The Ottoman Empire’s long history is infused with stories of migration, voluntary or not. Increasingly an area of focus for scholars, the migration story has diversified as studies seek to explain in new ways a larger historical process. From the very beginning of the empire, large flows of human beings animated Ottoman political, economic, and cultural life. From peasants uprooted by periods of administrative transition occurring as the empire replaced previous ruling structures to political, cultural, and economic exiles welcomed by various constituencies within the Ottoman state structure, migrants, nomads, and refugees have been critical to the framing of a wide variety of histories (Kasaba, 2009).

While previous scholarship has proven helpful, there is room to improve some ways of characterizing such migratory actors. The associations made by referring to sets of people moving within Ottoman territories as migrants, workers, and/or refugees shape our interpretation of events around them. Refugees, for example, are often portrayed as having been bereft of agency and dependent on the historical choices of their “hosts” – often the Ottoman state or its external rivals. Research has shown that their stories are far more complex (Fratantuono, 2017). Earlier work on refugees (muhacir in Ottoman) in the larger context of migration suggests that their contribution to Ottoman history was just as crucial to understanding the dramatic, often disconnected events. By the final century, for example, government officials sought to administer and regulate their settlement because of how critical they were to maintaining stability. In other words, at certain moments the refugee become an active agent of Ottoman history.