Migrant Settlement, Internal Colonization, and the ‘Logic of Elimination’ in Ottoman Anatolia, 1850-1910

In 1857, the Ottoman state issued an invitation to potential colonizers, promising free land, temporary tax exemption, and religious freedom to all those pledging loyalty to the sultan and possessing sufficient capital. The 1857 invitation and a related regulation on settlement occurred almost simultaneously with the initiation of a decades-long mass Muslim migration from the Crimean Peninsula, Caucasus, and Balkans into the shrinking territory of the Ottoman state. Though the scale and duration of Muslim immigration overshadows the 1857 colonization scheme, these events are closely related. From the perspective of immigration policy, the 1857 colonization initiative is useful in highlighting the shift from the liberal and religiously egalitarian tendencies of the Tanzimat reform period (1839-1876) to the increasingly restrictive migration regulations of the Hamidian period (1876-1908). From the perspective of settlement policy, the 1857 colonization scheme serves as an early iteration of persistent Ottoman strategies and ideologies of population management.

This paper will consider how evaluating nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman migrant settlement through core concepts in Settler Colonial Studies, in particular Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination,” highlights continuities and developments in Ottoman settlement policy. Officials generated grids of knowledge to facilitate settlement and mapped notions of productivity onto Ottoman territory. Ultimately, officials and migrants cast some newcomers as vectors of civilization to justify land appropriation and immigrant settlement. Analyzing the curtailed colonization scheme and Muslim migrant settlement as two components of the same project increases historians’ understanding of the trends of settlement and expulsion characterizing the late Ottoman period.