Ottoman Passports | İlkay Yılmaz

Ottoman History Podcast

E567 | Passports are objects at once momentous and mundane. How did they come about in the late Ottoman Empire? In this episode, İlkay Yılmaz discusses the history of this technology, and how the state effort to manage information about identity and control people's movement emerged alongside international police efforts to control anarchist and revolutionary subjects between different empires in the late nineteenth century. With this new technology, the ability to control people's movement also became contingent on the photograph and connected to late Ottoman politics of migration and ethnicity. She also discusses how these state efforts to limit people's movement through the technology of the passport have echoes in the present, even in her own life. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/09/yilmaz.html İlkay Yılmaz is a DFG-funded research associate at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin. She has held numerous fellowships, including at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, and was previously an Assistant Professor at Istanbul University, where she completed her MA and PhD. Her research has appeared in Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Journal of Photography, among others. Her book is Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (Syracuse University Press). Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press. CREDITS Episode No. 567 Release Date: 5 September 2024 Recording location: Nashville / Berlin Sound production by Sam Dolbee Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Sombra," "Petite Route," "Big Road of Burravoe" Bibliography courtesy of İlkay Yılmaz available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2024/09/yilmaz.html