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THE PROTECTION QUESTION: CENTRAL ASIANS AND EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2016

Lâle Can
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Abstract

This article examines the impact of the Ottoman Empire's battle against legal imperialism on the status of Central Asians in its domains, specifically after the promulgation of a nationality law in 1869 that classified them as foreigners. It traces how the threat of Muslim colonial subjects attaining European consular protections led to the emergence of a “Central Asian protection question”: whether Afghans, Bukharans, and Chinese Muslims had legitimate claims to European legal nationality and, by extension, capitulatory privileges. Through a number of case studies, the article shows how the Ottoman Foreign Ministry fused international legal norms and pan-Islamic claims to arrive at the position that Central Asians from informally colonized lands were not “real” subjects of European empires, and that they were under the exclusive protection of the caliphate. This strategy, I argue, undermined the creation of an Ottoman citizenship boundary and opened up a complex field of inter- and intraimperial contestation about who was a foreigner. In contrast to positive associations with legal pluralism in this period, Central Asian migrants and pilgrims who were protected by the caliph but not recognized as Ottomans or European subjects found that they could not benefit from practices such as forum shopping and affiliation switching. And while the notion of foreignness remained subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations across the empire, I argue that nationality as a legal category was incontrovertibly becoming a defining feature of these foreign Muslims' rights and status in the sultan's domains.

Keywords

Central Asian historyextraterritorialitymigration/pilgrimageOttoman historypan-Islam
Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 679 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: The research and writing of this article was made possible by grants from the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I wish to express my gratitude to the participants in the workshop on Ottoman citizenship and international law at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (2015) and the Harvard workshop “Protection and Empire” (2016), particularly Lauren Benton, Aimee Genell, Will Hanley, Michael Christopher Low, and Will Smiley. I am also indebted to Samuel Dolbee, Chris Gratien, Emily Greble, Susan Gunasti, Adeeb Khalid, Masha Kirasirova, Jessica Marglin, Robert D. McChesney, Eric Schluessel, Joshua M. White, and Seçil Yılmaz for their valuable feedback. I also thank Jeffrey Culang, Akram Khater, and the three anonymous reviewers at IJMES for their incisive comments for improving earlier drafts of this article.

1 “Hemşerim Memleket Nire” was released on the 1992 album Mega Manço by Emre Plak.

2 Throughout this article I use “nationality” to mean a type of affiliation with a state that enabled claims to rights, without modern connotations of loyalty or political citizenship. This is in line with Will Smiley's usage, also in the context of negotiations over Russo-Ottoman sovereignty. As Smiley succinctly puts it, “all Russian subjects, when abroad, were Russian ‘nationals’—sharing membership of the same state, regardless of their status within that state.” See “The Ottoman State, Russian Fugitives, and Interimperial Law, 1774–1869,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 73–93.

3 According to Victor Turner, communitas was an intense form of comradeship and equality experienced by people during rites of passage such as hajj. It was “a spontaneously generated relationship between leveled and equal total and individuated human beings, stripped of all structural attributes.” Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 202.

4 On the role of Islam and pan-Islamic ideology in the late Ottoman Empire, see Deringil, Selim, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998)Google Scholar; and Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Restructuring Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the sultan's custodianship of the hajj, see Faroqhi, Suraiya, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014)Google Scholar.

5 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA) HR.H 571/27 (2 July 1892) and HR.HMŞ.İŞO 177/34 (11 July 1892).

6 Özsu, Umut, “The Ottoman Empire, the Origins of Extraterritoriality, and International Legal Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law, ed. Hoffman, Florian and Oxford, Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 124 Google Scholar. For additional background on the Capitulations, see Ahmad, Feroz, “Ottoman Perceptions of the Capitulations, 1800–1914,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11 (2000): 1–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Spagnolo, John T., “Portents of Empire in Britain's Ottoman Extraterritorial Jurisdiction,” Middle Eastern Studies 27 (1991): 256–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Özsu, “The Ottoman Empire,” 129.

8 For studies of how Russia and Britain sought to establish themselves as Muslim powers though patronage of the hajj, see Kane, Eileen, Russian Hajj, Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Slight, John, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On British claims to protect Afghans, see Ahmed, Faiz, “Contested Subjects: Ottoman and British Jurisdictional Quarrels in re Afghans and Indian Muslims,” Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (forthcoming, winter 2016)Google Scholar.

9 Kayaoğlu defines extraterritoriality as “the extension of a state's legal authority into another state and limitation of legal authority of the target state over issues that may affect people, commercial interests, and security of the imperial states.” Kayaoğlu, Turan, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 This scholarship is too extensive to cite all of it here, particularly on the Capitulations, which are discussed in most works on the late Ottoman Empire. In addition to Ahmad, “Ottoman Perceptions” and Spagnolo, “Portents of Empire,” see Van den Boogert, Maurits, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls, and Beratlıs in the 18th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2005)Google Scholar. On legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire, see Barkey, Karen, “Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1850, ed. Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard (New York: New York University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Studies by Julia Clancy Smith and Mary Dewhurst Lewis have been particularly influential for reconceptualizing the possibilities and problems ushered in by legal imperialism and legal pluralism. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2012); Lewis, “The Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881–1935,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 791–830. On the protégé system, see Sonyel, Salahi R., “The Protégé System in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Islamic Studies 2 (1991): 56–66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other works of note on nationality, sovereignty, legal pluralism, and protection include Will Hanley, “Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria, 1880–1914” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007); Beverly, Eric, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marglin, Jessica M. “The Two Lives of Masʿud Amoyal: Pseudo-Algerians in Morocco, 1830–1912,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012): 651–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 80–108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Lewis, “The Geographies of Power,” 180.

12 On the uncertainties of colonial law and legal pluralism, see Merry, Sally Engle, “Colonial Law and Its Uncertainties,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 1067–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stephens, Julia “An Uncertain Inheritance: The Imperial Travels of Legal Migrants, from British India to Ottoman Iraq,” Law and History Review 32 (2014): 749–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stephens traces how how legal uncertainty frustrated both colonial authorities and litigants in British consular courts in Iraq, but concludes that “uncertainty and certainty were mutually constitutive” and ultimately expanded the reach of imperial law.

13 For these studies, see n. 10. I am influenced here by Clancy-Smith, who writes, “the legal quagmire created by conflicts involving the subjects of local rulers, recognized protégés, resident expatriates, recent immigrants, or familiar strangers under shifting or uncertain jurisdictions was presented as an episode in modern Middle Eastern history, not as one chapter in larger struggles unfolding across the world in much the same manner and period. Conflicting jurisdictions are universal phenomena, which haunt our world, ever more today due to high-intensity ‘globalization.’” Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 200.

14 On the Porte's views of foreign Muslims, see Deringil, Selim, “The Ottoman Empire and Russian Muslims: Brothers or Rivals?,” Central Asian Survey 13 (1994): 409–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Michael Christopher Low, “The Mechanics of Mecca: The Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hejaz and the Colonial Hajj” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015).

15 Kemal Karpat analyzes Ottoman–Central Asian relations through the lens of ethnic kinship and brotherhood in The Politicization of Islam. In another influential but problematic study, Mehmet Saray considers kinship and loyalty as crucial to Ottoman–Central Asian political relations. Saray, The Russian, British, Chinese and Ottoman Rivalry in Turkestan: Four Studies on the History of Central Asia (Ankara, Turkey: Turkish Historical Society Printing House, 2003). Michael A. Reynolds offers a critique of pan-Turkism and pan-Islam as categories of analysis in “Buffers, Not Brethren: Young Turk Military Policy in the First World War and the Myth of Panturanism,” Past and Present 203 (2009): 137–79.

16 International law emerged as a Eurocentric framework for the practice of international relations by diplomats, based on treaty and customary law and, increasingly, the Capitulations.

17 These were colonial subjects who had no connections to the legal nationalities they acquired and who, according to colonial authorities, employed various ruses solely for the purpose of obtaining rights and protections. Lewis uses the term “borrowed nationalities” to describe how French authorities in Tunisia viewed non-European protégés such as Algerians. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014), 61 Google Scholar.

18 Rian Thum makes the case for referring to this region as “Altishahr,” using the designation that people in the region used historically. Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014).

19 On the Russian Empire in Central Asia, see Becker, Seymour, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Sahadeo, Jeff, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865–1923 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Morrison, Alexander, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868–1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Chinese Turkestan, see Kim, Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. The meaning of the terms “protectorate” and “protected states” as used in this article is not synonymous with post–World War I Mandates. In the Russian protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara, the khan and the amir were Russian vassals who were granted local autonomy but no control over foreign policy. While their territories were neither fully annexed (although parts of Bukhara were annexed to the Russian colony in Turkestan) nor subject to settler colonialism, they were internationally recognized as part of the Russian Empire. In Afghanistan, the amir technically retained independence as the head of a “protected state.” The country was never officially part of the British Empire, and the amir controlled internal affairs. But as in the case of the Bukharan protectorate, the British controlled Afghanistan's foreign policy.

20 On British involvement in Afghanistan, see Barfield, Thomas, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

21 For a file that summarizes five decades of Ottoman and citizenship- and nationality-related problems and provides the 1869 law in full, see HR.HMŞ.İŞO 221/1 (5 November 1919). For an English translation of the law, see Flournoy, Richard and Hudson, Manley, eds., A Collection of Nationality Law of Various Countries as Contained in Constitutions, Statutes and Treaties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929)Google Scholar.

22 Hanley, Will, “What Ottoman Nationality Was and Was Not,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (forthcoming, winter 2016)Google Scholar.

23 Prior to the Tanzimat, ecnebi was primarily used as a term to describe people from Christian lands.

24 DH.SN.THR 54/45 (3 August 1914). On the government's decision not to implement the Tanzimat reforms in Yemen and other “exceptional provinces,” see Kuehn, Thomas, Empire, Islam, and Politics of Difference: Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 HR.H 571/27 (2 July 1892); HR.HMŞ.İŞO 177/34 (11 July 1892). On the consular system in Jeddah, see Freitag, Ulrike, “Helpless Representatives of the Great Powers? Western Consuls in Jeddah, 1830s to 1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (2012): 357–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 According to Daniel Brower, “tsardom had become the patron of [Central Asian pilgrims]” as a consequence of attempts to regulate the hajj. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). As Alexander Morrison argues, even if Russian colonial administrators claimed that inhabitants of Tashkent, Samarqand, and other cities were “considered to be as much Russian citizens as those of Moscow,” this claim was patently false because “they were not accorded equal rights with the population of European Russia.” Morrison, “Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (2012): 327–64. According to Eric Lohr, “the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva (formally acquired by Russia and given protectorate status in 1867 and 1873, respectively) retained their own subjecthood and their subjects were treated as foreigners in nearly all respects when they crossed the border between the emirates and the empire proper.” Their status was different from that of subjects of “parts of Central Asia that were annexed and fully incorporated directly” and “ascribed subjecthood on a full jus soli [right of the soil] basis.” Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012), 32–33.

27 Kane, Russian Hajj.

28 I explore Ottoman and Russian patronage of Central Asian pilgrims at greater length in my forthcoming manuscript, provisionally titled “Spiritual Citizens: Central Asian Pilgrims in the Late Ottoman Empire.”

29 Lauren Benton, “Shadows of Sovereignty: Legal Encounters and the Politics of Protection in the Atlantic World,” in Encounters Old and New: Essays in Honor of Jerry Bentley (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, forthcoming).

30 For a comparative study of legal imperialism, see Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism. Lewis’s work on French North Africa is indispensable for understanding the complexity of overlapping and divided sovereignty. Lewis, Divided Rule. See also works cited in n. 10; Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Benton and Ross, Legal Pluralism and Empires.

31 HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1886. On British Indians and consular courts in Iraq, see Stephens, “An Uncertain Inheritance”; and Gökhan Çetinsaya, “The Ottoman View of British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of Abdülhamid II,” Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003): 194–203. Although the archival record does not reveal why Hacı Habib tried to become a British national, he may have been motivated to do so if he had sons who faced conscription. Cases involving muhacir in Iraq and Greater Syria suggest that while first-generation migrants were exempt from serving in the military, their children were not. On conscription, see Beşikçi, Mehmet, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Karen Kern explores citizenship, marriage, and conscription in Iraq. Kern, Imperial Citizens: Marriage and Citizenship in the Ottoman Frontier Provinces of Iraq (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

32 BOA Rehberi [BOA Guidebook], Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı Yayın Nu: 108, İstanbul, 2010, 381–82. On the training and composition of the legal advisors in the Hukuk Müşavirliği, see Aimee Genell, “The Well-Defended Domains: Eurocentric Law and the Making of the Ottoman Office of Legal Counsel,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (forthcoming, winter 2016).

33 HR.TO 365/86, 27 January 1881.

34 HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1886.

35 The reference to tribes here should be understood in the context of Russian subjecthood/extraterritoriality, where prominent tribal and clan leaders were sometimes given subjecthood rights in negotiations for colonial expansion.

36 HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1886.

37 In the case of Afghanistan, the British had made this very clear by sending the Porte a copy of the agreement signed with the amir. See, for example, HR.TO 264/51, 8 September 1890.

