This is a warmly welcomed and successful work on a vital issue in Ottoman and Middle East history—the place of nomads, migrants, and refugees. Both the chronological and geographical scales of the book are vast, including all of Ottoman history and most of the empire. Reşat Kasaba does justice to the former, although, given his own interests, there is more weight to the post-1700 era. In terms of the latter, due attention is given to the Balkan, Anatolian, and Arab provinces, but the African regions are ignored. The book tends to focus on nomads and tribes while migrants and refugees receive far less attention. It should be stressed that the work is a bit of an odd hybrid, a kind of monographic overview. Not since Kemal Karpat's earlier studies have we seen so much attention paid to the worthy subject of population and population movements, and Kasaba's book surely will stimulate further research.

The author presents an intelligent analysis of the Ottoman state's changing policies over the centuries. I liked the nuances of the presentation, demonstrating shifts but not radical breaks in the state's efforts to deal with the vast movements within and across the empire. Throughout, nomads remain an important if ever-changing component in the Ottoman state's calculus of power. In the early years, nomads were an important source of strength as the state sought to weave a symbiosis between them and its emerging institutions. With a flexibility that historians are now seeing as a key factor in Ottoman success, the early state sought to both incorporate and administer many of the mobile groups it encountered in its disparate territories. These administrative tribal units were not bounded but quite loose territorial areas, premised on the understanding that the state needed the nomads to maintain and extend its own power. It did sometimes move and settle groups, but these were specific, focused, and limited actions. Overall, Kasaba argues, nomads increased in numbers “during the first half of Ottoman rule” (p. 37).

As borders with neighbors began to harden by the end of the 17th century, however, new approaches were needed. Nomadism and mobility became less an asset and more a potential weakness that needed to be contained. Therefore, the state more frequently implemented nomad resettlements, expanded the enrollment of tribal members as border guards, and tried to integrate tribes into special military units. As the author shows, these 17th- and 18th-century programs were but a weak foreshadowing of those to come a century later.

The author illustrates that in the 18th and especially the 19th centuries, an expanding state relied on and used the tribes as part of its increasing power. As he incisively states, nomadism faded, but tribalism remained. Tribes and state grew together in power over the course of the 19th century. Sometimes juggling, sometimes imposing, always negotiating, the state created and maintained a balance of interests that shifted over time. Thus, reliance on provincial forces that saved the empire in the 1820s differed sharply from the use of Hamidiye regiments as a supplemental, if regionally crucial, force in the 1890s. Kasaba's treatment of tribalism/nomadism and the state is simply excellent.

Although there were major refugee movements in the 18th century, these reached stupendous and at times unmanageable proportions only later. Here perhaps the author might have more explicitly linked the state's continuing reliance on tribes to its need for aid in dealing with the terrible insecurities brought by the refugee waves. In his closing pages, the author reminds us effectively, if too briefly, of the catastrophic events of the last days of empire, including the slaughter of the Armenians and the brutalities of the population exchange. He seems a bit rushed here, as in his cursory treatment of migratory labor, a subject on which he has written well elsewhere. Overall, however, this book is a truly fine achievement and is highly recommended.