1. The overrepresentation of British and North American Universities in the field is partly due to their appeal to young historians with complex migratory backgrounds, possessing rare skills and unique perspectives. The relative freedom in the choice of subjects studied and the selection of thesis advisory panels is another advantage of US PhD programs. Germany is also an important pole for this emerging research, where it is dominated, for the moment, by early modernists.

2. On the historiographical debates on modernity in the context of the Russian and Soviet Empires, see Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). For the Ottoman Empire, see the now classic Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (1993; London/New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004). On the ongoing debates on modernization and modernity in Eastern Europe, see Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stanislav Holubec, and Joachim von Puttkamer, eds., Mastery and Lost Illusions: Space and Time in the Modernization of Eastern and Central Europe (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014).

3. For important new international histories of Russian-Ottoman entanglements, see Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky, eds., Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).

4. The groups studied are overwhelmingly male in the archival sources. The place of women could vary depending on the situation, however, and their invisibilization in the archives reflects a diverse range of realities. Smiley emphasizes that women represented a significant proportion of captives during wartime, whether they were connected to the armies or, as was more often the case, civilians taken during the conflict. Mentions of these women are particularly sparse in the archives for a number of reasons: they were rapidly purchased as domestic slaves and entered Ottoman households, where they were harder to reach; they were of no economic or military interest to the Russian authorities, who showed little concern for their fate; and women who had given birth to a Muslim child in the Ottoman Empire could not legally be sent back to Russia. Hamed-Troyansky remarks that the marked demographic imbalance in favor of men among Circassian refugees reflected far higher rates of female mortality during their migration. Women nevertheless played an important role in the Circassian nationalist movement at the start of the twentieth century. Finally, Can observes that although the hajj was often a family affair, women appear almost exclusively in the sources as wives, daughters, and mothers, leaving little further trace.

5. The monographs discussed here are complemented by still-fragmentary research on these diasporic communities themselves, in national and transnational histories that focus on particular groups, usually treating the empires themselves as resources, hindrances, or simply general context. For the Circassians, see Seteney Shami, “Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion,” in “Globalization,” ed. Arjun Appadurai, special issue, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 177–204; Zeynel Abidin Besleney, The Circassian Diaspora in Turkey: A Political History (London: Routledge, 2014); Elbruz Aksoy, Benim Adım 1864. Çerkes Hikâyeleri (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2018). See also Brian Williams, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2001).

6. On the key role of the Romanov Empire in this process of formalization, see Peter Holquist, “The Russian Empire as a ‘Civilized State’: International Law as Principle and Practice in Imperial Russia, 1874–1878,” NCEEER Working Paper (Washington: National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, 2004).

7. See also Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (1982; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Christoph Witzenrath, The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation, 1480–1725: Trans-Cultural Worldviews in Eurasia (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).

8. See Georgij Alekseevich Dzidzarija, Makhadzhirstvo i problemy istorii Abkhazii xix stoletija (Sukhumi: Alashara, 1982); Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–44; Mara Kozelsky, “Casualties of Conflict: Crimean Tatars During the Crimean War,” Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (2008): 866–91; Dana Sherry, “Social Alchemy on the Black Sea Coast, 1860–65,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (2009): 7–30.

9. The term muhacir is derived from hijra. It became both a legal and administrative category and a term of self-identification for Muslims forced out of Christian states, regardless of the actual circumstances of their displacement. Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed discussion of the terms and concepts used in the Ottoman space, although his discussion of their Russian equivalents remains superficial.

10. Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees, 10.

11. See James H. Meyer, “Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 15–32.

12. Unlike other specialists, Can thus rejects the idea that Christian empires can be considered “protectors” of the hajj reduced to its purely logistic dimensions. See Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Valentina Izmirlieva, “Christian Hajjis—The Other Orthodox Pilgrims to Jerusalem,” Slavic Review 73, no. 2 (2014): 322–46. For an overview of European empires as “Muslim powers” organizing the pilgrimage and the parallel structuration of a transimperial Muslim space during the colonial period, see Luc Chantre, Pèlerinages d’empire. Une histoire européenne du pèlerinage à La Mecque (Paris: éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018).

13. See Lauren Benton, “From International Law to Imperial Constitutions: The Problem of Quasi- Sovereignty, 1870–1900,” in “Law, War, and History,” ed. David S. Tanenhaus, special issue, Law and History Review 26, no. 3 (2008): 595–619.

14. Can, Spiritual Subjects, 30.

15. The Central Asian lodges in Istanbul studied in this volume were founded between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries by notables linked to the Naqshbandi order.

