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Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.

The most important and undoubtedly the most fateful period in Ottoman history is the Young Turk or Union and Progress era in 1908–18. The final disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the rise of independent states in the Middle East, the intensification of conflicts over Macedonia, the full emergence of Turkish and Arab nationalisms, the start of the Muslim anti-imperialist mobilization through struggle in Libya in 1911, and other events of vital importance in the social and political history of the area occurred during the Young Turk era. It was a historical watershed which marked simultaneously the end of an imperial form of political organization in the Middle East and the beginning of a new political existence in the form of national states. The Young Turks affected profoundly the course of history among the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans. Moreover the Young Turks were the first group in the Ottoman state to approach the social, political, and cultural transformation of their society in the spirit of modern politics. Yet the Young Turks remain the least studied and understood and the most distortedly portrayed power group in the history of the Balkans and the Middle East. Most of the existing works on the Young Turks, consisting mainly of memoirs, were written by their authors to credit themselves with political roles and achievements which did not always correspond to reality.

The study of the Ottoman state in tĥe latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman State at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted.