This book studies the impact of mobility on the lives of people who moved between the Ottoman
Empire Eastern Europe and Iran from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century through the
lens of their biographies. Depending on who moved where and their circumstances mobility could
mean brutal uprooting or homecoming a loss of freedom or the opening of new opportunities
marginalization or a path to wealth and power. Beyond the individual level Transottoman
biographies inform us about the local societies that both shaped and were shaped by mobile
people. Mobile biographies show the entanglements between different regions and empires and
make comprehensible what this specifically meant for the people on the ground.
