Mi. 18 Juni 2025

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

Cover of Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky: Empire of Refugees. North Caucasian Muslims and the late Ottoman State, Stanford University Press 2024.

Between the 1850s and World War I, the Ottoman Empire welcomed about a million Muslim refugees from Russia. These refugees established hundreds of villages throughout the Ottoman Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. Most villages still exist today, including what is now the city of Amman. In his book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, 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 the Ottoman government created a refugee regime, which predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. It offers a new way to think about migration and displacement in the Middle East.

 

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, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Slavic Review. He received a PhD in History from Stanford University and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. In 2025-26 he is a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Toygun Altıntaş is a research associate at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut in the field of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. His DFG project titled “The Market’s Underbelly” investigates the relationship between smuggling and monopoly capitalism, and focuses on the operation of the black market for contraband tobacco in the late Ottoman Empire. It explores the social and political conditions that gave rise to the expansion of the black market as well as the connection between organized crime and the modern state. He has been a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2020-23, and remains an affiliated EUME Fellow in 2024/25. 
 

Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud. 

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