This article follows the history of migration from the mountain villages of the Jebel Nafusa in Ottoman Trablus al-Gharb (in today’s northwestern Libya) to the southern Tunisian island of Djerba in the early 20th century. It situates this local history of migration within the broader framework of Maghribi migration both before and during the colonial era in Libya (1911–43), while tracing the histories of two categories of migrants, in particular, manual laborers and Qur’an teachers (m’addibs). The article makes three claims: (1) Nafusi migration was as much the result of local historical circumstances as it was a response to colonialism; (2) the historical experience of migration of Nafusis differed according to social class; and (3) local circumstances shaped the dynamics of migrant integration in the Maghrib. In doing so, I demonstrate how Nafusi migration to Djerba both conforms to and diverges from the larger history of late Ottoman and colonial-era migration in Tunisia. By shifting the focus away from the colonial moment, I make the case for foregrounding longer-term regional connections and migrations that linked different spaces across the Maghrib and also attend to local histories and what they offer in the way of caveats and exceptions.

This article examines the subject of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean in the two and a half centuries after 1650. With reference to both Ottoman and European sources, it first grapples with the empirical problems involved in studying the subject. It then explores how a combination of trade dynamics in the Gulf and the economic preferences of both Ottoman state and private actors attenuated the expansion of Ottoman shipping. Taken together, these factors confirm that the comparative dearth of Ottoman vessels in the Indian Ocean trade was a product of geopolitical and ecological contingency rather than entrepreneurial neglect or state aversion. Even so, as shown by two case studies, Ottoman subjects of one type or another were found in ports from Surat to Batavia at various moments before 1800. The analysis then turns to later nineteenth-century attempts by Ottoman state actors to augment Ottoman shipping. These efforts were inhibited by the contrasting incentives of private Ottoman seafarers, the dominance of European and Indian ships in the empire’s trade with India, the dislocation of nominal Ottoman territories in the Gulf, and the political economy of the Ottoman Gulf itself. Despite the fact that state-sponsored shipping came to grief, the presence of Ottoman ships in the Indian Ocean invites reflections on the highly mutable character of Ottoman identity and sovereignty, as well as the empire’s relative position in the wider commercial world of the Indian Ocean, across these centuries.

This article highlights the state’s labor coercion practices and their perpetual characteristic in defining the history of migration and migrants’ experiences in the city. It underlines the internal relationship between production processes and relations on the one hand and the mobility of workers and their families on the other. For this purpose, it focuses on the migration dynamics of shipbuilding workers in mid-nineteenth-century İstanbul, most of whom worked in the Imperial Arsenal (Tersane-i Amire) and dwelled in the neighborhoods of the surrounding quarter of Kasımpaşa. I will utilize the population records of one of these neighborhoods, the Seyyid Ali Çelebi, where the relationship between the worksite and the residential community was evident, and the wage records of the Imperial Arsenal to understand the relationality of migration and work processes. Based on an analysis of these sources, I will point to the connections between the configuration of migration networks built in or through the Arsenal and the settlement patterns in the neighborhood. I will particularly argue that relations at the workplace and the coercive dynamics that underlined these relations significantly impacted the migration and settlement patterns in the nineteenth century.

This article provides a microhistorical case study centered on a Roma couple residing in Istanbul’s renowned Romani settlement, Sulukule. It sheds light on three significant historical processes related to modernity that influenced the interactions of the individuals involved: land commodification, the 1881 census reform, and the rise of both inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses within the Ottoman ruling elite. At the heart of the narrative are Sadık and Züleyha, who aimed to purchase waqf land subdivided and offered for sale by Mehmed Efendi in Yenibahçe. Their goal was to escape the spatial segregation they experienced. They leveraged the new census policy, which eliminated the classification of Muslim "Gypsy” from official records, allowing them to present themselves as Muslim refugees from Bulgaria. However, upon discovering the couple’s Roma identity from Sulukule, their new neighbors initiated a legal dispute, resulting in the Internal Affairs Section of the Council of State voting to annul the transaction. The differing opinions among council members highlighted the competing inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses. The article first reconstructs the case and examines the associated historical processes using extensive primary and secondary sources.