38 HR.SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, June 1895.

39 See, for example, HR. SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, for a 15 October 1895 memorandum issued by the Hukuk Müşavirliği.

40 HR.SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, 16 December 1911.

41 Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains. On Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, see Ochsenwald, William, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840–1908 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. The claim to “spiritual authority” dated to the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which the Ottomans signed with Russia after the loss of the Crimea. The treaty recognized the tsar as the protector of Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands, and the sultan-caliph's authority over Russian Muslims. On the treaty, see Davison, Roderic H., “‘Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility’: The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji Reconsidered,” Slavic Review 35 (1976): 463–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 There is a growing area of research that explores how engagement with international law informed Ottoman governance in autonomous and “exceptional” provinces. See Aimee Genell, “‘Empire by Law’: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882–1923” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013); Low, “Mechanics of Mecca”; Hanley, Will, Nationality Grasped: Identification, Protection, and Law in Turn-of-the-Century Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcomingGoogle Scholar); Minawi, Mostafa, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Matthew Ellis, “Desert Borderland: Territoriality, Sovereignty, and the Making of Modern Egypt and Libya” (unpublished manuscript).

43 Low elaborates that the Council used the autonomous status of the holy cities “to deflect and circumvent the internationally binding requirements of the Capitulations and prevent the application of foreign protection beyond Jeddah.” Low, “Mechanics of Mecca,” 136–37.

44 Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains.

45 For the 1861 decision, see A.}MKT.UM 511/80 (25 R 1278/30 September 1861). Low also quotes this ruling in “The Mechanics of Mecca,” 136–37.

46 For the law in its entirety and a summary of foreigners’ property rights and the central government's concerns about the extension of capitulations, see BEO 4338/325334 (17 January 1915). To preempt European intervention, the law stipulated that any future disputes or legal matters involving property would be subject to Ottoman legal jurisdiction alone. It also required states to sign separate protocols in order for their subjects to benefit from the law. Though selectively enforced, this stipulation could be used to prevent mahmi from acquiring real estate, since their home countries could not independently sign such international agreements.

47 It is common to come across phrases in these sources that acknowledge that Central Asians had “until recently” (at various points between the 1880s and 1910s) been treated as Ottomans. An 1887 Meclis-i Vükela decision, for example, begins by stating that, “even though Central Asians residing in the empire have until recently been treated as Ottomans. . .” MV 17/38 (30 Ca 1304/24 February 1887).

48 Deringil's analysis draws on a source in the YA.RES 15/38 file, which states that, “If we remain indifferent to the accumulation of property by devious means in the hands of foreign Muslims, with the passage of time we may find that much of the Holy Lands have been acquired by the subjects of foreign powers. Then, the foreigners, as is their wont, after lying in waiting for some time, will suddenly be upon us at the slightest opportunity and excuse and will proceed to make the most preposterous claims.” This citation accurately reflects the Şura-yı Devlet's position but, I argue, does not fully represent debates within the government. Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 60.

49 YA.RES 15/38 (5 C 1299/24 April 1882). Cezmi Eraslan cites similar numbers in II. Abdülhamid ve İslam Birliği: Osmanlı Devleti'nin İslam Siyaseti, 1856–1908 (Divanyolu, İstanbul: Ötüken, 1991), 31.

50 YA.RES 15/38.

51 Hanley examines what it meant to be an Ottoman or a local in Egypt, and argues that Egyptians’ Ottoman status persisted into the 20th century. “When Did Egyptians Stop Being Ottomans? An Imperial Citizenship Case Study,” Multilevel Citizenship, ed. Willem Maas (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 89–109. In Nationality Grasped, he argues that administrators and bureaucrats met with extensive difficulty in replacing local (mahalli, yerli) as a focal point of identity.

52 YA.RES 15/38, 24 S 1299 (15 Ocak 1882).

53 Until the early 1880s, Kashgar was technically under Ottoman suzerainty. Kim, Holy War in China; Karpat, Kemal, “Yakub Bey's Relations with the Ottoman Sultans: A Reinterpretation,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 32 (1991): 17–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 DH.MKT 543/13, 18 July 1902. The question of Mir Bedreddin's identity is thorny. He may have been the son of the chief qadi (qazi al-quzat) of Bukhara, Mulla Mir Sadr al-Din Khuttalani, but there is no evidence that this individual ever went to the Hijaz. According to Robert D. McChesney, he may have had a surrogate acting in his name, or—in a twist on Martin Guerre—the Mir Bedreddin in this case may have been an impostor adopting a well-known but not easily verifiable identity. On the chief qadi and his son, see Allworth, Edward et al., eds., The Personal History of a Bukharan Intellectual: The Diary of Muhammad-Sharif-i Sadr-Ziya (Leiden: Brill, 2004), esp. 97n50Google Scholar.

