The Ottoman Refugee Regime

In its final decades, the Ottoman Empire constructed a refugee regime, which facilitated the admission and resettlement of Muslim refugees. Between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I, the Ottoman Empire became the largest host of displaced Muslim populations. It received over 2.5 million foreign refugees, primarily from Russia, and 2.5 million Muslims displaced from former Ottoman territories. Historical scholarship traditionally locates the emergence of refugee regimes after World War II or, at the earliest, after World War I. In contrast, this paper explores the Ottoman making of a refugee regime, with its own set of guarantees and protections. The Ottoman refugee relief effort laid the foundation of refugee infrastructure in the modern Middle East and Eastern Europe.

The Ottoman refugee regime was based on two legal acts: the Ottoman Immigration Law of 1857 and the Land Code of 1858. Together, they guaranteed free land, tax exemptions, and a pathway to Ottoman citizenship for refugees. While contemporary refugee regimes derive a refugee’s identity from citizenship in a nation-state, the Ottoman refugee regime was predicated on a Muslim’s perceived religious obligation to emigrate when persecuted and the Ottoman caliphate’s responsibility to protect both domestic and foreign Muslims. The executor of the Ottoman refugee regime was the Ottoman Refugee Commission, founded in 1860. As a state agency, the Ottoman Refugee Commission largely served the government’s interests, resettling refugees to boost the empire’s agriculture, extend Ottoman sovereignty in nomadic areas, or change demographic ratios on the empire’s margins. This paper is based on archival research in the Ottoman archive in Istanbul, Turkey. It rethinks the relationship between immigration and refugee resettlement in the late Ottoman era and contributes to the scholarship on global refugee history and refugee regimes.