In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I used to travel to Sudan from time to time for certain business projects. It never occurred to me how eye-opening what I would see and experience in an underdeveloped country like Sudan could be. When I first landed in Sudan, the airport was covered everywhere with advertising posters of world-famous hotels. Familiar logos, familiar names. Yet the airport itself was terrible, with cats roaming all over the place. The cats were of a kind I h

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

Abstract This article examines the major population movements that reshaped Anatolia  and Rumelia  between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Building on the political and institutional context outlined in Ottomans and Karamanids , it analyzes the long-term repercussions of Ottoman expansion, the application and evolution of forced relocation (sürgün), the demographic effects of the Celâlî rebellions, migrations driven by Ottoman–Safavid frontier dynamics, and the large-

This article examines the political, cultural, and linguistic contrasts between the Ottoman Empire and the Karamanid principality, two major Anatolian powers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By evaluating their respective administrative structures, social compositions, and identity formations, it identifies the distinct trajectories of these two polities. The article also surveys the ethnic and religious groups living under both systems and analyzes the sürgün (forc

Turkey lost Erdal İnönü in the fall of 2007. Erdal İnönü had a quality that was far superior to his other qualities, such as being the...