İlkay Yılmaz’s book, Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908, presents a thorough and compelling investigation into the use of passports as tools of mobility control before the widespread adoption of passport controls. Yılmaz illustrates how the Ottoman state, under the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1908), instrumentalize the documentation of Ottoman subjects’ individual identities to expand security and surveillance networks and limit mobility for suspect populations. Centering the Ottoman government’s use of passports as a part of both internal state centralization and a growing international trend that associated individual mobility with state security, Yılmaz places the Ottoman Empire within a wider nineteenth-century context of state modernization.
Though numerous studies in recent years have explored the Ottoman Empire’s use of passports to control the mobility of its Armenian population specifically, Yılmaz’s work is the first English-language historical monograph to focus on Ottoman passports more generally. While the Armenian question figures prominently in Ottoman Passports, Yılmaz also examines the Macedonian question and contextualizes both the Armenian question and the Macedonian question within the Ottoman government’s larger-scale security concerns regarding mobility. Rather than only focusing on passports for international use, Yılmaz explores passports as one of numerous forms of documents reflecting individual identity, which could be used for movement, both internationally and domestically. She also offers a deep analysis of the language used by the Ottoman government to label potentially threatening groups as “internal enemies.” In this way, Yılmaz vividly illustrates that the Ottoman Empire’s use of mobility controls was born of existential threats (real or perceived) to Ottoman sovereignty, which shaped Hamidian-era state policy.
Ottoman Passports is composed of seven chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first two chapters of the book are theory-driven and explain the surveillance methods and the developing infrastructural power of the modern Hamidian state, while later chapters examine more concrete practices adopted and executed by Hamidian state officials to regulate the movement of Ottoman subjects. In the first chapter, Yılmaz dives into a theoretical conceptualization of the modern state and its utilization of surveillance practices. Bringing together Micheal Foucault’s governmentality and Charles Tilly’s direct and indirect rule, Yılmaz underlines the modern state’s need to collect information and limit geographic mobility.
The second chapter opens with a history of the introduction and institutionalization of internal security practices during the Hamidian era (1876–1909). Historicizing both the Macedonian Question and the actions of Armenian Revolutionaries, Yılmaz unpacks how and why the Hamidian state standardized and institutionalized security practices, passports, police forces, and residence documents with the goal of protecting the integrity of the empire. By regulating administrative practices and introducing new methods of social surveillance, the Hamidian state aimed to extend its control over the population and reduce the impact of nationalist movements and territorial loss.
Yılmaz underlines that the increased surveillance and the penetration of the Hamidian state into the lives and movement of Ottoman subjects were not unique to the Ottoman Empire but were rather part of a wider international crusade against anti-monarchist and anarchist movements. In the third chapter, Yılmaz focuses on the Conference of Rome (1898) and the St. Petersburg Protocols (1904), in which the Ottoman government participated, hoping to form an international security network to share classified intelligence on anti-government elements. These international security platforms aimed to establish common practices for imperial powers to increase their infrastructural capability to police those deemed agents of social disorder. The fourth chapter explores an internal Ottoman discourse that criminalized the Armenian revolutionary movement. Yılmaz artfully analyzes Ottoman terms regarding criminality, such as serseri (vagrant) or fesad (seditious) and underlines the intentional ambiguity held within them, which facilitated the labeling of internal elements, such as Armenian groups, as security threats (142).
In Chapter Five, Yılmaz examines Ottoman state regulations regarding geographical mobility from the early modern era to the 19th century. By exploring early modern state practices forcing reaya (common tax-paying people) to remain on their lands, Yılmaz shows that the change in state practices from social control to more modern surveillance techniques was gradual and based on a hybrid model of using both written registries and local social mechanisms to police the population (158–159). In Chapter Six, Yılmaz explores the relationship between the internal passport system and social networks, illustrating that one’s belonging to a particular group identity, or their trustworthiness within their community, determined their mobility within Ottoman borders (164–165). The chapter demonstrates how the gathering of data on particular groups, such as Bulgarians, seasonal workers, anarchists, or Armenians, enabled the Hamidian government to restrict their internal mobility. Yılmaz shows how, in mixing old and new security practices, the Hamidian regime was able to control the geographic mobility of people categorized as dangerous or seditious more than ever before (187).
Chapter Seven explores Ottoman passports as tools of both information gathering and mobility control. Yılmaz argues that the security concerns of the Hamidian regime were the major factor in determining the course of mobility within and across imperial borders. Yılmaz emphasizes that the execution of passport laws was not always consistent, but was instead sometimes contradictory and shaped by local conditions (235).
Yılmaz employs a vast number of Ottoman archival primary sources to offer a vivid and thorough account of how the Hamidian state determined that limiting the mobility of its subjects was vital to the survival of the empire, and how state policy melded local, empire-wide, and international surveillance techniques to monitor and restrict the movement of suspect populations. Ottoman passports thus makes a beautiful contribution to the growing literature on mobility, the documentation of individual identity, and the modern state. In this way, Yılmaz’s work appeals not only to students of Ottoman history, but also to those interested in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state and security decisions more generally, and to any reader interested in learning more about the roots of the modern passport regime.
