The Crimean War Within the Context of the Eastern Question and Migrations from Russia to the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century

Migration History Talk: Candan Badem, Visiting Fellow, Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre The Crimean War (1853-56) was the first modern war and a major European war, or a proto-World War. It was a case of Russian diplomatic isolation after the aggression against the Ottoman Empire, the socalled ‘sick man of Europe’ or the object of the ‘Eastern Question’. The conduct and outcome of the war were largely determined by the technological and industrial capacities (including means of transport) of the belligerent states. Blockade as an instrument of economic warfare became a determinant factor. The media and public opinion were also prominent in this war. As the war drew towards a long war of attrition and economic blockade, with the possibility of Sweden and Austria joining the allies against Russia, Russian authorities came to understand that they could not continue the war. The war disclosed the weakness of archaic formations and gave an impulse to the process of political reform in Russia and the Ottoman Empire. It also gave rise to mass emigrations of Muslims from Russia into the Ottoman Empire. The talk will also try to draw parallels with the present conflict in Ukraine. About the Speaker Candan Badem is an Associate Professor of History. He holds his BA degree from Boğaziçi University (1992), an MA degree from the University of Birmingham, Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (2001), and a PhD from Sabancı University (2007). In 2016, he was banned by a decree law from working in state universities in Turkey because of his signature on a declaration by academics urging the government to stop violence against civilian Kurds. In the academic year 2020-21, he was a scholarship holder at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and a visiting researcher at Uppsala University in 2021-22. His current research at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre is on the Russian-Ottoman borderlands in South Caucasus at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.