Please join the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky. Moderated by Yana Skorobogatov.
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million Muslims from the Russian Empire’s Caucasus region sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire. In his new book, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State, Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky examines how Circassian, Chechen, Dagestani, and other refugees transformed the late Ottoman Empire and how the Ottoman government managed Muslim refugee resettlement. Empire of Refugees argues that, in response to Muslim migrations from Russia, the Ottoman government created a refugee regime, which predated refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. The book further revises our understanding of how Russia used migration policies to govern the Caucasus and its Muslim populations.
Dr. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky is a historian of global migration and forced displacement and Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines Muslim refugee migration and its role in shaping the modern world. He is the author of Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024). Based on research in over twenty archives in ten countries, the book explores the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East and the Balkans. Vladimir is currently writing a new book, which is a transnational history of Muslim displacement in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia since 1850. His articles appeared in Past & Present, Slavic Review, Kritika, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and International Journal of Middle East Studies. He received a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 2018 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute in 2018–19.
