From Imperial Mobility to National Fixation

For over four centuries, the Ottoman Empire governed population movement as a routine component of administrative order. Warfare, fiscal extraction, frontier security, environmental pressures, and centralized planning continuously displaced and recombined populations across Anatolia, the Balkans, the Black Sea steppe, and the Caucasus. In this context, mobility functioned not as an exceptional disruption but as a regular instrument of imperial governance.

Through sustained population circulation, the empire produced layered genealogies, overlapping social affiliations, and regionally integrated economic networks. Migration, resettlement, and forced relocation (sürgün) operated as administrative mechanisms directed toward stabilizing tax revenues, securing frontier zones, restoring agricultural production, and integrating newly incorporated territories into the imperial fiscal and logistical system.

As demonstrated in the preceding two articles of this series, Celâlî-era internal displacements, steppe-origin resettlements, and nineteenth-century refugee settlement regimes were not isolated reactions to crisis, but formed part of a long-term demographic management framework. Population movement was structurally embedded within the imperial organization of territorial cohesion, revenue extraction, military provisioning, and infrastructural continuity.

Between 1912 and 1923, this demographic regime underwent a fundamental transformation. The Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the Turkish–Greek Population Exchange did not simply produce another cycle of displacement. Together, they marked a structural break in the imperial logic of mobility itself. In its place emerged a new political and demographic order grounded in fixed territorial borders, legally singular national identities, and the long-term stabilization of population through territorial registration and border enforcement.

This shift was not unique to the late Ottoman lands. It formed part of a broader global transformation in political imagination that unfolded from the late eighteenth century onward. The doctrines of popular sovereignty, national self-determination, and mass political identity that emerged from the French Revolution diffused throughout Europe and beyond during the nineteenth century.

By the early twentieth century, nationalism had become the dominant principle of political legitimacy across much of the world. The unifications of Italy and Germany, the dissolution of the Habsburg and Romanov empires, and the transformation of multi-ethnic imperial systems into territorially bounded nation-states followed a common conceptual logic. In each case, earlier regimes of layered sovereignty, imperial mobility, and plural legal identities were replaced by demographic systems centered on ethnic classification, population registration, and border enforcement.

The late Ottoman transition unfolded within this same ideological field. The collapse of imperial authority in the Balkans and Anatolia occurred under the combined pressures of mass warfare, territorial contraction, and the proliferation of nationalist projects. Population movement, which under the imperial system had served as a mechanism of integration, fiscal stabilization, and frontier consolidation, was increasingly redefined as a security concern within emerging nation-state frameworks.

The Balkan Wars initiated this transformation through large-scale expulsions, retaliatory violence, and the demographic restructuring of contested territories. The First World War further intensified population reorganization through deportations, emergency resettlements, and militarized border formation. The 1923 Turkish–Greek Population Exchange subsequently institutionalized this logic by transforming mass displacement into a permanent international legal instrument of nation-state consolidation.

What resulted was not a reconfiguration of Ottoman mobility within a new political regime but the replacement of the imperial demographic order itself. The flexible, layered, and functionally integrated population structure of the empire was succeeded by a demographic regime centered on territorial sovereignty, national classification, and border-anchored population control.

In this sense, the demographic transformation of Anatolia and the Balkans between 1912 and 1923 represents a regional expression of a global historical transition: the consolidation of the nation-state as the dominant form of political organization and the redefinition of population from a mobile imperial resource into a territorially fixed national body.

Yet the establishment of nation-state frameworks did not yield ethnically uniform societies in practice. In Turkey, despite the civic and territorial foundations of republican citizenship, significant linguistic, ethnic, and cultural plurality persisted. Kurds, Arabs, Laz, Circassians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Roma communities, and diverse Alevi and Sunni traditions continued to coexist within the national framework.

This outcome was not specific to Turkey. Across post-imperial Europe and the Middle East, political borders were established far more rapidly than demographic structures were transformed. Nation-states emerged through the administrative consolidation of highly heterogeneous social landscapes. In this sense, nationalism functioned primarily as a political project of population management applied to pre-existing diversity rather than as a sociological description of demographic uniformity.

In Turkey’s case, the tension between inherited demographic plurality and nation-state integration was managed through processes of legal inclusion, administrative classification, linguistic standardization, and selective population policies rather than through total demographic homogenization. As a result, diversity was not eliminated but redefined within a centralized political structure.

Contemporary Turkey thus remains the demographic successor both to a nation-state project and to an older imperial population system whose layered settlement patterns were never fully dissolved. In this respect, modern ethnic plurality reflects not an anomaly within national order but the historical persistence of an earlier imperial demographic ecology.

When Return Became Structurally Constrained

The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 marked the first irreversible rupture. Within a single year, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all of its remaining European territories outside eastern Thrace. The demographic consequences were immediate. More than 400,000 Muslims (including Turks, Pomaks, Albanians, Bosniaks, and Tatars) fled Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro toward Thrace, the Marmara basin, and western Anatolia.

Unlike earlier Ottoman resettlements, these movements were not organized for reintegration or frontier stabilization. They unfolded under conditions of violence, expropriation, and systemic insecurity. For the first time, large Muslim populations were expelled from newly formed nation-states rather than relocated within an imperial system of redistribution.

A defining feature of this shift was the growing constraint on return. Whereas earlier Ottoman migrations assumed the possibility of recombination and institutional absorption, post-1912 population movements increasingly encountered new border regimes, property reallocations, and citizenship redefinitions that rendered return logistically and legally constrained.

World War I converted demographic disruption into a systemic condition of total war. Mass military mobilization removed working-age men from agricultural and urban production, contributing to widespread shortages and declines in output. Wartime security policies introduced extensive deportations and internal relocations driven primarily by military emergency and political risk perceptions. Famine and epidemic further intensified population movements, increasingly driven by survival rather than settlement.

By the armistice of 1918, returning soldiers encountered devastated villages, altered property regimes, and collapsed institutions. Large segments of the population existed in conditions of displacement, insecurity, and legal ambiguity. Population movement at this stage reflected not classical migration but widespread demographic compression under conditions of weakened sovereignty.

The Turkish–Greek Population Exchange of 1923 institutionalized the new demographic regime. For the first time in eastern Mediterranean history, religious identity became the primary legal criterion of residence, compulsory expulsion was codified as a reciprocal mechanism, and identity became territorially irreversible. Over 1.5 million people were forcibly transferred—Orthodox Christians from Anatolia to Greece and Muslims from Greece to Turkey.

This process marked the emergence of a formally regulated system of mass population transfer oriented toward border stabilization and sovereign consolidation. Whereas Ottoman population circulation had functioned as a mechanism of integration and redistribution, population policy under the nation-state increasingly centered on territorial control and demographic registration.

Economic Transformation beneath Demographic Change

Between 1912 and the early 1920s, large-scale displacement and population exchange produced lasting changes in the economic organization of the eastern Mediterranean. The loss and reassignment of populations altered urban commercial networks, rural production systems, and regional trade linkages.

In major port and commercial cities such as Salonica, Izmir, Edirne, Aydın, and Bursa, the departure of established merchant groups, artisans, financiers, and shipping agents disrupted long-standing credit relations, supply chains, and export-oriented production structures. The reconstitution of these networks required extended periods of capital accumulation, institutional rebuilding, and trust formation.

In rural Anatolia, displaced populations were frequently settled in ecological environments with which they had limited prior experience. Variations in soil composition, climate, irrigation, and crop regimes affected productivity. Unequal access to land, draft animals, seeds, and credit produced uneven recovery patterns, and in several regions agricultural output remained below prewar levels for prolonged periods.

At the macroeconomic level, the post-imperial economy of the 1920s displayed a more territorially bounded structure than the late Ottoman economy. Trade volumes declined relative to pre-1914 levels, cross-border integration weakened, and production increasingly oriented toward domestic market stabilization under border-controlled economic sovereignty.

The Transformation of Social Identity

The transition from imperial to national governance introduced a structural shift in the administrative organization of population and identity. Under the Ottoman system, social identity was shaped through overlapping affiliations grounded in migration history, regional origin, and communal status. The nation-state introduced a demographic regime based on fixed territorial belonging and legally singular identity categories.

Across Thrace and western Anatolia, family settlement patterns reflected successive waves of migration from the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Central Anatolia. These layered histories persisted in social memory even as legal classification reorganized populations within uniform national frameworks.

Between 1912 and 1923, this shift involved a comprehensive restructuring of population distribution through war-related displacement, compulsory exchange, resettlement, and border revision. Where the late imperial system had governed mobile populations across overlapping administrative spaces, the nation-state reorganized governance around sedentary populations within sharply defined borders.