Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 | Book Talk with İlkay Yılmaz

İlkay Yılmaz reconsiders the history of two political issues, the Armenian and Macedonian questions, approaching both through the lens of mobility restrictions during the late Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1908. Yılmaz investigates how Ottoman security perceptions and travel regulations were directly linked to transnational security regimes battling against anarchism. The Ottoman government targeted “internal threats” to the regime with security policies that created new categories of suspects benefiting from the concepts of vagrant, conspirator, and anarchist. Yılmaz explores how mobility restrictions and the use of passports became critical to criminalizing the groups including Armenians, Bulgarians, seasonal and foreign workers, and revolutionaries.

İlkay Yılmaz is a DFG (German Research Foundation) funded research associate at the Department of Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin. She was an Einstein Senior Researcher at the same department. She was a research associate at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient between 2017-19 with the Humboldt Scholarship and between 2014-15 with TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) scholarship. She worked as an assistant professor at Istanbul University from 2014 until 2017. Her articles have appeared in several journals. Her research interests focus on the history of security, passport history, trans-imperial collaboration on policing, state formation, and the history of violence in the late Ottoman Empire.