Imperial Redemption? Migration, Productivity, and Loyalty in the Late Ottoman Syrian Interior and Hijaz

At the turn of the twentieth century, Ottoman policymakers in Istanbul constructed the interior provinces of Syria and Hijaz, the region comprising the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the lands around the Hajj route to Damascus, as a potential imperial solution to the anticipated loss of Istanbul. This paper charts interlinked Ottoman official attitudes towards migration and population, property and prosperity, and political loyalty in this interior region between 1850 and 1914. In particular, it examines changing ideas about the migration and resettlement of various human populations - peasants and merchant capitalists from the littoral regions of Palestine and Syria and Jewish and Muslim refugees especially from Russia - in relation to debates about how best to maintain territorial sovereignty and increase agrarian productivity in the empire’s final days.

The paper analyzes a number of policies that reflected the attempts of their imperial drafters to regulate who could migrate to and settle in the Syrian interior region and become landowners. Some of these, like restrictions on non-Muslim settlement and land ownership in Hijaz and general restrictions on Jewish migration, are well known. The paper places these restrictions on communities whose loyalty was deemed questionable in a wider context of highly contested attempts to regulate and monitor migration, resettlement, and land sales across this entire interior region amid mounting concerns about the political loyalty of capitalist entrepreneurs. It argues that debates over these policies reflected wider Ottoman contestations over free trade, productivity and sovereignty, and often pitted different bureaucratic agencies against each other. In the process, these debates constituted a new kind of national economic thinking about population, landscape, and political loyalty that reformulated the Syrian interior and Hijaz as potential spaces of Ottoman redemption in the post-1870s environment of territorial loss and fiscal crisis.