This volume is the fruit of a reflection that started at a conference on war and population displacements in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries held at the German Historical Institute in Paris in April 2015. During the event, we discussed the importance of the conference’s issue in the Ottoman Empire as one of the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional and transcontinental empires that, for centuries, shaped the history of Europe and the world. Given this diagnosis, we decided to launch a project exploring the relationship between military conflicts and human movements in the Ottoman Empire over the longue durée and as widely as possible in space.
Our goal was twofold. On the one hand we wanted to deepen our knowledge about the movements of hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, of people – both within the Ottoman Empire and beyond its borders – that were provoked by the military conflicts ensued by the expansion and consolidation of the Ottoman Empire from the middle of the 14th to the end of the 17th centuries, but also played a role in its decline and dissolution since the 18th century. In other terms, we wanted to approach the history of the Ottoman Empire as a history of war and human mobility. On the other hand, we intended to bring together researchers from academic disciplines that do not always work together and thus open a dialogue in a research field, which not only have great potential for historical research but is also highly relevant in the present.
In order to achieve these goals we organized two successive workshops: a first one focusing on the early modern period that took place during the Turkologentag in Hamburg in September 2016, and a second concentrating on population movements induced by the conflicts of the “Eastern Question” in the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Caucasus in the 19th century, and from the Young Turk Revolution to the aftermath of the World War I. Organized in cooperation with colleagues from the universities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, Giessen, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Zurich, the Graduate Institute of Geneva and DODIS (Swiss Diplomatic Documents), this second workshop took place in Lausanne in October 2018.
As said before, the present volume is the outcome of our investigation into war and population displacements in the Ottoman Empire since 2015. It brings together both, conceptual contributions and case studies from the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia Minor and Caucasus. Some of them are the revised versions of papers presented in Lausanne.
We are deeply indebted to our partners, contributors and “hidden helpers” for their participation and support all along our project. Our particular gratitude goes to Thomas David at Lausanne University for his generous help and financial support in the organization of the workshop in Lausanne, to the Laboratoire d’Excellence “Écrire une histoire nouvelle de l’Europe” (LABEX EHNE) and Justus-Liebig-Universität of Giessen for their financial support of the project, to Arby Gharibian for editing the volume, to Sarah Maria Noske and Larissa Sebastian for the proof-reading and final editing of all the contributions and to Dennis Klose for indexing the names. Last but not least, we would like to express our thanks to the editors of “The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage. Politics, Society and Economy” for allowing us to publish our volume in their collection as well as to Franca de Kort for her ongoing support and engagement in the publication of this book.
Catherine Horel and Bettina Severin-Barboutie