“They Have Abrogated Their Duties to Humanity!” Humanitarianisms and the Debts of Justice

In the wake of the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War, an aide-de-camp of Sultan Abdulhamid II, Colonel Suleyman, visited the Circassian refugee camps littering the shores of Marmara Sea. His report on the camps was dire: The martyrs who fought for the Sultan were bereft of land on which to be laid to rest. Their orphans were left on the streets. The governor of Brussa had refused to settle them for fear they would then become a permanent fixture. Suleyman opined that Ottoman officers had abrogated their ‘duties to humanity’ (vecіbe-i insāniyyet), by leaving refugees ‘lacking land and aid that was their due’. However, on what basis, and for what price, did the Circassian refugees deserve this land and aid that was their due? Was their loyalty a debt, or justice their right?

This paper takes Suleyman’s report as a starting point to position the Ottoman policy of humanitarian refuge (iltica) between a European and vernacular notion of humanity. I argue that in the 19th century, the notion of humanity was pregnant with competing connotations. One the one hand, it invoked notions of mercy and indebtedness that were foundational to the concept of a just ruler in the Ottoman political vernacular. On the other hand, it resonated with pleas for equality before the law, supplementing a new, contractarian notion of political society into the Ottoman body politic. I argue that the pleas of refugees and the dictates of international diplomacy laid bare this tension between justice and equality, subjecthood and citizenship, or being conditionally included within and contractually excluded from Ottoman political society.