How did Transottoman mobility impact people’s biographies?

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.