Mehmed Ziya, an Ottoman Muslim educator and intellectual, published an art historical treatise on the Chora Monastery/Kariye Mosque in Istanbul in 1910. This was largely a translation of three articles by the French Byzantinist Charles Diehl previously published in Études byzantines and in Le Journal des savants. Through his book, Mehmed Ziya attempted to acquaint the Ottoman Turks with this Byzantine monument, especially its rich decorations. Two letters appended in the book reveal his efforts to raise awareness among the youth in this respect, and to mobilize the Ottoman authorities regarding the protection and promotion of the Chora monastery more particularly.

In a collection of Hatt-ı Hümayuns (Imperial Edicts) at the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, I located the Ottoman translation of the Greek Declaration of Independence. This article examines the terminology that Ottomans used to interpret the language employed by the revolutionary Greeks. The goal of this study is to examine Ottoman attempts to define the rebels and conceptualize the inner motive behind the revolt of their subjects. This article argues that confiscated documents such as the Greek Declaration of Independence contributed to the familiarization of the imperial authorities with the ideological background to the rebellion and the reasons that triggered it.

This article explores the path of the microscopic phylloxera insect as it made its way from the United States to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century. As the pest devastated vineyards in Western Europe it also catalyzed grape production in the western Ottoman Empire around Izmir, before this region, too, succumbed. One response to the outbreak was the first legal code controlling plant traffic across nations, and another was an effort to plant American rootstocks, which were relatively resistant. The Ottoman response to phylloxera offers another example of the ways in which the alleged “sick man of Europe” was actually much more dynamic than its detractors insisted. The invocation of phylloxera moreover became a way for post-Ottoman states like Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia to protect their national grape economies. The article’s broader analysis explains how the shared environment of the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean incubated both the spread of phylloxera and—in the protectionist legal regimes formed in response—the architecture of the region’s peculiarly integrated disconnection. The article closes by considering the agriculture of displacement amidst the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange, and how it further entrenched these dynamics as migrants took vines with them and planted them in the remarkably similar environments of their new national homes.

The Greek anti-Ottoman revolt in the 1820s brought increased suspicion among the empire’s ruling circles toward not only Greeks but non-Muslim subjects in general. This sparked government security measures in Istanbul, home to substantial Christian and Jewish populations. This article examines such measures intended to bring non-Muslim subjects under control, and the overall impact the Greek revolt had on the Ottoman approach to its subjects. It argues that the revolt catalyzed changes in the state’s attitude toward population surveillance and its treatment of non-Muslims. When the empire felt the need to bring non-Muslims under control, a major challenge was how to verify and vouch for the latter’s identity, since they deemed Muslim officials incapable of doing so. Thus, though they were suspicious of non-Muslims, they actively used the religious authorities of their communities to implement various security measures, including the creation of a population record and the introduction of internal passports. At the same time, religious authorities found it essential to demonstrate their and their community’s pro-Ottoman position by cooperating with the state in its efforts to find enemies within. Incorporation of non-Muslim religious authorities into imperial governance led to official recognition of the representatives of smaller non-Muslim groups, including Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews. The result was a standardization of non-Muslim communities with officially recognized representatives before the government.

This article analyses the struggle for possession of the House of Baha’u’llah in Baghdad during the 1920s and 1930s. One of the Bahai religion’s most sacred sites, the House of Baha’u’llah was the subject of protracted legal and political-diplomatic disputes following efforts by anti-Bahai activists to appropriate it from its Bahai custodians in 1921. The ensuing case touched almost every facet of the Iraqi judicial system, galvanised the international Bahai community and captured the attention of the British colonial state, the Iraqi government and the League of Nations. This article explores the causes and implications of the dispute, which can be considered one of the first incidents of religious persecution in modern Iraq. Rather than explaining the incident with reference to the intolerant attitudes of the Shi`i majority, the article argues for the role of the institutions of colonial modernity – the Mandates system, the new minorities regime, the praxis and discourse of colonial expansion, and the internationalism of the interwar period – for the unravelling of the case itself and for affecting modern, secular articulations of anti-Bahai prejudice.