In the second half of the nineteenth century, several million Muslims migrated from the Caucasus, Crimea, and Balkans into the Ottoman Empire. During the same era, the empire launched a series of economic, administrative, legal, and political reforms intended to increase the power of the central government. The reform era altered the relationship between state and subject, as state institutions became more visible in the population’s everyday lives. Though scholars credit mass population movements with changing the ethnic fabric of the empire, few have described how official policies were employed to encourage migrant identification with the changing Ottoman state. This dissertation analyzes migration and Ottoman migration administration in the five decades following the Crimean War (1853-1856). I explore the development of the immigrant as a social issue requiring administrative intervention within a modernizing state. Through an analysis of policy directives and official reports on migrant settlement, education, and health, I consider state strategies of population management and spatial organization. Migrants were potential tools in development projects and objects of assimilating reform, and migration administration reveals officials’ concerns with developing techniques to encourage productivity and identification with the state. A history of late Ottoman Empire with a focus on migration and migration administration highlights mobility and space as critical to Ottoman governance.
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