Travel Documents, Mobility Control, and the Ottoman State in an Age of Global Migration, 1880–1915

Abstract:This article investigates efforts by the Hamidian-era Ottoman state to rely on its document-based internal mobility control regime, the mürûr tezkeresi system, to prevent overseas mobility from Mount Lebanon on the Levantine coast and the province of Mamuretülaziz in eastern Anatolia. It also contrasts Hamidian-era mobility control efforts with those of the Ottoman state following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, revealing points of both convergence and divergence. It asserts that these efforts reveal many of the broader contradictions and tensions of the Ottoman modernization process of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argues for understanding the Ottoman case as part of the broader global story of mobility and migration control.