The Echoes of Empire: Reconsidering the 1923 Greek–Turkish Population Exchange Through an Imperial Perspective

In 1923, Greece and Turkey, with the support of international powers, agreed to a compulsory “exchange” of their resident populations at Lausanne based on the conflation of religion with ethnicity. While the proposal built on regional precedent that population transfers would resolve local conflict, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange became the first example of internationally sanctioned ethnic cleansing for the sake of “future peace.” As a result, the exchange uprooted over 1.8 million people across the Eastern Mediterranean. Consequently, Turkey denaturalized and deported its indigenous Christian populations—Greek Orthodox, Armenian Christians, and others—to Greece. In turn, Greece expelled its autochthonous Muslim communities, including Albanian-speaking Muslims to the new Turkish nation-state. As a result, the exchange uprooted over 1.8 million people across the Eastern Mediterranean.

While the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange has been framed around the periodization of the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the emergence of nation-states, this paper reconsiders the framework of management of refugees of the exchange through the new imperialism that emerged after the First World War. The paper considers how imperialism became central to uprooting Albanian-speaking Muslims of Greece, their deportation to Turkey, and relocation to Albania. Through centering small states, like Albania, the paper demonstrates that refugee management and resettlement of the exchange was thought through the echoes of the Ottoman empire and the new imperialism that emerged after the First World War. The paper traces how the 1924 Mixed Commission’s survey of Epirus and Macedonia in Greece—requested by the League of Nations—led to the displacement and deportation of Albanian-speaking Muslims to Turkey and how Albanian-speaking refugees navigated and negotiated new pathways of resettlement. Thinking with empire, this paper considers how the population exchange impacted post-Ottoman successor states beyond Turkey and Greece.