Transatlantic Migrations and Their Causes in an Age of Global Migration (1870–1914)

From the late nineteenth century up to World War I, approximately half a million Ottoman citizens immigrated to the Americas from the province of Greater Syria. This article examines the fundamental reasons for this mass emigration in the light of the Ottoman archives and historical migration records of Argentina and the United States. While these migration movements have traditionally been depicted as the consequence of civil war and local unrest in the empire in the 1860s, this article argues that social and economic factors—namely population growth, economic deterioration, and military conscription—played the determinant role in the exodus of Ottoman Syrians.

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