Economic globalization is not a historical term, but combining economic trends and globalization processes summarizes this major cause of Ottoman emigration.

In the traditional Ottoman economy, prices and quantity remained unchanged in the interior, upheld through a system of agricultural and domestic peasants and slaves (“Rise of the World System”). Following the Industrial Revolution, the Empire integrated into the European-led, capitalist world economy. Deals with European countries, like the British-Ottoman trade edicts gave foreign merchants favorable trade deals, hurting the profits and success of Ottoman merchants (Toledano). Through this, Ottomans became dependent on Western markets to determine their production. Peasants, investing in cash crops like silk, were exposed to the fluctuations and pitfalls of the world economy. As a result, peasants were economically dislocated and willing to migrate further than before (to Arabic-speaking countries like Egypt) in order to provide for themselves and their families.

For example, Mount Lebanon peasants invested deeply in the silk industry during the 1840’s silk boom, due to French demand and desire for Lebanon silk (Khater and Khater). When the silk industry collapsed in 1877 and 1889, due to mechanization, silkworm and mulberry leaf disease and quality control issues, peasants especially were dislocated from the economy. Peasants took devastating losses, Chinese silk grew popular and domestic tastes turned to European goods (Shakir). The Lebanese silk economy crashed and sericulture was no longer viable. In addition to the silk collapse, the construction of the Suez Canal contributed to economic dislocation, as ships were rerouted away from the coasts of Greater Syria, and sectors apart from the silk industry experienced similar downturns (Orfalea). Thus, the earliest Syrian migrants came from the lowest socioeconomic classes.

The technological modernizations of globalization altered the social structure of the Ottoman Empire, leading to religious questions about Ottoman interaction with the West. The modernizations of transport, steamships and railways, communication and telegraphs, and information about the outside world flowed from port cities, European travelers, merchants and later missionaries. Ottomans had increased familiarization with external cultures.

Fast-paced urban areas like port cities were an attractive alternative for ambitious and employment seeking individuals. Beirut, close to Mount Lebanon, was a “gateway” for the trade of goods and ideas (Shakir). In the face of new technologies, new employments, such as telegraph operators and other professions expanded, while old craftsmen dwindled.

The ability to return and communicate from far away allowed migrants to galvanize relatives from to migrate. These “shifting political and economic dynamics, and more readily available transportation, permitted ambitious migrants to transfer their destinations from the nearest urban centers within the region to those throughout Europe and across the Atlantic” (Naar). The majority of migrants came from Mount Lebanon, and Greater Syria with closer access to portside transportation than more interior Ottomans.

In addition, Westerners were regular visitors to the Arab world. Artists, diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, scholars, archaeologists and missionaries all came to the Ottoman Empire. In 1866, the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut) was established, forming a center for missionaries and Western academics (Shakir). U.S. missionaries established elementary schools, and because of their popularity, later local schools were modeled after them (Orfalea). Though they may not have overtly pushed emigration, their presence and curriculum introduced U.S. as a viable option.

Technological advancements were also shown on a global scale in American expositions during the end of the nineteenth century (Shakir). The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia brought a large delegation of Ottomans, and “some of the first Ottoman Jews on American soil… explicitly as representatives of the sultan” (Naar). Later Syrian-Palestinian merchants spread word from cities to countrysides of success upon return to the Empire. These first arrivals left without a route to follow, but later in the 1890s, technology and transport, alongside growing demand created a network from steamships to hotel keepers to transport migrants across the Atlantic (Shakir).

Also, Ottomans brought their wares and technologies to the Americas too. A large Ottoman delegation “arrived in St. Louis for the World’s Fair in 1904.” At the Columbians Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, with Jews “constituting four-fifths of the Ottoman entourage…[they] served as unofficial Ottoman ambassadors to the United States and performed as Ottomans on Chicago’s world stage” (Naar).

From 1839 to 1876, and heavily in the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire underwent a series of imperial Tanzimat reforms. Through focusing on its citizens’ equality and rights as a method to centralize, an intelligentsia and middle class formed by the late nineteenth century. An Ottoman identity was developed through administration, creating “Ottoman ‘citizens’ by redefining the relationship between millets (ethno-religious groups) and the state” (Naar).

After the 1860 Civil War, Mount Lebanon was granted more autonomy and its people were free from conscription, able to interact with foreigners to build infrastructure (Shakir). Mount Lebanon, and Greater Syria people were more able to leave the Empire.

While some modernizations did stabilize populations, and grant some autonomy, centralization flared domestic tensions.As the Empire centralized after the European nation state model, reformers and political opportunists left and organized based on their ideologies outside of the Empire, in khedivate Egypt or further away (Orfalea).  

The Tanzimat reforms in land ownership, taxation, a school system, religious equality created a new middle class, and despite intentions to equalize, European associated business people held more privileges, and were not subject to Ottoman law. This caused economic tension, which became religious concerns. Whereas peasant and lower social classes were the first migrants, increasingly upper class people, with formal educations, professional and academic knowledge, migrated from the Ottoman Empire. Additionally, the aforementioned technologies brought ideologies, socialism, nationalism, secularization, which spread in the Empire as religious leaders contended with the potential impact of the West.

According to writer Gregory Orfalea, migrants to the U.S. also became journalists, now able to practice their profession more freely than under Ottoman censorship and politicians. As Dr. Arbeely described in American journalism, he brought his family to America because he “desired freedom of speech and action and education advantages for my children,” and wished to escape “retrograding civilization and a tyrannical government” (Orfalea). Historian Reem Bailony posits this reasoning as a common trope among early Arabic-speaking migrants, but most migrants did not leave because of persecution, or consider the Ottomans tyrants.

Some historians maintain that the Mount Lebanon Civil War, between the Christian Maronite church and the Druze, an Islamic sect, was a primary cause for migration. Other historians argue that the War was caused by political manipulation of pre-existing tensions and religious sects.

The facts are that the rebellion of peasants against the landowning class spiralled, with killings targeting Christian peasants and Druze landowners, eventually totalling at least five thousand deaths (Khater and Khater). The fighting spread as far as Damascus, claiming twenty thousand Christian victims there (Orfalea). But how many victims or refugees left the fighting to emigrate?

The heralded first Syrian family to America, of Dr. Joseph Awad Arbeely, an Arbeen, Syria native, was cited by American press as having left “intercenine warfare” to come for “freedom and opportunity” (Orfalea). Arbeely had fled to Beirut from Arbeen in 1860, but left to the U.S. eighteen years later. According to historian Devin Naar, “Christian populations actively sought to liberate themselves from Ottoman rule” (Naar). Historian Evelyn Shakir agrees that,“Most who came—90 percent of more—were Christian, a statistic that has been accounted for in various ways” (Shakir).

Indeed, early migrants registered in the United States as ‘Turks’ as their race and not citizenship, until the classification of ‘Syrian’ was introduced in 1899 (Naar). In the Ottoman Empire, due to the aforementioned Tanzimat reforms, all “Jewish, Christian, and Muslim ‘citizens’ of the Ottoman Empire were to qualify under the rubric of Turkinos” (Naar). Reforms of the Tanzimat, the red flag with a white crescent and star, the citizenship rights and equality, were all to assimilate diverse peoples composing the Ottoman Empire into a administrated monolith. To its detriment, it means that in the Americas, people’s origins were labelled altogether and inaccurately.

In contrast, some Ottoman Jews willingly espoused the ideology of “Ottomanism” (Naar). Historian Devin Naar established that “The ‘one or two detached individuals’ who ‘drifted over’… prior to the Young Turk Revolution included a group of Jewish merchants who arrived first and foremost as ‘Ottomans’,” they were proud of their Ottomanism (Naar).

However, some may have wanted to obscure their origin, or to self-determine upon arrival in the Americas. There has been pervasive islamophobia in the Americas, and this may have influenced Muslim people to claim Christianity (Kayal). Some Jewish people also obscured their origins, making “differing claims about their nationality, country of origin, citizenship, or race in order to evade immigration quotas or gain employment in their new land of residence” (Naar). Jews and Muslims both faced antagonism and discrimination when emigrating to the Americas. In Greater Syria, religion “divided the Middle Easterner into two generally antagonistic camps: Christian and Moslem,” with Christians further subdivided and antagonistic (Naar).

According to some historians, the choice to migrate came down to whether people could afford overseas passage, or had felt some “kinship” with American missionaries, or had interacted with overseas merchants (Orfalea). The narrative of religious persecution can be called into question if only because there are not reliable statistics, and migration to nearby locales was common. According to historian Philip Kayal, “nearly ninety percent of all Arabic-speaking immigrants arriving here before 1924 were Syrian Christians from Mount Lebanon,” either Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox, “Arab only in culture” (Kayal). Mount Lebanon’s massacres may have been cause for few, but probably not for the majority of transatlantic migrations.