Muslim Migrants between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, 1800s-1910s

FAIN: FT-249364-16

Eileen Mary Kane
Connecticut College (New London, CT 06320-4125)

Archival research for a book-length manuscript on Muslim migration between the Russian and Ottoman Empires from the 1880s to the 1910s.

My project is a book, titled Black Sea Crossings: Muslim Migrants and the Worlds They Made. A study of migrations between the Russian and Ottoman empires at a time of rising human mobility (1880s-1910s), this book will reconstruct patterns of Muslim movement between the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Constantinople (Istanbul)—the two largest and most economically vibrant port cities of the Russian and Ottoman empires, respectively—as a way to understand how Muslims navigated new policies toward Islam introduced by the tsarist and Ottoman governments in the decades before World War I, and the collapse of both empires. In telling this story, my aim is to challenge stark and ahistorical divisions between Europe and Islam, and bridge the histories of Russia and the Middle East, regions that have deeply entangled pasts and yet are rarely studied in relation to each another.