Between 1860 and the First World War over a million refugees from the north Caucasus moved to the Ottoman Empire, violently evicted by an expanding Russian Empire. They included around 90% of the Circassian population, as well as large numbers of Chechens, Ossetians, Ingush, Abkhazians and others. As Vladimir explained in this conversation, recorded on 20 May 2024, he stumbled across this overlooked exodus while living in Damascus, where he met members of the Circassian diaspora, who are calling for recognition of this expulsion as genocide. The means adopted by the Russian military and civil authorities varied from the violent (burning of villages in 1863-4) to the legalistic (land reforms). The Ottoman Empire was unprepared for the scale of the influx to ports such as Trabzon and Istanbul, which rapidly filled with refugees already weakened by forced marches, hunger and disease. An Ottoman Refugee Commission was formed in 1860, but its budget was insufficient to the task, leading to squabbles between it and provincial Ottoman authorities over burden sharing. Relations with their Russian colleagues, by contrast, were surprisingly warm. A landmark 1865 Russo-Ottoman refugee agreement that represented “one of the origin points of population transfer as a tool of population management” was hailed as a great success: in celebration each side’s officials awarded medals to their counterparts.

My book shows that, in the second half of the nineteenth century  a Muslim country, the Ottoman Empire, was offering a package of protections remarkably similar to one we could expect today. So that extends the timeline of modern refugee regimes in global history.

As Vladimir explains, caring for coreligionists displaced from another empire (muhajirs) was recognized as a religious duty by the Sultan Caliph, in contrast to the secular refugee regimes of the following century. But the Ottoman state also saw the muhajirs as an opportunity, to extend their sovereignty in border regions, particularly those populated by nomads. Settled in over 1,000 new villages in eastern Anatolia and the Levant/Syria, the muhajirs took pains to establish title to their new lands, many of which had been appropriated by the imperial authorities from the aforementioned nomadic as well as non-Muslim communities. By choosing to do so via the Ottoman Land Registry under the terms of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, they and the many other, non-muhajirs who followed their example increased the Ottoman regime’s tax base.

In the Balkans, by contrast, the failure to establish economically-viable communities in the 1860s reaped a bitter harvest a decade later: displaced Circassian refugees turned in desperation to paramilitary activity, joining başıbozuk gangs that terrorized their Christian neighbours, contributing to the unravelling of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. The conversation ends by considering the phenomenon of “return migration”, in which Chechens and Abkhazians returned to their homelands, in defiance of a Russian ban in force since 1861. Vladimir concludes by noting the ways in which the Ottoman Empire’s pioneering refugee regime anticipated many of the traits found in much more familiar League of Nations regimes introduced at an international level in the interwar period.

Episode 53 – Empire of Refugees

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

FEATURE IMAGE: GROUP PORTRAIT OF EIGHT CIRCASSIAN MEN IN UNIFORM, WITH ANOTHER MAN, POSSIBLY AN OTTOMAN OFFICIAL (BETWEEN 1880 AND 1900), SOURCE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, COURTESY VLADIMIR HAMED-TROYANSKY