The Ottoman-Russian struggle for Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, 1908--1918: Identity, ideology and the geopolitics of world order

The theme of nationalism has long provided the dominant framework for understanding the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and has become an increasingly popular motif in Russian and Soviet historiography. This dissertation sharply challenges that framework. It returns late Ottoman and Russian history to their imperial contexts, and treats the Ottoman and Russian empires as state actors pursuing their security interests. It argues that interstate competition, not nationalism, provides the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the early twentieth century. Reversing the causal logic that sees state and sub-state behavior as a function of nationalist identities and ideologies, it demonstrates how competitive interstate relations and geopolitical factors give rise to and shape those identities and ideologies. The study remedies a major deficiency in the existing theoretical literature on nationalism, namely the inability to account for the rapid proliferation of nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by illustrating how the structure of the world order can foster the spread of nationalism in form, if not in content.; The study begins with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and concludes with the end of World War I. It not only examines the "high politics" of formal, institutional state relations but also devotes significant attention to sub-state actors, using extensive original material from Ottoman and Russian archives to demonstrate in detail how local and regional agendas interacted with the dynamics of interstate competition to produce new forms of political identity.; It refutes in particular the influential myth that the proto-national ideologies of Pan-Turkism or Pan-Islam heavily influenced Ottoman policies, and shows how a keen sense of realpolitik guided Ottoman perceptions and behavior. It thus should reorient not just debates in Ottoman and Turkish historiography but also debates in comparative imperial history about the relationship between nationalism and imperial collapse. The empirical findings that this study presents will be of great interest not just to historians of the Ottoman and Russian empires in general, but also to those who specialize in the history of the Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanis, and mountaineers of the North Caucasus.