Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

University of California, Santa Barbara

2025 Roger Owen Book Award Honorable Mention

Carefully researched and powerfully written, Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State is a novel and uniquely compelling history of the late Ottoman empire – one that places the state-management of the mass displacement of Muslim refugees at its center. His transnational history shows how the Ottoman empire, fraying at its edges, sought to shore up its imperial legitimacy by positioning itself as refuge for Muslims displaced by European expansion, but that its specific actions determined whether the refugee arrival would lead to the empire’s consolidation of control over its contested borderlands or whether those areas would calve off. His work draws out the contradictions in Ottoman policy: a precursor to contemporary policies for refugee resettlement later codified through the League of Nations and then the United Nations, it also set the stage for the bloody population transfers and forced homogenization that would soon tear at the fabric of empire.  With a history that is at once capacious and intimate, Hamad-Troyansky’s reminds us how much state policy matters – for the refugees who are displaced and for the communities that receive them– but also for political futures and radical transformations they set in motion.

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