16. See especially Stefan Rohdewald, Stephan Conermann, and Albrecht Fuess, eds., Transottomanica — Osteuropäisch-osmanisch-persische Mobilitätsdynamiken: Perspektiven und Forschungsstand (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2019); Ninja Bumann et al., eds., Handbook on the History and Culture of the Black Sea Region (Boston: De Gruyter, 2024).

17. This is supported by Alexander Morrison, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Morrison shows that the Russian conquest of Central Asia was predicated on the refusal of the Russian imperial state to recognize Central Asian khanates and emirates as legitimate political actors, even as its authorities cooperated with their British counterparts to seal the new interimperial order in the region, despite the discourse of the “Great Game.” Although they were entangled with other European empires, the Russian and Ottoman Empires’ concept of sovereignty appears to combine forms and temporalities of legal reform, territorialization, nationalization, and colonization that were distinct from those seen in Western European colonial empires. See Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

18. For a transnational history of Chinese-Russian Turkestan, see David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

19. The best account of the history of Eurasia through the prism of imperial expansion fueled by interimperial rivalry is that offered by Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Recent historiography has revisited the dynamics and effects of this interimperial rivalry in the Eastern European and Anatolian borderlands in the early twentieth century. See Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

20. On the conquest and colonization of this frontier, see Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London/New York: Routledge, 2008); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Reşat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

21. See Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller, Nationalizing Empires (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2015); Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus After 1863 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Darius Staliūnas and Yoko Aoshima, eds., The Tsar, the Empire, and the Nation: Dilemmas of Nationalization in Russia’s Western Borderlands, 1905–1915 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2021).

22. This was also manifested in a new mistrust of certain populations previously favored for internal colonization, including Germans and Armenians.

23. Stephen Badalyan Riegg, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020), 195 sq.

24. On the reconfiguration of refugee resettlement as a national rather than imperial project in the wake of the genocide, see Jo Laycock, “Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation: Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus,” in Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, ed. Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 97–111. On the emergence of the modern refugee regime, see Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Can mentions the continuous arrival in the Middle East of Central Asian refugees fleeing the Soviet Union in the interwar years. Much work remains to be done, however, on the place of former Ottoman regions in the transit but also the hosting of refugees fleeing the 1917 revolution, the ensuing civil wars, and Bolshevik violence.

25. étienne Forestier-Peyrat, “Retrouver le Caucase. Histoire d’une diplomatie frontalière 1905–1938” (PhD diss., Sciences Po Paris, 2015); Forestier-Peyrat, Histoire du Caucase au xx^e siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2020).

26. On the history of imperial subjecthood, nationality, and citizenship in the two empires, see Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Dina Rizk Khoury and Sergey Glebov, “Citizenship, Subjecthood, and Difference in the Late Ottoman and Russian Empires,” Ab Imperio 2017, no. 1 (2017): 45–58. The authors of the three volumes reviewed here choose to employ the category of “subjecthood,” arguing—sometimes explicitly, with precise terminological analysis—against the confusion created by the use of “nationality” or “citizenship” as translations of the Russian and Turkish terms.

27. Smiley, From Slaves to Prisoners of War, 99.

28. Will Smiley, “The Burdens of Subjecthood: The Ottoman State, Russian Fugitives, and Interimperial Law, 1774–1869,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 1 (2014): 73–93; Witzenrath, The Russian Empire, Slaving and Liberation.

29. For a transnational history that emphasizes how people could use legal pluralism and overlapping claims of sovereignty in the Russian-Ottoman context, see James H. Meyer, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). A groundbreaking analysis of the forms and practices of subjecthood between empires in the Tunisian protectorate, which informs Can’s reflection, can be found in Mary Dewhurst Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

30. Smiley, From Slaves to Prisoners of War, 99.

31. On discourses and rituals of imperial legitimacy in the nineteenth century, see Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London/New York: Tauris, 1998); Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

32. On the protection regime created by European extraterritoriality in the Ottoman Empire, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

33. The articulations and overlaps that may have existed between older Circassian networks issued from slavery and the newer ones produced by their mass displacement merit further study. This would also offer an intriguing way of connecting the Russian-Ottoman and French-Ottoman transimperial histories that are currently developing in parallel. See M’hamed Oualdi, A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

34. For recent examples of such transnational histories in the region, see Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Danielle Ross, Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

35. See Rohdewald, Conermann, and Fuess, Transottomanica. On the mapping and control of space across the lands ruled by the Romanovs, see Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, eds., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Borodziej, Holubec, and Puttkamer, Mastery and Lost Illusions; Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne. Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2014); John P. LeDonne, Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 (Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2020); Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

36. This reconceptualization of the Soviet Empire as “not simply a federation of nationalities confined to titular republics” but “an empire of mobile diasporas” was formulated by Erik R. Scott, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.

37. See especially Benton, A Search for Sovereignty.

38. Rohdewald, Conermann, and Fuess, Transottomanica.