This book examines the making of the present day Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish boundary, shedding new light on some of the most contentious issues of today.

Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.

Ottoman Borderlands, consisting of a number of articles by prominent scholars, aims to begin to fill a large gap in Ottoman studies, namely the study of the borderlands and their socially, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous population. In both the frontier provinces and the semiautonomous borderlands, the central government used force, economic incentives, and the granting of titles to establish control over local rulers and, when possible, to integrate them into the system. However, despite the pressing power of the central government, the borderlands remained cultural-social units with their own identities and their own internal dynamics. While the core provinces were more Ottoman, Islamic, and Turkish-speaking, the borderlands were culturally, religiously, and linguistically more heterogeneous, as well as more politically autonomous. Originally published by the International Journal of Turkish Studies

During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today. The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically vast, multicultural region through a variety of methodological lenses, this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.

James Meyer tells the story of the pan-Turkists, a group of Muslim activists who became involved in a wave of revolutions taking place in Russia (1905), Iran (1906) and the Ottoman Empire (1908), demonstrating how theirs is part of a larger history of trans-imperial Muslims, the Russian-Ottoman borderlands, and the late imperial age.

This book explores the Eurasian borderlands as contested 'shatter zones' which have generated some of the world's most significant conflicts. Analyzing the struggles of Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Iranian and Qing empires, Alfred J. Rieber surveys the period from the rise of the great multicultural, conquest empires in the late medieval/early modern period to their collapse in the early twentieth century. He charts how these empires expanded along moving, military frontiers, competing with one another in war, diplomacy and cultural practices, while the subjugated peoples of the borderlands strove to maintain their cultures and to defend their autonomy. The gradual and fragmentary adaptation of Western constitutional ideas, military reforms, cultural practices and economic penetration began to undermine these ruling ideologies and institutions, leading to the collapse of all five empires in revolution and war within little more than a decade between 1911 and 1923.