İlkay Yılmaz, Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2023), pp. 346. $39.95 Paperback (ISBN: 9780815638117)
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: İlkay Yılmaz's book, Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908, presents a thorough and compelling investigation into the use of passports as tools of mobility control before the widespread adoption of passport controls.Yılmaz illustrates how the Ottoman state, under the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r., instrumentalize the documentation of Ottoman subjects' individual identities to expand security and surveillance networks and limit mobility for suspect populations.Centering the Ottoman government's use of passports as a part of both internal state centralization and a growing international trend that associated individual mobility with state security, Yılmaz places the Ottoman Empire within a wider nineteenth-century context of state modernization.Though numerous studies in recent years have explored the Ottoman Empire's use of passports to control the mobility of its Armenian population specifically, Yılmaz's work is the first English-language historical monograph to focus on Ottoman passports more generally.While the Armenian question figures prominently in Ottoman Passports, Yılmaz also examines the Macedonian question and contextualizes both the Armenian question and the Macedonian question within the Ottoman government's larger-scale security concerns regarding mobility.Rather than only focusing on passports for international use, Yılmaz explores passports as one of numerous forms of documents reflecting individual identity, which could be used for movement, both internationally and domestically.She also offers a deep analysis of the language used by the Ottoman government to label potentially threatening groups as "internal enemies."In this way, Yılmaz vividly illustrates that the Ottoman Empire's use of mobility controls was born of existential threats (real or perceived) to Ottoman sovereignty, which shaped Hamidian-era state policy.
Source: Law and History Review
Author: Mahmut Polat
Institution: University of Minnesota
Language: English
Topic: Historical Turkish Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7154279608
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