrative and legal framework to sort of take that history back to what for the Middle East was really the beginning of this history of displacement that has been almost, you know, it's been cyclical, but it's been pretty steady since the mid 19th century up until today. And the changing regime surrounding displacement, I think is really a really productive endeavor. And to sort of excavate the history of the category-surrounded migration without projecting back our present-day categories and words that we use to describe these phenomena and all of the

institutional baggage they come with is even a greater contribution. Sure, I think we need to always avoid the tendency to become sort of our own officials of asylum, basically, to avoid the temptation to sort of excavate the reasons why people came, if only to apply the label of refugee or forced migrant to their movement. To posthumously advocate on their behalf as historians as if we know what the proper way in any moment to quote unquote manage the problem of displacement is. All right, Ella, well, it's been great having you on.

This has added yet another episode to our many installments that indirectly have touched on the topic we've talked about in various ways. Yeah, and thank you so much for having me. I can't wait to listen to this and continue to think about sort of the provocative questions and directions you guys have provided for me as I continue to work on the project. And thank you, Sacha, for hosting us and providing this space. And I want to remind our listeners that they can be part of the conversation too. We've got a Facebook group with over 30,000 followers, and some of them will probably be game to discuss and debate some of the things we've talked about. And of course, Ella will be able to see those comments and questions. Also got our blog,

ottomohistorypodcast.com, where you can leave comments there. Also find a lot of great episodes related to today's topic and a really hefty bibliography about the theme of migration in the Ottoman Empire constructed by none other than Ella Frattantuono. That's all for this episode. Thanks for tuning in and join us next time in a future installment of Ottoman History Podcast. Thank you.