55 The Bukharan pilgrimage leader provided the guarantee (kefalet). This was an official appointed by the sharīf of Mecca and a member of the most important guilds in the Hijaz.

56 Lohr argues that a defining feature of citizenship policy through 1914 was an “attract and hold” approach that sought to counter “a persistent shortage of people and a sense that immigration and naturalization helped expand the economic power of the empire, while emigration and denaturalization were to be avoided for the same reason.” Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 5 and chap. 4. James H. Meyer makes a similar argument in “Immigration, Return and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39 (2007): 15–32.

57 Smiley, “The Burdens of Subjecthood.”

58 According to a 1908 report from Jeddah, the Russian consul there reported that Chinese Muslims claimed Russian protection when it suited them, and suggested to the central government that it would make sense to formally assume responsibility over Kashgaris. Fond 143, opis 491, delo 2305, Chinese in Turkey. I thank David Brophy for sharing this source with me.

59 DH. MKT 2736/37, 10 February 1909; DH.MKT 2691/30, 24 December 1908. Also, in 1908, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Kashgaris were under the protection of the hilafet-i mukaddese-i İslamiye (holy Islamic caliphate), but did not engage at all with tsarist arguments about shariʿa. HR.HMŞ.İŞO 194/68 (30 December 1908); DH.MKT 2691/30 (24 December 1908).

60 Adapting Stephen Kotkin's idea of “speaking Bolshevik” (Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995]), Meyer uses the term “speaking shariʿa” to show how Russia and Russian Muslims articulated social, economic, and political conflicts. Meyer, “Speaking Sharia to the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika 14 (2013): 485–505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 DH.MKT 2691/30, 24 December 1908; DH.MKT 2736/37, 10 February 1909.

62 HR.HMŞ.İŞO 194/68, 30 December 1908; DH.MKT 2736/37, 10 February 1909.

63 DH.SN.THR 54/45, document dated 5 Ca 1331 (22 April 1913).

64 DH.SNTHR 54/45, copy of letter from Medine Muhafiz ve Kumandanlığı 15 Ca [1]331.

65 DH.SN.THR 54/45 nos. 14 and 16, correspondence between Foreign Ministry and Medine Muhafız. Officials in Medina and the province at large repeatedly advocated on behalf of the needs of long-term residents, raising questions about relationships among the Central Asian community, the guild of pilgrimage guides, and the sharīf. This might suggest a type of patron–protégé relationship with mutual economic benefit.

66 DH.SN.THR 54/15, Hicaz Vilayet to Dahiliye, 2 Şubat [1]329.

67 DH.SN.THR 54/45, Hariciye to Dahiliye, 16 L 1331.

68 DH.SN.THR 54/45, Hariciye to Dahiliye, 19 S 1332.

69 Ibid.

70 Notable works on this broad topic include Gelvin, James and Green, Nile, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Green, Nile, “Spacetime and the Industrial Journey West: Industrial Communications and the Making of the ‘Muslim World,’” American Historical Review (2013) 118 (2): 401–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tagliacozzo, Eric, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

71 Huber, Valeska, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Ibid., 6.

73 In his analysis of naturalization and migration policies aimed at Russian and Soviet citizens, Lohr defines the citizenship boundary as “the line between members and nonmembers, on the rules and practices that define the boundary, and on the various ways citizenship was acquired, lost, ascribed, or removed.” Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 3.

74 James Meyer shows how Russian Muslims held onto their Russian nationality in Ottoman lands, and how they utilized borrowed (or purchased) identity papers to pass as Ottomans. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. In an article on Alexandria, Ziad Fahmy describes consular agents as “borderlanders par excellence” and “legal chameleons” who “used the capitulatory system to manipulate their official identities, juggling at times two or three ‘nationalities.’” Fahmy, “Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality and ‘Legal Chameleons’ in Precolonial Alexandria, 1840–1870,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 305–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 This supports Smiley's argument that interimperial mobility regulations “hardened the empires’ human and geographic boundaries,” and could result in foreign subjecthood becoming a liability. Smiley, “The Burdens of Subjecthood,” 73.

76 On liminal subjects in other settings, see Carlston, Erin G., Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Haour, Anne, Outsiders and Strangers: An Archaeology of Liminality in West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Arsan, Andrew, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.