Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939

Isa Blumi is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Area Studies, Leipzig University, Germany and Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University, USA.

• Introduction1 Prelude to Disaster: Finance Capitalism and the Political Economy of Imperial Collapse2 Resettlement Regimes and Empire: The Politics of Caring for Ottoman Refugees3 Traveling the Contours of an Ottoman Proximate World4 Transitional Migrants: The Global Ottoman Refugee and Colonial Terror5 Missionaries at the Imperial Ideological EdgeConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

Blumi (Georgia State Univ., Reinstating the Ottomans, 2011) has written a very sophisticated analysis of refugees during the late- and post-Ottoman periods that shows the complexities of refugee identity within the empire. In doing so, he recognizes the role played by the linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity of these people, which at times finds the various interests and identities of refugees pitted against each other. Throughout the work, Blumi highlights the trauma of the Ottoman refugee studies, it gives the readers a larger perspective of the refugee experience, not one limited geographically or otherwise. Blumi, whose vast linguistic abilities allow him to reach across the empire from Albania to Yemen, adds a much-needed theoretical foundation to the study of Ottoman refugees. He shows how refugees in their struggle to survive were forced to contend with the interests of global capitalism in both the nation-states arising from the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, especially Latin America. Valuable for students of Ottoman history as well as most general refugee studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended.