Charles King’s book is a wonderfully written narrative on the Caucasus since the eighteenth century. It is not very systematic in its coverage of the individual nations’ developments; rather, King treats the Caucasus as a region, and each of the historical chapters has a comparative design with examples taken from various nations.
Chapter one treats the Caucasus between the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires and follows the Russian conquest of the Southern Caucasus, with subchapters on captivity and slavery as forms of cultural contact. The second chapter deals in depth with the resistance of the mountaineers of the Northeastern Caucasus, who defied Russian rule until the 1860s. Chapter three appears as an interlude, for it is about the place of the Caucasus in the Russian and Western literary imagination. Chapter four takes the historical description further from the late nineteenth century through the period of the Russian revolutions; and the last chapter brings the reader into the present time, stressing the continuity of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.
King does not add much new to what has already been said on the Caucasus; rather, the novelty of his work stems from the way he selects what is essential, and how he puts various scholarly threads together, detecting links that usually pass unobserved in the highly specialized literature on the area. With a keen sense for fascinating stories, King enriches the well-known accounts by changing perspectives. For instance, in chapter three, he reveals the extent to which the image of the Caucasus in nineteenth-century Russia – especially Pushkin, whose poetic imagery serves as the leitmotif for the whole book – was indebted to Bronevskii’s popularizing description of the Caucasus of 1823, and shows how much Bronevskii in his turn drew his information and categories from ethnic German scholars such as Güldenstädt and Klaproth who analyzed the region beginning in the eighteenth century. This linkage puts the classics of Russian literature into historiographical perspective. In a similar fashion, the same chapter also discusses the image of the Caucasus in the West, with some fascinating accounts of the early days of modern Alpinism in Georgia and of exotic but fake Caucasian women in Western circuses. It is in various episodes such as these that King enriches the existing research literature with his own archival studies.
Given the geographic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity of the area, King’s approach to treating the Caucasus as a coherent region has certain limitations. In particular, one sometimes gets the impression that the book was written over the heads of the Caucasians themselves: what the book describes is basically the history of the Russian conquest of, and rule over, the Caucasus, as well as of its Orientalist consumption, and, in the last chapter, the turmoil after the collapse of the Soviet Union (which leaves less room for romantic images). This Russian perspective has much to do with the fact that King’s sources are almost entirely Western and Russian; voices from the Caucasus are only represented through the European lens. I am afraid that for the time being only this imperial and post-colonial perspective can make the Caucasus appear as a distinct unit.
While the literature that King drew upon for this work is considerable, specialists will always find fault in the necessarily selective manner in which King makes complicated matters readable and understandable. Thus from the perspective of Islamic studies, his second chapter, on Shamil’s resistance against the Russian conquest, misses a more balanced view on the nature of Muridism; here, King maintains that the anti-Russian jihad was organized by the Sufi brotherhood of the Naqshbandiyya khalidiyya (P. 81). This interpretation, indeed still widespread, stems from a colonial Russian perspective; it has been very much contested in recent studies on Islamic literature from the area for having no basis in Muslim sources from the Caucasus.^[1] In addition, local Arabic documents from the nineteenth century make it clear that the Khalidiyya brotherhood reached Daghestan only by the 1820s, not, as King maintains, in the late eighteenth century (Pp. 65, 69). Similarly, Shamil became acquainted with the future first Imam, Ghazi Muhammad, not through a Sufi murid–murshid relationship (as stated on P. 78); rather, Ghazi Muhammad emerged as a jihad preacher with Shamil as his follower before both of them were introduced to the Sufi brotherhood. It is, of course, very tempting to explain jihad by the mystical imagery of a secretive brotherhood; but to acknowledge the mainly Islamic legalistic, not Sufi, character of Shamil’s movement would help King explain why today’s Islamists in the Caucasus who (like Shamil Basaev, killed in 2006) stand in opposition to the Naqshbandiyya, can use the same terminology as Shamil did (as correctly observed on P. 241).
These simplifications notwithstanding, King’s book is extremely welcome for his consistent attempt to understand identities in the Caucasus as constructed and “relational” (P. 15); “in an environment in which cultural exchange was the norm,” even the lines between imperialist and native can sometimes be indistinct (P. 42). This insight is true not only for the nineteenth century but also for our times: “In the Caucasus, the real story of the late twentieth century is not about deep-rooted sentiments of ethnicity or ancient grievances but about the ways in which personal ambition, structural incentives, and the simple presence of sufficient quantities of guns led to bloody conflict” (P. 212).