The presenters make several interventions in the study of late Ottoman migration. First, they stress that the Ottoman government utilized migration to strengthen, or even reinvent, the empire in its waning decades. Specifically, the Ottoman authorities propped up imperial rule in the Arab provinces through Muslim refugee resettlement and nomads’ sedentarization. Second, refugee migration was not merely a byproduct of war but a key tool of nation-building. New nation-states in the Balkans constructed new nations in part through the displacement of Muslim populations and the immigration of co-ethnic refugees from the Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman domains. Furthermore, the presenters push the chronology of late Ottoman migration into the 1920s and beyond. For example, Muslim refugee migration, or hijra, helped consolidate the Turkish state in the 1920s and 1930s, while Jewish immigration, or aliyah, prepared ground for the establishment of Israel in 1948. Finally, this session centers political economy as a critical lens to study late Ottoman migration. By examining the relationship between the state, migrants, and land, they scrutinize various facets of dispossession, settler colonialism, and expansion of capitalism that characterize the late Ottoman era.

The objective of this session is to generate a conversation on new directions in the study of late Ottoman migration in particular and global migration more generally. This session demonstrates the importance of migration to the making of the contemporary Middle East and the Balkans. It also contextualizes Ottoman origins and genealogies of the modern practices of a population exchange, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, which would further reshape the region in the twentieth century. The session should be of interest to scholars of migration, nationalism, demography, political economy, and global and imperial history.