Ottoman Passports

with İlkay Yılmaz

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| Passports are objects at once momentous and mundane. How did they come about in the late Ottoman Empire? In this episode, İlkay Yılmaz discusses the history of this technology, and how the state effort to manage information about identity and control people's movement emerged alongside international police efforts to control anarchist and revolutionary subjects between different empires in the late nineteenth century. With this new technology, the ability to control people's movement also became contingent on the photograph and connected to late Ottoman politics of migration and ethnicity. She also discusses how these state efforts to limit people's movement through the technology of the passport have echoes in the present, even in her own life.        

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Passports are objects at once momentous and mundane. How did they come about in the late Ottoman Empire? In this episode, İlkay Yılmaz discusses the history of this technology, and how the state effort to manage information about identity and control people's movement emerged alongside international police efforts to control anarchist and revolutionary subjects between different empires in the late nineteenth century. With this new technology, the ability to control people's movement also became contingent on the photograph and connected to late Ottoman politics of migration and ethnicity. She also discusses how these state efforts to limit people's movement through the technology of the passport have echoes in the present, even in her own life.

    

Contributor Bios

İlkay Yılmaz is a DFG-funded research associate at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin. She has held numerous fellowships, including at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, and was previously an Assistant Professor at Istanbul University, where she completed her MA and PhD. Her research has appeared in Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Journal of Photography, among others. Her book is Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press).

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press.

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Credits

Episode No. 567

Release Date: 5 September 2024
Recording location: Nashville / Berlin

Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Sombra," "Petite Route," "Big Road of Burravoe"  

Bibliography courtesy of İlkay Yılmaz

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	David Gutman	433 11/14/2019	The Poltiics of Armenian Migration to North America
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Select Bibliography

Berberian, Houri. Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds. University of California Press, 2019.

Gürsel, Zeynep D. (2023), “Looking Together as Method”. Visual Anthropology Review, 39: 200-229.

Gutman, David E.  The Politics of Armenian Migration To North America, 1885–1915: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Hanley, Will. Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. Columbia University Press, 2017.

Herzog, Christoph. “Migration and the State: On Ottoman Regulations Concerning Migration since the Age of Mahmud II”, The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and Making of Urban Modernity. ed. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, Florian Riedler, Routledge, 2011, pp. 117–134.

Jensen, Richard Bach, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Kieser, Hans Lukas. Der verpasste Friede. Mission, Ethnie und Staat in den Ostprovinzen der Türkei 1839–1938, Chronos, 2000.

Turna, Nalan. 19. yy.den 20.yy.'ye Osmanlı Topraklarında Göç ve Asayis ̧ Belgeleri, Mürür Tezkeleri, Kaknüs Yayınları, 2013.

Yılmaz, İlkay. “Governing the Armenian Question Through Passports in The Late Ottoman Empire (1876-1908), Journal of Historical Sociology, 32, 2019.

Yosmaoğlu, İpek. Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908. Cornell University Press, 2014