This book studies the impact of mobility on the lives of people who moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, through the lens of their biographies. Depending on who moved where and their circumstances, mobility could mean brutal uprooting or homecoming; a loss of freedom or the opening of new opportunities; marginalization or a path to wealth and power. Beyond the individual level, Transottoman biographies inform us about the local societies that both shaped and were shaped by mobile people. Mobile biographies show the entanglements between different regions and empires and make comprehensible what this specifically meant for the people on the ground.

Hersteller:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ute.schnueckel@brill.com
Theaterstraße 13
DE 37073 Göttingen

Dr Denise Klein is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and a Researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz.

For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people's biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.

The articles use a biographical approach to explore and narrate Transottoman history, focusing on the lives of individuals and groups of people on the move. This approach looks promising for several reasons.