Empires in War and Peace: Caucasian Communities in the Ottoman–Russian Borderlands, 1780–1865

Abstract

Historiography on empires and their borderlands has become an increasingly debated field, particularly in discussions of imperial adaptation to the nineteenth-century world order. Since the turn of the century, historians have begun situating the Ottoman and Russian Empires within the broader landscape of global empires, emphasizing processes of empire-making, reconfigured modes of imperial rule, and evolving imperial relations within a wider political context. Central to this scholarship are questions of institutional borrowing, parallel governing challenges, and mutual observation between empires. Long labeled as staunch rivals over Eurasian territories, the Ottoman and Russian empires fought repeated wars from the eighteenth century onward, largely in contested borderlands, measuring their successes and failures against one another while simultaneously consolidating and redefining their frontiers. Although comparative scholarship on the Ottoman and Russian empires has expanded significantly over the past decade, much of this work continues to privilege administrative practices and top-down reform agendas. Far fewer studies have examined the social and economic dynamics underpinning Ottoman–Russian relations or foregrounded local actors as central agents shaping imperial policy. This dissertation instead focuses on the political economy of the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the Caucasus, treating local communities not as passive subjects but as key participants in the making of imperial rule who actively sought to preserve their autonomy. Drawing primarily on untapped archival sources in Ottoman Turkish and Russian, the dissertation examines agrarian relations, warfare, and the slave trade to show how imperial authority in the Caucasus was negotiated through local economies, labor regimes, and cross-border mobilities. By adopting a comparative borderlands perspective, the study demonstrates that imperial governance in the Caucasus emerged less from centralized reform than from the interactions between rival empires and the social, economic, and military practices of frontier communities. The first part of this dissertation centers on the North Caucasus, with particular attention to the military labor of mobile populations. Chapter 1 assesses the strategic importance of frontier fortresses and mobile populations for the Ottoman control along the Kuban border. It shows how, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire rearranged its relations with Circassians and Abkhazian communities through military recruitment and various forms of incorporation. Focusing on the Russian Empire’s relations with its own mobile populations, Chapter 2 analyzes the establishment of the Kuban Cossack Host. It highlights both the similarities and differences between Russian and Ottoman approaches to governing mobile groups, arguing that Russian authorities cultivated more durable relations with newly relocated Cossack communities than the Ottomans did with mobile populations under their rule. The second part of the dissertation turns to the political economy of imperial rivalry in the South Caucasus. Chapter 3 maps the evolution of local dynasties and their subject populations in Ottoman Georgia and the autonomous princedoms of western Georgia. It begins in the sixteenth century when the Ottoman conquest transformed the region and established an early modern frontier along the former territories of the Georgian kingdom. Chapter 4 traces the evolution of land regimes in western Georgia under Ottoman jurisdiction and in neighboring autonomous Georgian principalities up to the 1820s. It demonstrates that these regimes developed concurrently from the sixteenth century onward, culminating in the consolidation of hereditary forms of landholding. Chapter 5 adopts a comparative perspective on imperial land reform, challenging interpretations that privilege top-down reform initiatives. Instead, it foregrounds local dynamics, showing that changes in land tenure systems often preceded and shaped imperial reform agendas rather than resulting from them. Chapter 6 offers a brief glimpse into the concept of servile labor by focusing on the abolition of serfdom in Russia and the Ottoman ban on corvée in the mid-nineteenth century. Exploring the possibilities of connected histories of servile labor within a Eurasian context, it analyzes the reshaping of social hierarchies amid tensions between imperial rulers, hereditary landowners, and local cultivators. Building on this discussion, Chapter 7 zooms in on the slave trade across the Caucasian borderlands. It addresses the social backgrounds and political affiliations of local slave dealers within the nineteenth-century global order marked by anti-slavery campaigns. Overall, through an analysis of agrarian relations, warfare, and the slave trade, this dissertation argues that imperial authority in the Caucasus was enacted through the active participation of local communities in the processes of empire-making and their negotiations over autonomy. Centering the shared Ottoman–Russian borderlands of the Caucasus, the study contributes to comparative imperial historiography by directing attention to the political economy of borderlands. In doing so, it demonstrates how borderlands were not peripheral spaces but critical sites where imperial power, social hierarchies, and labor regimes were produced, contested, and transformed in the nineteenth-century Eurasian world.