24.05 | 17.00 | A TSN Spring Series lecture by David Gutman

This paper will discuss the conjuring of the Armenian migrant as a security threat in Ottoman state discourse during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). As this paper seeks to demonstrate, anxieties about the international migration of Armenians, particularly to the United States and to Russia, spurred the Ottoman state to experiment with strategies of borders security and surveillance in hopes of keeping such individuals from exiting and reentering the empire. Over the course of the twentieth century, many of these strategies adopted by the Hamidian regime would become staple practices of modern border security the world over. Thus, far from being an illiberal outlier in an age of more-or-less free mobility, the criminalization and vilification Armenian migrants, and the increasingly sophisticated efforts that Istanbul employed to stymie their mobility, foreshadowed the internationalization of mobility control and border surveillance practices in the aftermath of the First World War.

David Gutman is Associate Professor of History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.  He is the author, Sojourners, Smugglers, and the State: Armenian Migration, Mobility Control, and Sovereignty in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1885-1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). He is also the author of several articles and book reviews on topics ranging from migration and mobility control to the historiography of genocide.