Reşat Kasaba: Migration and State Formation in the Aftermath of the Ottoman Empire

Greece & Turkey Lecture Series
Resat Kasaba (University of Washington), “Migration and State Formation in the Aftermath of the Ottoman Empire”

4:45 pm: Book Signing, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (University of Washington Press, 2009)
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

5:15 pm: Lecture, “Migration and State Formation in the Aftermath of the Ottoman Empire“

Abstract: The Ottoman Empire started and ended in migration. While the movements of people that shaped the empire and its boundaries in the early part of its history were, to a large extent, voluntary, those that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire were compulsory. Multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities of the empire all around the empire were torn apart and almost the entire non-Muslim population of the empire were deported, killed, or marginalized as minorities. This presentation compares the early and later types of migration, explains the forces that brought the shift from the first to the second, and describes how these developments affected the status of  the Greek population of Anatolia in the early decades of the 20th century.

Reşat Kasaba is Stanley D. Golub Professor of International Studies and Director of Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. in Economics and Statistics from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from State University of New York at Binghamton. Focusing on economic history, state-society relations, migration, ethnicity, nationalism, and urban history, his research explores different aspects of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prof. Kasaba is the recipient of many research grants and fellowships awarded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and National Science Foundation. Among his publications are A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (2009), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (1998), Rules and Rights in the Middle East: Democracy, Law, and Society (1993), and The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy: The Nineteenth Century (1988).