Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky on Muslim refugees in the Ottoman Empire

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky on “Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press)

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It seems that at least in Western academia this is an understudied area. Is that correct?

It is an understudied topic given the scale of this displacement. We're talking about a million Muslim refugees who arrived from the North Caucasus within the Russian Empire and were resettled in the Ottoman Empire. In my work, I'm looking at the topic comprehensively, studying migrations from various parts of the North Caucasus, from Circassia in the west all the way to Dagestan in the east. And I'm looking at their resettlement in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, in the Ottoman Balkans, Ottoman Anatolia and the Ottoman Levant.

There is rich scholarship in Turkish, Russian and Arabic that focuses on different aspects, different stages of the resettlement. For example, scholarship that focuses on specific ethnic groups migrating from the North Caucasus, or focusing on resettlement in specific regions of Ottoman Anatolia, or focusing on a specific stage of resettlement. In my book I put those different literatures in several languages in conversation with each other.