56 C h a p t e r Tw o
in large cities worldwide.^27 This event terrified the European powers, and stoked
fears of the hajj as a sanitary threat to Europe and its colonies. Europeans had
only recently come to experience firsthand the dreadful disease of cholera.
Long known to exist in Asia, cholera became widely known to Europeans only
in the 1830s, when the first epidemic was recorded. A bacterial infection of the
small intestine, cholera kills its victims quickly and painfully: the infected
develop violent diarrhea and vomiting and die from dehydration, sometimes
within twenty-four hours of infection. In 1865 it was not clear to scientists and
physicians how cholera was spread, making outbreaks all the more horrifying.
The European powers responded to the 1865 epidemic by drafting a series of
new international sanitary rules to prevent the spread of cholera and other
infectious diseases. They built new quarantine facilities at transit points of hajj
traffic around the world, and intensified efforts to monitor the flow of hajj pil-
grims between European-ruled lands and Arabia.^28
But correspondence about the ministry’s 1865 order reveals other concerns as
well. The ministry issued it in response to reports that many Crimean Tatars were
using the hajj as a pretext for emigration, getting passports to Mecca and using
them to resettle in Ottoman lands. Russian officials in the Tauride region (today’s
Crimea and environs) would later explain this movement as Muslim flight from
Russian military conscription, and fears of government restrictions on their access
to Mecca.^29 Whatever the reason for this emigration, the tsarist government
sought to stop it, primarily for economic reasons. Since Russia’s late eighteenth-
century conquest and seizure of the Crimea from the Ottomans, there had been a
chronic labor shortage there, due largely to waves of Tatar emigration from the
region. The most recent wave had occurred after the end of the Crimean War.
Starting in 1859, the tsarist government had expelled and encouraged the emigra-
tion of millions of Muslims from the Crimea and the Caucasus, on the grounds of
their loyalties to the sultan over the tsar. Soon thereafter, the regime regretted the
decision to push out Crimean Tatars, and reversed the policy, to discourage their
emigration from the empire. To rebuild the population, the Russian government
began offering social and financial incentives in the 1860s to encourage colonists
from Russia’s central regions to resettle in the Crimea. Against this backdrop, the
ministry’s 1865 order appears, in large part, as an attempt to stop the exodus of
Tatar emigration for the sake of regional economic development.^30
Economic concerns also drove the second order by the ministry, issued in
- This order required Russian officials in Muslim regions to issue passports
only to Muslim pilgrims who provided evidence that they had the means to pay
the costs involved in the pilgrimage, and left a deposit of ten rubles as insurance,