North Caucasian Refugees and the Late Ottoman State

Ottoman History Podcast

with Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

hosted by Chris Gratien & Can Gümüş

| During the late 19th and early 20th century, tens of millions of migrants crossed the seas, settling in the Americas and beyond in a mass migration event that reshaped politics and economies throughout the world. In this episode, we focus on one of the most ignored groups within the history of those momentous events: North Caucasian Muslims. As our guest, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, explains, North Caucasian refugees fleeing Russian expansion became a large segment of the Ottoman migrant (muhacir) population and in turn, became a major new demographic component, constituting about 5% of the empire's citizens by WWI. Under the Muhacirin Commission created to facilitate their movements, they settled in remote provinces, from the edges of the Syrian desert to the plateaus of Central Anatolia, founding what would become major cities like Amman (modern-day Jordan) and constructing new diasporic identities in the process. As we discuss, these migrations not only changed the millions of people who became Ottoman refugees during the empire's last decade and their communities back home. They changed the nature of the Ottoman state itself.

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