
Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia
Alva Robinson
Danielle Ross
2020, Indiana UP, 978-0-25304-571-3, $30 pb.
Ross argues that the Kazan Tatars, who had settled along the Volga River as early as the eighth century CE, played a key role in the rise of the Russian empire some 10 centuries later. After the Russian conquest of their khanate in 1552, Kazan Tatars began forming “a new identity for themselves” in response to 17th-century crises including the impact of Russian policies against their own local leadership bodies. The remnants of the Kazan Tatar nobility adapted, creating a “codependent relationship” with Russian officials that “began to empower specific networks within Kazan Tatar society and to facilitate the extension of those networks [away] from their homeland” to the Urals, western Siberia, the Kazakh steppe, and the Russian-Chinese borderlands. Although Ross neglects to define the cultural and linguistic identity of Kazan Tatars, she succeeds in tracing the “relationships among the multitude of jurists, shaykhs, merchants, industrialists, bureaucrats, teachers, rebels, revolutionaries” that blurred “the categories of colonizer and colonized” and figured significantly in the rise of the Russian state.
You may also be interested in...
Zeina Abirached’s Art Uncovers Urgency of Wisdom in Gibran’s The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 classic is given new life, as Abirached’s graphic novel blends Lebanese artistry with the late author’s timeless wisdom.British Library’s 500-Year-Old Nizami Manuscripts Shed Light on Power of Art and Poetry in 12th-Century Herat
Persian and Mughal scholar and specialist Barbara Brend presents a comprehensive study of one of the most highly esteemed works of Persian Literature.