Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s (Harriman Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2018-19) Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State has been released by Stanford University Press. The book was published with the support of a Harriman First Book Subvention grant. Hamed-Troyanksky is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara..
Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
“A brilliant tour de force. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed, revisionist understanding of the beginnings of the modern refugee regime.”  —Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford
