For convicts in the late Ottoman Empire, distance was often part of the punishment. This was a lesson that Zeliha Hanım and her son Hafız Bayram learned all too well when Hafız was exiled from İşkodra (Shkodër, in today’s Albania) to Diyarbekir in southeastern Anatolia and then, possibly, to Yemen. Glimpses of their story appear in a handful of Ottoman sources prompted by a petition from Zeliha that has since been lost from the archival record. In an appeal for clemency—which the Interior Ministry summarized in a 1902 request to İşkodra for information about the case—Zeliha asked the grand vizier for her son’s pardon and claimed he had been exiled without reason ( bilâsebeb ). The Governor and Commander of İşkodra, Mehmed Şakir,Footnote 1 responded that this was not the case: Hafız had been distanced ( teb’id ) by his predecessor for acts that allegedly included aiding foreign agents and publishing and distributing seditious materials. In light of the vast numbers of such seditious subjects, many of whom were involved in smuggling weapons, he suggested exiling them all “in such a way that they can never return.”Footnote 2 The location the governor had in mind was Yemen and the model he invoked was Siberia. He wrote, “Just as the Russians, on the one hand, cultivate and populate the Siberian territories and, on the other hand, cleanse the interior provinces of evil and corrupt elements by permanently transferring and banishing them to Siberia, so too these people should be exiled [ nefy ve tağrib ] from here to remote parts of Yemen such as Hajja and Hujur, so that by way of exile and banishment this country can be purified and the vast Yemeni lands built up and settled.”Footnote 3
The governor’s reference to establishing what he imagined as an “Ottoman Siberia” was arresting—particularly juxtaposed with Zeliha’s request for her son’s pardon. But the idea was not new and represented a growing strand of developmentalist thought in the government about how to extend central authority to imperial frontiers believed to be fertile and prime for agricultural development and cultivation.Footnote 4 Practices of settlement ( iskân ) had long been used for similar purposes but had focused in the second half of the nineteenth century primarily on Muslim refugees and migrants ( muhacirin ).Footnote 5 New ideas about how to settle other groups surfaced in the 1880s, when statesmen in the upper echelons of government expressed interest in how convicts ( mücrimin ) might be deployed for similar purposes, specifically through the adaptation of European practices of exile. But by 1902, after nearly two decades of intermittent discussion, these ideas had started to lose traction. This was evident from the ministry’s response, which made clear that the central government could not issue a blanket authorization to exile groups of people to Yemen. In an expression of concern about legal procedure, the Interior Ministry reminded the governor that instances of administrative exile—permissible only when a criminal trial was not possible—required deliberation by the Council of State and sultanic ratification.Footnote 6 The warning suggested that these requirements were being ignored. Indeed, an earlier ciphered telegram indicated that Hafız had been banished without being charged with a crime or receiving a trial.Footnote 7
Although plans for a settler penal colony in Yemen or Libya were never realized, they illuminate how government officials were thinking about exile as a way to maintain imperial order and security, expand central authority, and extract convict labor.Footnote 8 Mehmed Şakir’s proposal serves as a starting point for this article’s exploration of the complex and understudied history of exile in the late Ottoman Empire. When and why, for example, did Ottoman statesmen begin to envision provinces like Yemen and Libya as sites of exile and settlement? What was the appeal of adapting the Russian exile regime to Siberia? In a period associated with the rise of modern prisons and the rationalization of law, Hafız Bayram’s extrajudicial banishment also calls for a reexamination of the place of exile in the penal system. Why were convicts being sent to “distant lands” rather than to local prisons? The governor’s use of the language of distancing, cultivation, and development also raises questions about how these ideas intersected with the empire’s historical approaches to governing mobility as well as global penal practices that relied on convict transport and labor for colonial expansion.
Through engagement with these questions, this article presents a new history of exile as a tool of punishment and governance in late Ottoman history—not as an exceptional sentence but as a routinized form of internal deportation that intersected with incarceration and migration. Building on revisionist literature that moves away from Michel Foucault’s influential focus on the disciplinary power of modern prisons and penitentiaries, my central argument is that exile was part of an expansive and legally entrenched system of Ottoman punitive mobility in which distance was a defining feature of legal and extralegal punishments. As Clare Anderson has demonstrated in field-defining research on this topic, “[p]enal transportation did not exist as an addendum to the central narrative of the history of punishment as a story of the rise of the prison but predated it, coexisted with it, and shaped it in critical ways.”Footnote 9 This technology of punishment included the immobilization of convicts in distant prisons and carceral archipelagos; deportation to internal and external exile sites, often with aspects of labor extraction; and banishment to remote inland and border regions, islands, and colonies.Footnote 10 In the late Ottoman Empire, punitive mobility comprised not only the narrow legal sentence of exile ( nefy ), but also imprisonment with hard labor; exile and imprisonment in a fortress, island, or walled city; and government service in exile.
Literature in English and Turkish has traced various aspects of Ottoman punitive mobility, but primarily in terms of its discrete components. Despite an abundance of references to exile in studies of disparate topics in late Ottoman history, there has been no systematic study of how it shaped governance or was informed by law. Existing literature primarily focuses on questions such as how particular places became sites of exile,Footnote 11 the experiences of dissidents and political figures,Footnote 12 or the impact of exile on refugees.Footnote 13 The reliance on subjective accounts such as memoirs—often written years later by intellectuals, revolutionaries, and political figures—also reinforces the singularity of this punishment, suggesting that it operated outside of both the Ottoman criminal justice system and global developments in punitive mobility.Footnote 14
These historiographical issues come into sharper relief when the literature on exile is read alongside studies of prisons and the rationalization of law, which suggest a sharp break in the mid-nineteenth century, whereby criminals were tried in criminal courts and incarcerated in prisons, and political convicts and dissidents were banished to remote places.Footnote 15 As Gültekin Yıldız shows in the most comprehensive study of Ottoman prisons to date, the lines between imprisonment and exile remained blurred long after Tanzimat-era prison reforms. The ambitious plans of Ottoman reformers—undertaken under intense European pressure—were frustrated by severe financial constraints, ultimately leading to continued reliance on older penal practices and carceral spaces.Footnote 16 Even as prison reform was tied in disparate polities to similar understandings of what modern incarceration entailed—from the idea of humane and “scientific” punishment and prisoner rehabilitation to the idea of being a marker of a civilized state—the establishment of modern penitentiaries remained largely aspirational.Footnote 17 Across a range of global contexts, convict transport fused forced mobility with regimes of confinement and immobilization. Prisons—new and old—continued to serve multiple functions, including acting as sites of exile. Footnote 18
Exile is also conspicuously absent from the literature on late Ottoman governance, particularly how the “moveable empire” used punitive mobility to respond to individuals and groups that challenged imperial order.Footnote 19 This is in contrast to the classical and pre-modern periods, which explore how the state used exile and internal deportation ( sürgün ) for settlement ( iskân ), economic revitalization, and demographic engineering.Footnote 20 Barkan’s influential characterization of sürgün as a mode of internal colonization established the state’s use of forced mobility to “revitalize” newly conquered territories and to extract suspect or rebellious groups from regions where central authority was comparatively weak.Footnote 21 Later studies, however, have downplayed the disciplinary nature of sürgün and focused on how it contributed to the making of a diverse, mobile, and tolerant empire.Footnote 22 This emphasis on the “dynamic” nature of these policies has subsequently shaped the framing of state-imposed settlement in curious ways. A notable exception is Kemal Daşcıoğlu’s study of the eighteenth century, which underscores the coercive and punitive nature of sürgün . Even as it continued to be used for the purposes of settlement and revitalization, Daşcıoğlu demonstrates how exile and deportation were deployed to respond to banditry and criminal disorder in the wake of large-scale revolts, to settle problematic tribes in “abandoned places” where they would “bring land under cultivation and to restore prosperity,” and to banish criminals to places “with bad geography and climate.”Footnote 23 His analysis highlights how sürgün linked disciplinary power and penal practices with the state’s broader spatial strategies of governance, and is instructive for thinking about how exile served similar functions in the modern era. Although terms like sürgün were replaced by “distancing” ( te’bid ) and “exile” ( nefy , tağrib ), and ideas like “revitalization” and “colonization” ( şenlendirmek , kolonizasyon ) were expressed as “development” ( imar ) and “cultivation” ( iştigalat ), the objectives were similar.
This longer view of the uses of internal deportation demonstrates that the Ottoman state pursued strategies to adapt and expand punitive mobility not only because prison reform was incomplete or had failed, but because it was a feature of how the empire managed and governed its population. In contrast to the British, French, and Russian empires, however, the Ottomans were not proficient in adapting the exile system to incorporate large-scale expropriation of convict labor or to occupy and settle distant frontiers. But as Mostafa Minawi writes, “unfulfilled goals and unfinished plans, which usually disappear into the depths of the archives, are sometimes more telling than stories that seem to fit a neat linear trajectory leading to the end of empire.”Footnote 24 In this instance, reconstructing plans for an “Ottoman Siberia” and understanding why they never came to fruition yields important insights. First, it reveals a sustained interest in colonial and extractive penal settlement that contributes to debates about the nature of Ottoman colonialism.Footnote 25 Second, this analysis is instructive for conceptualizing exile on a continuum of mobility management. As I argue below, projects to settle mücrimin (convicts) and muhacirin (migrants) drew on similar spatial imaginaries and developmentalist ideas and competed for the same scarce resources. This preliminary attempt to read their histories together shows how continual flows of migrants and refugees into the empire—exiles displaced by other polities—informed plans for settlement and cultivation.Footnote 26 Attention to this inter-imperial dynamic makes a novel contribution to histories of global convict transport, an area of growing scholarship from which the Ottoman Empire has been almost entirely absent.Footnote 27 The Ottoman story also calls into question claims about how the sprawling and contiguous nature of Imperial Russia—typically contrasted with maritime European empires rather than other Eurasian or post-Mongol polities—made it “uniquely positioned to use movements as a means of punishment against its citizens.”Footnote 28 The Ottoman case, where forced mobility was a defining feature of punishment, opens up new possibilities for comparison and suggests that Russian exceptionalism was not owing to the geography of empire alone.
*
This history of plans for an “Ottoman Siberia”—their emergence and denouement—is pieced together through fragmentary evidence in the Ottoman state archives, including records from the interior and foreign ministries, diplomatic correspondence between Istanbul and Ottoman consuls in Europe, and exchanges between the central government and provincial authorities. To tell this story, the article proceeds in four sections. The first establishes how Tanzimat (1839–1876) penal reforms inscribed punitive mobility into the new political and legal order, leading to the expansion of carceral infrastructure starting in the 1860s and growing interest in the 1880s in adopting aspects of colonial exile regimes. This analysis recasts our understanding of exile as a constitutive feature of governance rooted in a period of liberalizing reforms, rather than treating it as a symptom of Hamidian despotism (1876–1909). Similar to contexts as distant as the United States, it suggests that “the rise of a liberal political ideology and the growth of institutional disciplinary regimes fueled each other.”Footnote 29 The second section explores how questions about the feasibility of sending convicts to Yemen and Libya resurfaced in the late 1890s and situates punitive mobility within the same analytical and temporal framework as the governance of migration. The third section extends the analysis of exile beyond criminal law, demonstrating how the 1877 declaration of a state of siege created a hybrid legal regime in which military tribunals entrenched the use of exile to punish undesirable subjects—a broad category including individuals accused of homicide, banditry, rebellion, sedition, and treason. The concluding section considers why plans for a settler penal colony never came to fruition. It contends that the same developmentalist ambitions, fiscal pressures, and logistical constraints that shaped migration administration foreclosed similar plans for convict settlement.
In light of this extensive historical and historiographical terrain, what follows is necessarily a mapping of key developments and directions for research rather than an exhaustive account of each aspect of this history. Before proceeding, two points regarding terminology merit note. The first is about people. Throughout the article, I use the term “convict” to refer to political and criminal prisoners. This is not to equate them or suggest they were all criminals, but rather to show how the state understood them as problem subjects who could be punished and governed via punitive mobility. The second concerns place. In the cases explored here, statesmen invoked Yemen and Libya in conspicuously abstract terms as sites of potential exile ( menfa ), ignoring their modes of local governance and dynamics.Footnote 30 I follow their usage, not to reproduce it uncritically, but to illuminate changing understandings of how and where to punish, settle, and exploit convicts for the purposes of governing the empire as an empire.
Expanding Punitive Mobility in Law and in Practice
When Hafız Bayram was detained by authorities in İşkodra and distanced to Diyarbekir, he was one of innumerable subjects caught up in diffuse webs of punishment aimed at “problem” or “undesirable” ( muzır ) subjects who were seen as threats to imperial order. As one noted political figure would write, “every day you could hear that one of your neighbors had been sent into sürgün .”Footnote 31 But it was not only the neighbors of political dissidents who were subject to this terror. Similar to journalists, students, and intellectuals, felons, “bandits” ( eşkıya ), smugglers, revolutionaries, and anarchists were sentenced to punishments that entailed some form of distancing. These included what we might term “exile proper” ( nefy ), imprisonment ( haps ) in a distant location, hard labor ( kürek ), and confinement in a fortress or walled city ( kalebend ). It is difficult, however, to offer reliable statistics; the only official source for the Hamidian period, The First Statistical Yearbook of the Ottoman Empire (1897), lists a total of 53 cases of permanent and temporary fortress confinement and exile proper, and 133 cases of the death penalty (which was often commuted to hard labor).Footnote 32 These figures are undermined by the fact that, in 1897 alone, 78 members of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) were exiled to Libya.Footnote 33 Secondary sources on the Hamidian era suggest that thousands were affected. Gülsüm Şimşek’s study of political exiles, for example, claims that Sultan Abdülhamid II banished 2,000 seminary students to Eastern Anatolia in 1902.Footnote 34 And, after a general pardon in 1908, the president of the Fedakaran-ı Millet Cemiyeti, a syndicate-cum-political party representing the interests of individuals who were not members of the CUP, claimed to represent 4,000 individuals banished during the Hamidian era.Footnote 35
There is no question that these staggering figures were tied to the extensive surveillance and security apparatus of the Hamidian period.Footnote 36 But the growth of punitive mobility was not a product of the Hamidian era alone. One year after the promulgation of the 1839 Gülhane Decree inaugurating the Tanzimat, the state embarked on a process of codification spanning 1840 through 1858. Whereas both Anglophone and Turkish scholarship has generally approached these penal reforms through the lenses of codification and standardization, European legal influence, and shifts from corporal punishment to imprisonment, they can also be understood in terms of how they expanded the legal foundations of punitive mobility.Footnote 37 This process began with the 1840 Penal Code ( Ceza Kanunnamesi ), which focused on offenses that posed direct challenges to state authority and centralization. These crimes included treason, incitement to rebellion, tax evasion, and embezzlement. As Kent Schull writes, the 1840 code did not make legal punishment the exclusive domain of the state and “allowed discretionary corporal punishments and fines ( ta’zir and siyaset ), meted out respectively by kadıs and local magistrates.” It also continued to permit sharia punishments such as blood money ( diyet ) to be paid to victims’ families, even as it made provisions for trying murderers by the state.Footnote 38 The code’s focus on crimes such as embezzlement and corruption opened the door to wielding the new laws as political instruments. As Cengiz Kırlı has argued, by criminalizing practices that had long been embedded in Ottoman political culture—gift-giving, patronage, informal payments, and the use of office for private benefit—as violations of a new moral-legal order, the 1840 code allowed Tanzimat statesmen to prosecute and discipline opponents of the larger reform project. Notably, each of the three statesmen at the heart of Kırlı’s study was sentenced to some form of exile.Footnote 39
Ottoman legal reformers promulgated two additional codes in the 1850s, which, with several revisions, would serve as the basis of penal law through 1911. The “New Penal Code” of 1851 expanded the definition of criminality in ways that paralleled the 1839 Rescript’s promises of protection for life, honor, and property but did not introduce major changes. These would come with the 1858 Imperial Penal Code ( Ceza Kanunname-i Hümayun ). The 1858 code’s differentiation between crimes against state and society and crimes against individuals marked a major shift in Ottoman and Islamic law in terms of the codification of laws protecting individual rights.Footnote 40 In his analysis of transformations to the code between 1858 and 1911, Schull contends that, “[w]ith the exception of execution for very serious offenses, such as premeditated homicide, banditry, rebellion, and treason,” lawmakers during this period “eventually discontinued all forms of corporal punishment and the use of torture, thus completely circumscribing the ability of local magistrates and judges to utilize discretionary punishments ( ta‘zir and siyaset ).” Instead, “[a]dministrators replaced these punishments with clearly delineated fines and prison sentences according to the crime committed.” Schull contends that “[o]ccasionally, exile was still employed as a possible criminal punishment” and that “[s]ome prison sentences also continued to include hard labor ( kürek ), especially for serious crimes ( cinayet ).”Footnote 41
The countless Ottoman subjects who were exiled and sentenced to hard labor throughout the second half of the nineteenth century call for a reevaluation of this claim. Arguments about the diminishing place of exile in the reformed penal and legal system likely derive from a focus on nefy rather than the spectrum of punishments that involved punitive mobility. Yet the code details various crimes—particularly against the state—that were punishable by the death penalty, hard labor, fortress confinement (which was always a form of exile), and exile.Footnote 42 For example, Article 20 specifies that “kyurek [sic] in perpetuity is the employment of the criminal after his exposal in public and arduous services until his death, with chains on his feet, in places to be determined by the State.” Article 23 describes müebbed kalebend as “perpetual confinement in a fortress…until the time of death, by imprisonment in one of the fortresses determined by the State.” This is contrasted with muvakkit kalebend , temporary fortress confinement that ranged from three to fifteen years (Article 24).Footnote 43 In the first chapter, on crimes against the state, Article 49 specifies that sedition was punishable by the death penalty.Footnote 44 If the sentence was commuted—as was often the case for the death penalty—it would be reduced to permanent hard labor ( müebbed kürek ). A previous article, 47, lists the series of possible commutations as “…death to kyurek and of the punishment of kyurek to confinement in a fortress and of perpetual confinement in a fortress to perpetual exile and of temporary confinement in a fortress or imprisonment to temporary exile.”Footnote 45
Shifts from discretionary to standardized punishments and fines are more pronounced in the code’s section on crimes against individuals (chapter 2). But these changes are accompanied by a major, understudied development that shaped the expansion of punitive mobility: the codification of hard labor as a sentence for serious criminal offenses such as theft, robbery, highway banditry, and murder—a sentence that frequently involved convict transportation or was used as a form of exile.Footnote 46 Thus, while historians have noted how kürek evolved—from a term that referred to rowing in the imperial galleys and shipyards by prisoners, captives, and slaves, to a sentence of hard labor in a prison settingFootnote 47—the ways in which it intersected with exile have not been investigated. Rather than nefy , murderers, bandits, revolutionaries, and high-profile political figures whom the state wanted to exile were sentenced to müebbed kürek , or “permanent hard labor.”Footnote 48 Moreover, those sentenced to the death penalty ( idam ) frequently had their sentences commuted to this sentence and were then exiled.
One revealing example of how the sentence effectively constituted exile is the experience of Avnullah el-Kâzımî (1868–1916), an eccentric opposition figure who was one of the founders of a party that advocated for former exiles (the previously mentioned Fedakaran-ı Millet Cemiyeti). In 1902, el-Kâzımî was sentenced to permanent hard labor for his alleged role in a plot to assassinate the sultan.Footnote 49 Between 1902 and 1908, he was exiled to three different prisons in Payaskale, Sivas, and Sinop.Footnote 50 Throughout this time, he was never subject to hard labor ( hidemat-ı şakka ), although he was forced to wear shackles ( pranga ) after his second escape attempt. In accounts of his experiences and work on behalf of other pardoned political prisoners, el-Kâzımî described himself not as a hard labor convict ( kürek mahkumu ) but as an exile ( menfi ).Footnote 51
Even in instances where the goal was not exile, kürek convicts had to be transported to prisons where they could engage in hard labor. After 1858, the increase in sentences of hard labor led to a major strain on the empire’s existing penal facilities, setting in motion an expansion of infrastructure. Already by 1860, it had become clear that such prisons were in short supply. Pressures on existing state capacity resulted in complaints of overcrowding, particularly in the capital, where the Grand Admiral asked for half of the 1,109 convicts in the Imperial Arsenal to be transferred elsewhere.Footnote 52 His grievances were directed to the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances (Meclis-i Vala-yı Ahkam-i Adliye), which noted the considerable expense of transporting felons and the need to minimize pressures on the Arsenal. Even if overcrowding was not a problem, hard labor convicts could not all be sent to Istanbul—the one city that was, with minor exceptions, intentionally left out of the empire’s changing geography of exile. As a solution, the Council recommended establishing a network of hard labor prisons, referred to as kürek mevkii . While most provinces would have their own hard labor prison, others would be served by nearby prisons and fortresses. For example, the Imperial Arsenal would serve the Hüdavendigar Province and Sancak of Karesi. In Arabia, the Jeddah hard labor prison would cover both the Hijaz Province and Yemen.Footnote 53 Other kürek mevkii were designated in places like Akka (Acre), Sinop, Erzurum, and the Ergani copper mines. Prison administrators were instructed to ensure that all hard labor convicts had their legs bound in irons and were employed for the duration of their sentences.Footnote 54 While part of their earnings would go to the prison, convicts would also be given an “appropriate” and “moderate” daily wage. On days when there was no work, they were to be “detained in the innermost parts of the prison.” According to directives issued in 1864, those sentenced to up to five years of kürek were to be sent to provincial labor prisons where they could be used in public works projects. Prisoners in the Imperial Arsenal were to be transferred to work in regions with mines.Footnote 55 However, the extent to which prisoners were actually employed, particularly to meet chronic labor shortages, is unclear. Kaya Göktepe’s examination of prison labor in the Ergani copper mines, for example, shows that in a nine-month period in 1860 through 1861, only forty people were put to work out of a total of 630 kürek convicts in the Ergani Prison.Footnote 56 Existing sources suggest that, like prison reform, the idea of instituting systematic labor extraction in kürek mevkii also remained aspirational.Footnote 57
In its initial plans for provincial hard labor prisons, the Supreme Council sought to minimize convict transport and expressed concerns that sending felons to Trablusgarb, Fezzan, and Yemen would make a negative impression on local authorities and undermine Ottoman central authority.Footnote 58 But by the early years of Abdülhamid II’s reign, there were signs of change. In 1879, the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet) discussed the feasibility of sending prisoners from the Balkans to Yemen and other Arab provinces. The Minister of War and military tribunals presented convict transport as both a potential deterrent and a means to sever criminals’ ties to local networks.Footnote 59 The Council of State, however, was still apprehensive and feared that sending men from temperate climes to hot regions ( bilad-ı hare ) would be deleterious to their health and lead to the “ruin of their breath.”Footnote 60 As an alternative, the Council recommended expanding the Sinop prison and reaffirmed the need to utilize existing coastal prisons until “suitable places” for additional hard labor prisons could be designated.Footnote 61 Until then, kürek convicts would be sent to the same locations as kalebend and nefy prisoners—again signaling how prisoners and exiles were being sent to the same places.
Revolutionary activity, banditry, and organized opposition to the central government ultimately amplified the voices of those who advocated sending convicts to “distant lands.” By 1887, this included the sultan himself, who asked for a formal report to be prepared on the possibility of not only exile but penal settlement in Yemen or Trablusgarb. This was prompted by a case from that year involving two armed Albanian brigands who had robbed a tax collector’s servant, stolen animals from men transporting citrus for a Jewish merchant, and then shot someone in the foot during a dramatic standoff with gendarmes. The men were Habil bin Tahir, sentenced to four years of kürek in Adana, and Ali bin Islam (who turned out to be a conscription evader as well), sentenced to two years of local imprisonment with pranga and then military service in Yemen.Footnote 62 When the grand vizier sent the decision to the sultan for confirmation, Abdülhamid II’s chief scribe, Süreyya Pasha, added a note reducing Habil’s hard labor sentence from four to three years. There was no explanation as to why. This was followed by another, striking annotation from the sultan—as short as the pages of interrogation reports in the file were long—that put forward a new initiative. “Certain European nations have constructed exile sites in the most distant and suitable places,” he wrote, “sending convicts with their families.” He proposed that “these kinds of convicted criminals” could be sent to “these places” “together with their families, and allocated a plot of land.” Doing so would produce savings in prison expenditures and contribute to the cultivation and administration of those regions.Footnote 63 The sultan instructed the grand vizier to initiate research on the prospect of designating Yemen and Trablusgarb as such places of exile.
This was strikingly similar to the empire’s language informing refugee administration, whereby muhacirin were allocated land and resources to encourage agricultural settlement. Three days later, the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances recapitulated the sultan’s ideas. In a passage worth quoting in its entirety, the Council wrote, “…in light of the fact that certain European states designate their most remote and suitable territories as places of exile for criminals of this kind, dispatching convicts together with their families, it was proposed that the Ottoman government likewise designate an appropriate locality in either the province of Yemen or that of Trablusgarb as a place of exile. Those convicted of similar crimes can be sent there with their families, and a specified amount of land would be allotted to them. This measure would both reduce the expenses of maintaining prisons and contribute to the prosperity and development of those regions.”Footnote 64
The Council next delineated three potential exile locations based on the severity of the crime: first-degree felons would be sent to Fezzan, second-degree to Yemen, and third-degree to Benghazi. There was extensive overlap—particularly in the case of Libya—with areas considered targets of imperial expansion and development, while still retaining distinctions with sites associated with migrant settlement. This suggests that exile functioned within a broader strategy of mobility management, even as it was not explicitly articulated in this way. The Council also acknowledged the difficulties of forcing exiles’ families to relocate and decided to leave this decision to them, framing this as an act of benevolence. To encourage voluntary family relocation, it added that “those who chose to relocate voluntarily would be settled in the places of exile and granted an appropriate amount of land.”Footnote 65 The presence of families—and women in particular—was a prerequisite for building a successful penal colony and testified to how plans for penal settlement were linked to what Barkan referred to, in an earlier period, as internal colonization and revitalization.Footnote 66
Models Abroad, Models at Home
After a long pause—likely a reflection of the vagaries of archival cataloguing rather than a loss of interest within the government—discussions about penal colonization resumed in 1898, and with new urgency. That fall, the sultan issued another directive, charging the Council of State with setting up a commission to research how European empires used convict labor for agriculture and industry and how they combined it with the moral rehabilitation of prisoners. The commission was also tasked with assessing the feasibility of sending convicts to Yemen, Trablusgarb, and Benghazi—the locations identified as places of exile by the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances in 1887. These sites were now also described as “suitable for cultivation” ( iştigalata elverişli ) and “development” ( imar ).Footnote 67
Like other “outward-looking and modernizing” states such as Meiji Japan that “became increasingly aware of the penal practices of other global powers,”Footnote 68 the Ottomans set out to find new models for their exile regime. In October, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent confidential requests for information to consuls in London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, asking how these empires employed exiles to build colonies and develop industry and agriculture. The consuls responded with historical overviews of each empire’s exile practices and copies of pertinent regulations and legal codes. From London, Anthopoulo Pasha explained that, with the exception of some extraordinary circumstances, exile ( nefy and teb’id ) had been abolished and that due to the existing documentation on hard labor ( hidemat-ı şakka ) in prisons, he had not included this information in his report. Anthopoulo Pasha recounted the empire’s history of exile and forced labor, starting with the sixteenth century and culminating in the establishment of modern penitentiaries in the nineteenth century.Footnote 69 The consul in Paris sent a similar report. But despite the strong French influence on the 1858 Penal Code, the Foreign Ministry did not seem particularly interested in French models of punitive mobility and forced labor—perhaps because the French were, like the British, focused on overseas convict transport.Footnote 70
The tenor of correspondence with St. Petersburg was slightly different. Ottoman statesmen were eager to learn about how the empire was building hard labor prisons ( katorga ), using prisoners in railroad construction, and expanding penal colonies across Siberia. Zhanna Popova describes the katorga system as a means of simultaneously purging, punishing, and extracting labor from convicts. This punitive regime was “intended for those convicts deemed the most dangerous, and it included forced labour for terms of from four to twenty-five years, followed by ‘eternal settlement’ in Siberia.”Footnote 71 In addition to using convict labor for building and expanding railroad lines, Russia was sending prisoners to mines in Eastern Siberia and deploying them in agricultural and infrastructural work on Sakhalin Island, where it began sending hard labor convicts in the 1850s. Anton Chekhov depicted the horrors of life for exiles and inmates in this “prison without walls” in his eponymous 1895 book, Sakhalin Island, based on travels in 1890.Footnote 72 Although it was unlikely that Ottoman statesmen were familiar with Chekhov’s work, they were aware of the violence integral to this system of banishment and forced labor, which was debated in conferences such as the International Penitentiary Congress first convened in 1872. Ottoman representatives also attended the 1890 meeting in St. Petersburg.Footnote 73 This “epistemic community” constituted “a gathering and sharing of the views and knowledge of a range of transnational actors who met to debate issues of collective interest, and to formulate an agenda for reform.”Footnote 74 Beyond prisons, the congresses deliberated on concerns such as the use of penal transportation and labor, which, despite earlier hesitations, were recognized by delegates to the Paris Conference in 1895 for their utility in terms of punishment, deterrence, and labor.Footnote 75
In his note to Hüsnü Pasha, the Ottoman consul in St. Petersburg, Foreign Minister Tevfik Pasha asked for more information about the Russian system. His diplomatic politesse belied the nature of the inquiry: “Would his excellence be kind enough to inquire in a confidential manner,” he asked, “about how convicts are deported to Siberia, what work they are subject to, and how they are kept?” He also requested that Hüsnü Pasha obtain and send a copy of regulations or instructions concerning the deportees.Footnote 76 This slippage between terms such as exile and deportation indicated how these practices blurred the lines between demographic engineering and penal policy—both in Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Within two weeks, Hüsnü responded with an article from a Russian newspaper about Siberian deportations, which he said included statistics on the system that have since been lost from the file.Footnote 77 In additional correspondence, he sent a copy of the 1890 laws on deportation to Siberia that had recently gone into effect. This “ Règlement des exilés ” started by identifying three kinds of exile: 1) forced labor, 2) deportation for the purposes of colonization, and 3) exile for life. The document was sent in French and then messily translated into Ottoman, rendering the three categories as 1) kürek mahkumları , 2) maksad-ı istimar ile , and 3) müebedden menfi olanlar . Article 146 offered further elaboration, distinguishing among exiles, exiled colonizer immigrants, permanent exiles, vagabonds, and those sent by administrative order. The category for “exiled colonizer immigrants” ( les exilés colonisateurs émigrés ) was translated as “imar-ı belde ile mükellef muhacir menfiler,” or “muhacir exiles tasked with development of the settlement.”Footnote 78
The consul added a note that underscored a facet of the system not spelled out in the “ Règlement ” but that would interest the Foreign Minister. “For some time now,” he wrote, “exiles have been working on the construction of railroad lines for one-tenth the cost of free laborers, and their daily wage is only paid upon the completion of their sentence.” While he did not elaborate, the note intimated that this labor was ultimately free, since many convicts died while serving their sentences.Footnote 79 Tevfik and Hüsnü Pashas’ exchange reflected the growing interest in adopting practices that “had a close relationship to other kinds of free and coerced labour and migration” used in other empires.Footnote 80 It also spoke directly to Ottoman interest in adapting a system of internal deportation that would kill two proverbial birds with one stone: deporting seditious actors and hardened criminals, and putting them to work in remote regions where they would be cut off from their networks.
Yet Ottoman statesmen did not really need to look abroad for models—there were many precedents at home that were no less instructive. The empire had long relied on the twin policies of exile/deportation and settlement ( sürgün ve iskân ) to increase agricultural production, reshape demographic landscapes, and establish central authority in frontiers and borderlands. Ottoman statesmen built on these practices in the nineteenth century to govern migration across Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Libya.Footnote 81 Acting under the aegis of the Interior Ministry, different iterations of the Migrant Commission ( Muhacirin Komisyonu ) settled millions of Muslims arriving from the Caucasus, Crimea, Balkans, and Crete between roughly 1860 and 1913.Footnote 82 Ella Fratantuono shows how the central government responded to the challenges presented by waves of exiles and refugees from Imperial Russia and former Ottoman territories, and traces how the Migrant Commission increasingly viewed muhacir as “a problem to solve and a resource to carry out reform projects.”Footnote 83 Producing loyal Ottoman subjects required a sophisticated governing apparatus that could identify regions for settlement where Muslim migrants would act as agents of internal colonization and, ultimately, reinforce imperial sovereignty.Footnote 84 As Chris Gratien writes in his study of Cilicia, this apparatus was responsible for how “a new immigrant class became the vanguard of an empire-wide program of iskân .” In contrast to earlier periods, this settlement was “projected not out into the wild expanses of a territory in the process of being conquered but rather into pockets of sparse population and contested hegemony that had been part of the empire for centuries.”Footnote 85
Interest in settler penal colonies closely mirrored the logic of migrant settlement: convicts and their families were to be relocated, granted land, and transformed into productive agricultural settlers, thereby reducing prison expenditures while consolidating imperial control in frontiers. Recognizing how both projects envisaged turning problem populations into imperial assets allows us to see how they were part of an “amalgamation of colonizing projects” that were “conceptually and politically tethered.”Footnote 86 This tethering is strikingly clear in the Interior Ministry’s rendering of “ les exilés colonisateurs émigrés ” as “muhacir exiles tasked with development of the settlement.” This phrasing signified how bureaucrats and officials interpreted the Russian system through categories shaped by decades of plans related to migrants. While muhacirin and mücrimin were fundamentally different, they were both exiled groups—one displaced by Imperial Russia, the other a mix of internal convicts and deportees. Plans to harness the mobility of each were informed by similar bureaucratic anxieties, fiscal calculations, and material constraints. Recognizing these connections challenges us to understand exile as one node in a wider infrastructure of imperial governance that positioned migrants, refugees, and convicts alike as populations that could be moved in the service of the state.
Exceptional Circumstances, Exceptional Measures
Punitive mobility developed along several axes in the late nineteenth century. In addition to its codification in the Tanzimat era and subsequent efforts to develop the requisite infrastructure, the use of exile to punish and govern expanded as a consequence of the power the 1876 Constitution gave the sultan to declare a state of siege ( idare-i örfiyye ). Abdülhamid II first exercised this power in 1877 during the Russo-Ottoman War and continued to do so long after suspending the constitution in 1878. Article 113 of the short-lived constitution had not only granted the sultan the right to expel individuals who threatened the safety of the state but also to declare emergency measures to respond to acts that threatened the imperial order.Footnote 87 These measures included the suspension of civil administration and procedural guarantees, and the use of military tribunals to try civilians. As Noémi Lévy writes in a pioneering study of the role of military tribunals in the legal system, these provisions effectively “integrated exceptionality within the rule of law” and transformed idare-i örfiyye into a tool of governance for “exceptional and (more frequently) non-exceptional times.”Footnote 88
This development had major implications for the use of discretionary exile—the curtailment of which was a major objective of the Tanzimat penal reforms. The promulgation of the Regulations on the State of Siege in 1877 established the use of exceptional measures for as long as emergency measures were maintained. People suspected of involvement in seditious activities could now be tried by military tribunals, which meted out sentences of “death, forced labor, or prison, with the sentences to be enacted immediately ( derhâl ).” As Lévy observes, these courts were “in flagrant violation of the judicial system established during the Tanzimat era: they destroyed the autonomy of the judicial sphere and deprived the citizens of any right to appeal.”Footnote 89 The courts established had broad scope: “They could try offences and crimes committed against the internal and external ( dahili ve harici ) security of the state (art. 4), and they could sentence people for crimes and secret meetings that had occurred before the proclamation of the idare-i örfiyye (art. 10–11). In addition, individuals living outside the areas under the idare-i örfiyye could be tried by court-martial if they had been involved in any troubles in these areas (art. 12). In short, the basic spatial and temporal limits of the idare-i örfiyye were, to a certain extent, sidestepped by the judicial scope of the courts-martial.”Footnote 90
The courts-martial also circumvented the parameters of the 1858 Imperial Penal Code. Latitude in defining “troubles” allowed local authorities to extend military jurisdiction over civilians and to suspend ordinary legal guarantees. In the context of the Armenian and Macedonian “Questions,” emergency powers were increasingly routinized. As İlkay Yılmaz argues, “[t]he Hamidian Era was for the Ottoman Empire a period when the category of the internal enemy…was constructed, and the borders of politics were formed through this basic reference.”Footnote 91
The legal transformations that Lévy traces are vital for recognizing how the state of siege shaped legal praxis—specifically, how the use of military tribunals created a hybrid legal order in which provincial officials had greater leeway to internally deport problem subjects and allegedly seditious actors. In the case that opened this article, for example, a ciphered telegram from Mehmed Şakir’s predecessor, Müşir Kazım Pasha, described Hafız as a threat to public order and notified officials in Biga, a transit port on the Dardanelles, that Hafız was being “transferred and banished” for a three-year period in order to “reform his desires and morals” ( ıslah-ı nefs ü ahlak ).Footnote 92 He did not mention any specific crimes. As suggested by the Interior Ministry’s response to Governor and Commander Mehmed Şakir in 1902, this exile appears to have been an extrajudicial deportation.
Two other cases from 1903 demonstrate how provincial administrators used military tribunals to bypass the more stringent requirements of criminal law. In the first, the Rumeli Imperial Inspector, Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha,Footnote 93 wrote to the Sublime Porte about the need to quickly deport a hundred Bulgarian revolutionaries ( komiteci ), who had been taken into custody in Selanik, Kosovo, and Manastır.Footnote 94 Hüseyin Hilmi had detained the revolutionaries by administrative means ( idareten ) because of the serious threats he believed they posed to public security. Despite being “clearly among the biggest masters of sedition” and “the motive force of the machines of sedition,” there was not enough legal evidence to convict the detainees. The men were suspected of smuggling weapons and dynamite and accused of acts of terrorism and murder. If released, Hüseyin Hilmi was certain they would be emboldened and commit more serious offenses. He advocated bypassing a trial and exiling them, with haste, to Trablusgarb. In Istanbul, a commission comprising the heads of all the major ministries expressed fears that sending large revolutionary groups by sea would attract foreign attention and suggested that they begin by distancing ( teb’id ) the “most wicked” in small groups to Trablusgarb, Aleppo, Adana, and Diyarbekir. If foreign consuls made inquiries, the state’s response would be that such measures were necessary for “dimming the fire of revolution.” As the commission put it, “these kinds of exceptional circumstances called for recourse to exceptional measures.” The sultan approved these measures one day later.Footnote 95
Similar dynamics were at work in another case from that year, this time involving two brothers from the island of Midilli (Lesbos). Writing to the Interior Ministry, Abidin Pasha, the governor of the Mediterranean province of Cezair-i Bahr-i Sefid, explained that the brothers had earlier committed crimes in Istanbul and then fled to Russia. Upon returning to Midilli, they were taken into custody for “spreading anarchist thought.” Abidin Pasha believed the brothers would be acquitted in a criminal trial due to witnesses’ fears of testifying against them, and that this would surely result in their receiving a minor punishment that would “only increase their boldness.” Again, lack of evidence was cited—in a ciphered telegram—as cause for extrajudicial measures. Abidin Pasha asked for the Kopridi brothers to be sent by administrative exile to a “distant land such as Yemen or Fezzan.” The sultan ratified the governor’s request within a month’s time.Footnote 96
Both of these cases testify to how the use of idare-i örfiyye had become incorporated into governance, effectively allowing local and central authorities to internally deport subjects who threatened imperial order—and to expand the use of exile. The guiding principle was to break up seditious networks and swiftly distance their members from regions where they had or might sow discord. The state of siege had given provincial authorities the power to structure narratives of threat and potential crime. Using punitive mobility to banish the state’s internal enemies was clearly a constitutive element of the broader politics of internal security, which included instituting mobility regulations and controls on seditious subjects within the empire (or those seeking to leave).Footnote 97 The widespread use of military tribunals to prosecute civilians suspected of political crimes and acts that threatened imperial order and security points to the need for a reevaluation of the scope of exile—both within the hybrid legal system and the politics of internal security.
The Limits of the Moveable Empire
Political prisoners banished to infamous penal colonies in Ottoman Libya would create enduring associations in the imperial and post-imperial imaginary between exile and places like Fezzan and Trablusgarb, which were “inundated by exiles from around the Empire” from the mid-1880s onward.Footnote 98 These connections were also forged by public spectacles such as the Hamidian regime’s exile of seventy-eight Young Turks to Trablusgarb following an 1896 plan to overthrow the sultan and an 1897 plot by Unionists to assassinate the minister in charge of the empire’s military academies.Footnote 99 Similarly, texts like the 1910 prison memoir of the Macedonian anarchist Pavel Shatev (1882–1951) amplified associations between Libya and exile, particularly through descriptions of Fezzan as the “Siberia of Africa.”Footnote 100
Comparisons to Russia’s infamous colony among political prisoners like Shatev were likely informed by ties to revolutionary networks operating across Ottoman and Russian territories and knowledge of the carceral geographies of both empires. But while highly evocative, the analogy was ultimately off the mark. Unlike Imperial Russia, the Ottoman state had not succeeded in implementing a systematic exile regime or penal settlement for the purposes of internal colonization and development—neither in Libya nor in Yemen. Even as convicts would continue to be dispatched to these “distant lands,” they would never be sent as potential settlers or laborers.Footnote 101 What had happened? Why was the state not able to bring this plan to fruition? In the absence of an explicit explanation in Ottoman archival sources, this study concludes by looking for answers in two areas: the practical challenges of convict transport to Yemen in particular, and the empire’s prioritization of migrant settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
The case of an escaped exile—and what can only be described as a logistical nightmare for the prisoner and government officials alike—sheds light on the first factor. This revealing saga began in May 1898, when an exiled telegraph official named Mehmed Nuri Efendi was detained en route from Greece to Istanbul. After arriving in Izmir with what Ottoman police deemed suspicious travel documents, it soon became apparent that despite passing himself off as a Cypriot (Kıbrıslı), Mehmed Nuri was originally from the Crimea (Kırımlı). He had migrated to Istanbul in his youth and studied in the Imperial School of Medicine before dropping out to travel to Adana, where he studied telegraphy before securing a position in the Telegraph Office of Kosovo. There, Mehmed Nuri was implicated in a seditious plot against the government and sent to Istanbul, where he was held for nine months without any formal charges. The Taşkışla Military Tribunal exiled him to Yemen, even though there was no evidence of his criminal activity.Footnote 102 Somehow, he managed to escape from Yemen to Cyprus, and then travel to Egypt and Greece. When he next tried to visit a sister in Istanbul, his luck had run out and he was detained.Footnote 103
When local authorities discovered that he was a fugitive, they were ordered by the central government to send him back to Yemen, where he would serve an additional sentence for his escape. The only problem—and a significant one at that—was that there were no steamships to Hudaydah scheduled to stop in Izmir. Detained for the second time and awaiting another exile, Mehmed Nuri was reportedly “complaining all day and lamenting his situation.” Meanwhile, authorities in the Aegean city of Aydın protested that “a person for whom there is no verdict or decision regarding detention” could not be held indefinitely. As with the Kopridi brothers, the Interior Ministry warned the parties involved that Mehmed Nuri could not be sent on a foreign vessel. They then tried to send him to Taif via Beirut, and from there to Yemen. Once he reached Taif, however, authorities in the Hijaz were not able to find an Ottoman vessel heading to Hudaydah. Mehmed Nuri ended up back in Izmir.Footnote 104 Clearly, this was not an efficient way to transport one political prisoner, let alone large groups of convicts and their families, for the purposes of internal colonization and settlement.
Another significant question soon emerged: who bore the costs of such complicated transport? The question came up repeatedly in other cases related to prisoner transport catalogued in the same file, including the exile of groups of family members of tribal leaders from the Hemvend. In correspondence between the Interior Ministry and the Grand Vizierate, the former wrote that due to lack of funds for “criminal transport allocation” ( mücrimin sevk tertibi ), these expenses should be covered by the sending locations. In Biga, convicts awaiting deportation to Trablusgarb and Yemen were stuck due to both lack of Ottoman vessels and emerging conflicts over who was responsible for payment. The Interior Ministry notified the Grand Vizierate that they did not have funds for prisoner transport—or for the gendarmes needed to accompany them to their place of exile and then make the return journey.Footnote 105 The officials involved decided to send the prisoners to Sinop, a more readily accessible Black Sea port city that would become a major exile site through the early Republican period.Footnote 106
In contrast to proposals for establishing a penal colony in Yemen—which throughout the 1880s and 1890s referred to the province in completely abstract terms—cases such as Mehmed Nuri’s demonstrate that the very distance that made Yemen an attractive place of exile for some within the government rendered it an unlikely place for large-scale banishment. Whereas scholars have taken for granted that certain places were naturally suited to punishment, whether due to climate or geographical distance from the metropole,Footnote 107 these incidents illuminate why specific places became sites of exile, or menfa , and others did not. In the context of the fiscal austerity symbolized by the creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881,Footnote 108 one way to conclude this analysis would be to argue that the empire’s insolvency foreclosed not only the transportation of prisoners to Yemen but also the creation of settler penal colonies: there was simply no money to allocate to transport infrastructure, or to the land, tools, seed, animals, housing, and gendarmes needed to establish a penal colony in this distant location. But while this addresses the tensions between developmentalist, penal, and economic ambitions within the state, it is an incomplete explanation. Well after declaring bankruptcy and submitting to European control of a significant portion of state revenue, the central government continued to finance other projects related to governing mobility. This included the complex administration of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and, more relevant to this study, efforts to expand muhacir settlement. Both were predicated on fulfilling the sultan-caliph’s obligations vis-à-vis the worldwide Muslim community.Footnote 109 Both involved free populations.
In fact, the same year that Foreign Minister Tevfik Pasha was gathering information about European exile regimes, his colleagues in the Interior Ministry were occupied with plans to build what scholars have referred to as a “Second Egypt” in parts of Libya. By the 1850s, the central government had established a “wide-ranging reconstruction program centering on administrative standardization and infrastructure development” in the province.Footnote 110 Fredrick Walter Lorenz shows how the central government built on this infrastructure to settle Muslim migrants and refugees from Crete, who had been displaced during widespread insurrections on the island throughout 1897 and 1898. Authorities considered these displaced Ottomans as potential “agents of Ottoman expansionism” who could “establish newly implanted agricultural colonies with the goal of cultivating the fallow territories of Cyrenaica and transforming them into profitable agricultural lands.” Lorenz terms these governmental attempts to adopt settler colonial policies “Ottoman settlerism.”Footnote 111 These iskân policies, Gratien argues, were aimed at creating a cultivated and commercially lucrative region that would compensate for the de facto loss of Egypt and of high-yield agricultural territories in the Balkans.Footnote 112 By settling displaced populations in what it considered underdeveloped and “empty” ( mahlul ) lands, the state also sought to cultivate political loyalty in regions where central authority was tenuous or contested.Footnote 113 Muhacir were what Lorenz terms a potential “auxiliary military force” that would provide “increased security against the surveillance of tribal federations, European encroachment, and Sanusi operations in Cyrenaica.” These frontier settlers, as in other parts of the empire, would also shift the demographic balance vis-à-vis “savage” nomadic communities in favor of settled agriculturalists.Footnote 114 Convicts would only muddle this equation.
The boundaries of how mobility could be harnessed to greatest effect become clear when we situate the history of exile in a much broader continuum of governing mobility. The simultaneity of projects to create an “Ottoman Siberia” and a “Second Egypt” is deeply revealing: at the same time that Ottoman statesmen were contemplating how they might transform convicts into colonial settlers, they were already deploying free migrants for precisely that purpose. Despite the similar underpinnings of both ventures, there were important differences. First, whereas muhacir populations had to be settled (alternatively, they would only pose additional threats to imperial order), convicts who were already exiled to prisons and fortresses did not need to be moved. Second, men like Hafız Bayram and the other “masters of sedition” were not great candidates for fortifying state power. Any attempt to make this happen would require substantial upfront expenditures—not only on tools, animals, and machinery, but also significant funds to cover gendarmes, guards, and sentries to ensure that these exiles did not escape. Thus, despite interest in sending “these kinds of people sentenced for murder” to “distant places” where they would be allocated land for cultivation and reduce the cost of prison expenditures, this article has shown that the “moveable empire” had very real limits.
Conclusion
If Ottoman officials were following closely the developments in Russia, they would note that their longtime rival was increasingly interested in free rather than unfree colonization and that “[b]y the end of the nineteenth century, the use of exile as a tool for colonization had receded in significance as free settlement of the Empire’s peripheries had made penal colonization rather redundant.”Footnote 115 For many of the same reasons, plans to use convicts at home in this way became moot before they were ever implemented. Attention to these dynamics not only sheds light on Ottoman histories of punitive mobility but also complicates the familiar story of Russia’s exceptionalism vis-à-vis European empires with overseas colonies. The failure to implement contemporary models of settlement in the Ottoman Empire, for example, demonstrates that it was not geography and contiguous empire alone that dictated how exile regimes took shape. Factors set in motion beyond the empire’s borders—notably the exile and deportation practices in Russia that sent waves of muhacir into Ottoman lands—were also at play.
Sultanic directives to study European exile regimes and plans to expand convict labor, settlement, and cultivation all place the Ottoman Empire squarely within the global history of punitive mobility, and signal productive paths for research on inter-imperial and trans-imperial dynamics. The settler penal colony that Mehmed Şakir envisioned—where men like Hafız Bayram would cultivate distant lands while the state simultaneously purged the empire’s interior—was never built. And yet Hafız Bayram remained exiled and Zeliha Hanım suffered from the distance the state used to separate her from her son. The other, metaphorical distance worthy of note is the one between imperial ambition and what the empire could sustain. It is in this space that the history of Ottoman punitive mobility comes into focus: not only in realized projects of empire-building, but in modes of “distancing” that were at once extralegal and normalized, exceptional and routine, within and beyond prison walls.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts at the City College of New York for a semester of full research reassigned time to begin writing this article, as well as support provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. Nora Barakat, Sam Dolbee, Varak Ketsemanian, and Ayşe Polat provided immensely valuable feedback and intellectual support. I also thank participants in the Eurasian Empires Workshop at the Stanford University Humanities Center and the Ottoman Political Economies Working group, particularly Önder Eren Akgül, Seda Altuğ, Toygun Altıntaş, Camille Cole, Zoe Griffith, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, and Naz Yücel. Thank you to Adam Shatz and Mohamad Bazzi for their helpful suggestions and to the anonymous CSSH peer reviewers and editorial team for their role in strengthening this article.
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