In the final decades of Ottoman rule, several waves of refugees from the Russian Empire's North Caucasus region immigrated to Transjordan, where they founded Amman and other agricultural villages. This article examines the economy of Amman in its formative years as a Circassian refugee settlement. By exploring connections between North Caucasian refugees, Syrian and Palestinian merchants, and Transjordanian urban and nomadic communities, this study posits refugees as drivers of economic expansion in the late Ottoman period. I argue that the settlement of North Caucasian refugees and their active participation in the real estate market in and around Amman contributed to the entrenchment of the post-1858 property regime in Ottoman Transjordan. Through a study of an upper-class Circassian household and its legal battles, this article also illustrates the rise of refugee elites who benefited from the commodification of land and the construction of state-sponsored infrastructure in the late Ottoman Levant.

In the nineteenth-century South Caucasus, hundreds of local farmers and nomads petitioned Russian authorities to allow them to become Christians. Most of them were Muslims and specifically requested to join the Armenian Apostolic Church. This article explores religious conversions to Armenian Christianity on Russia's mountainous southern border with the Ottoman Empire and Iran. It demonstrates that tsarist reforms, chiefly the peasant reform and the sedentarization of nomads, accelerated labor migration within the region, bringing many Muslims, Yazidis, and Assyrians into an Armenian environment. Local anxieties over Russian colonialism further encouraged conversions. I argue that by converting to Armenian Christianity many rural South Caucasians benefited from a change in their legal status, which came with the right to move residence, access to agricultural land, and other freedoms. Russia's Jewish communities, on the other hand, saw conversion to Armenian Christianity as a legal means to circumvent discrimination and obtain the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. By drawing on converts’ petitions and officials’ decisions, this article illustrates that the Russian government emerged as an ultimate arbiter of religious conversions, evaluating the sincerity of petitioners’ faith and how Armenian they had become, while preserving the empire's religious and social hierarchies.

The half century before World War I saw mass population movements from Russia to the Middle East. One of the largest of these was the migration of Muslims (muhajirs) from Russia’s North Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire. This chapter focuses on one strand of this mass migration: after anticolonial unrest in the region of Chechnya in 1864, the Russian and Ottoman governments cooperated in resettling thousands of Chechen Muslims in the Ottoman domains. The chapter juxtaposes and analyzes three documents: 1865 reports by the Russian ambassador in Istanbul, Nikolai Ignat’ev, and by the chief of staff of the Caucasus Army, Aleksei Kartsov; and Chechen migrant leader Jantemir’s 1870 petition in Arabic to the Ottoman Interior Ministry. These documents offer insights into how officials in the two empires negotiated the resettlement of Chechens and the migrants’ experience of being moved.

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