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

Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a historian of migration in the Middle East, Russia, and Eastern Europe, and author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). His current research focuses on Muslim diasporas, nation-making, ethnic cleansing, and international law.

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