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

Between the 1850s and World War I, the Ottoman Empire welcomed about a million Muslim refugees from Russia. 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. North Caucasians 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. Empire of Refugees shows that the Ottoman government created a refugee regime that predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. The book tells the origin story of organized refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East.

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.