War Refugees and Violence in Hamidian Istanbul

This paper examines the place of war refugees in patterns of interpersonal violence in Istanbul in the 1890s. I argue that refugees, especially from the 1878 Russo-Turkish war, committed a disproportionate amount of criminal violence, and that their violent acts were often more extreme than those of other groups. I argue that factors such as poverty are insufficient to explain the degree of difference from the patterns of the general population. It is also necessary to look at an important cultural factor that most of these refugees share: exposure to and experience of violence. The conflicts from which the subjects of my paper were fleeing were particularly brutal ones, and thus could be expected to have a particularly brutalizing effect.