Ottoman Passports

In Ottoman Passports, Ilkay Yilmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yilmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Hamidian government targeted "internal threats" to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yilmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to targeting groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries. Taking up these new policies on surveillance, mobility, and control, Ottoman Passports offers a timely look at the origins of contemporary immigration debates and the historical development of discrimination, terrorism, and counterterrorism.

Annotation The 19th century prevails in this anthology on the transformation of the late Ottoman state into modern Turkey. Thirty-three articles are arranged in three categories: the Ottoman socio-political transformation, the population movements of immigration and migration, and the formation of nation-states with politico-religious identities. Karpat (history, U. of Wisconsin) has a central aim: to counteract what would become bureaucratic Republican attempts by the Turkish Historical Society (formerly, the Ottoman Historical Society) to cut off Turkish history from its Ottoman past. The THS was able to do this by instead connecting the Republic with its earlier Central Asian roots, and by relying too heavily on European versions of Ottoman/Turkish history more unfavorable to things Ottoman. Topics include the social and economic transformation of Istanbul in the 19th century, Jewish population movements in the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman relations with the Balkan nations after 1683, and Romanian independence and the Ottoman state. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

By the end of British rule in Palestine on 14 May 1948, Palestinian nationality had become well established in accordance with both domestic law and international law. Accordingly, the legal origin of Palestinian nationality lies in this nearly thirty-year period as the status of Palestinians has never been settled since. Hence, any legal consideration on the future status of individuals who once held Palestinian nationality should start from the point at which the British rule over Palestine was terminated. This work provides a legal basis for future settlement of the status of Palestinians of all categories that emerged in some sixty years following the end of the Palestine Mandate: Israeli citizens, inhabitants of the occupied territory, and Palestinian refugees. In conclusion, nationality as regulated by Britain in Palestine represents an international status that cannot be legally altered except in accordance with international law.

Forging Ties, Forging Passports is a history of migration and nation-building from the vantage point of those who lived between states. Devi Mays traces the histories of Ottoman Sephardi Jews who emigrated to the Americas—and especially to Mexico—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the complex relationships they maintained to legal documentation as they migrated and settled into new homes. Mays considers the shifting notions of belonging, nationality, and citizenship through the stories of individual women, men, and families who navigated these transitions in their everyday lives, as well as through the paperwork they carried. In the aftermath of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, migrants traversed new layers of bureaucracy and authority amid shifting political regimes as they crossed and were crossed by borders. Ottoman Sephardi migrants in Mexico resisted unequivocal classification as either Ottoman expatriates or Mexicans through their links to the Sephardi diaspora in formerly Ottoman lands, France, Cuba, and the United States. By making use of commercial and familial networks, these Sephardi migrants maintained a geographic and social mobility that challenged the physical borders of the state and the conceptual boundaries of the nation.

Three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world occurred almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other. Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now. Roving Revolutionaries probes the interconnected aspects of these three revolutions through the involvement of the Armenian revolutionaries—minorities in all of these empires—whose movements and participation within and across frontiers tell us a great deal about the global transformations that were taking shape. Exploring the geographical and ideological boundary crossings that occurred, Houri Berberian’s archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and print tells the story of peoples and ideologies in upheaval and collaborating with each other, and in so doing it illuminates our understanding of revolutions and movements.

From the late 1850s to the 1940s, multiple colonial projects, often in tension with each other, influenced the formation of local, transimperial, and transnational political identities of Arab Ottoman subjects in the eastern Mediterranean and the Western Hemisphere. Arab Ottoman men, women, and their descendants were generally accepted as whites in a racially stratified Brazilian society. Local anxieties about color and race among white Brazilians and European immigrants, however, soon challenged the white racial status the Brazilian state afforded to Arab Ottoman immigrants. In Transimperial Anxieties José D. Najar analyzes how overlapping transimperial processes of migration and return, community conflicts, and social adaption shaped the gendered, racial, and ethnic identity politics surrounding Arab Ottoman subjects and their descendants in Brazil. Upon arrival to the Brazilian Empire, Arab Ottoman subjects were referred to as turcos, an all-encompassing ethnic identity encased in Islamophobia and antisemitism, which forced the immigrants to renegotiate their identities in order to secure the possibility of upward mobility and national belonging. By exploring the relationship between race and gender in negotiating international and interimperial politics and law, national identity, and religion, Transimperial Anxieties advances understanding of the local and global forces shaping the lives of Arab Ottoman immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, and their reciprocity to state structure.

Since 2011 over 5.6 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and beyond, and another 6.6 million are internally displaced. The contemporary flight of Syrian refugees comes one century after the region's formative experience with massive upheaval, displacement, and geopolitical intervention: the First World War. In this book, Stacy Fahrenthold examines the politics of Syrian and Lebanese migration around the period of the First World War. Some half million Arab migrants, nearly all still subjects of the Ottoman Empire, lived in a diaspora concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States. They faced new demands for their political loyalty from Istanbul, which commanded them to resist European colonialism. From the Western hemisphere, Syrian migrants grappled with political suspicion, travel restriction, and outward displays of support for the war against the Ottomans. From these diasporic communities, Syrians used their ethnic associations, commercial networks, and global press to oppose Ottoman rule, collaborating with the Entente powers because they believed this war work would bolster the cause of Syria's liberation. Between the Ottomans and the Entente shows how these communities in North and South America became a geopolitical frontier between the Young Turk Revolution and the early French Mandate. It examines how empires at war-from the Ottomans to the French-embraced and claimed Syrian migrants as part of the state-building process in the Middle East. In doing so, they transformed this diaspora into an epicenter for Arab nationalist politics. Drawing on transnational sources from migrant activists, this wide-ranging work reveals the degree to which Ottoman migrants "became Syrians" while abroad and brought their politics home to the post-Ottoman Middle East.

Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as active agents – active, moreover, in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of the Ottoman state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between policies and practices of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Overall, she focuses on the end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of people inhabiting the Russo-Ottoman borderland. The author presents a new type of multi-faceted account of borderland development in which ethnoreligious considerations came to inform a somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between empire and nation-state.