Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong.

Chapters address numerous and varied dimensions of belonging in multiethnic territories of the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union, from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. They illustrate both the mutability and the durability of imperial belonging in Eurasian borderlands.

Contributors to this volume pay attention to state authorities but also to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and those left behind. Through those voices the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, noting the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denied it to specific populations deemed inconvenient or incapable of fitting in. The collective conclusion that editors Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum provide is that nations must take ownership of their behaviors, irrespective of whether they emerged from disintegrating empires or enjoyed autonomy and power within them.

Krista A. Goff is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. Lewis H. Siegelbaum is the Jack & Margaret Sweet Emeritus Professor in History at Michigan State University.

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands showcases a vibrant new historical literature that focuses on the entanglements of the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish states along their margins, where identities and allegiances were continually shifting. This is an excellent volume with uniformly high-quality contributions. [T]he editors and authors [...] make significant contributions to the study of nation and empire in Eurasia[.]

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands showcases a vibrant new historical literature that focuses on the entanglements of the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish states along their margins. This is an excellent volume with uniformly high-quality contributions. Taken together, the editors and authors of Empire and Belonging make significant contributions to the study of nation and empire in Eurasia.

The book's structure and the clarity of the essays make it a worthy addition to any course for undergraduate and graduate students learning about nationalities and identities in Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union.

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is a very strong collection and a fitting tribute to Suny, its essays steeped in broad historical and theoretical knowledge, and full of surprising and revelatory detail about those spaces, peoples and states in Eurasia's borderlands.

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is an edited volume of thematically and regionally similar papers that resulted from a conference held at the University of Michigan in October 2016. Ronald Suny sums the book up concisely with a brilliant discussion of empire and nation that ties together the book's themes and demonstrates the insight and breadth of vision that he has gained over his re-markable career. Given the geopolitical events of today, the lessons learned from this body of research draw our attention to some of the more insidious things that oft en result for people living in the border-lands of great empires.

Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati, and author of the award-winning The Baron's Cloak:

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is an excellent collection of essays featuring original research on a wide range of topics. It's certain to appeal to specialists in the history of nationality and empire as well as readers in the Russian field.

Alexander Morrison, New College, Oxford, and author of Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910:

Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands is a fine volume and a worthy tribute to Ron Suny, one of the leading scholars of the Russian empire and Soviet Union of his generation, whose work was never imprisoned by the conventional boundaries of Sovietology.