Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914

by Sabri Ates

Overview

Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107241701
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/21/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Sabri Ateş is an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He has published a book in Turkish entitled Tunalı Hilmi Bey: An Intellectual from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Turkey (2009), as well as several articles in Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Iranian Studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The Kurdish frontier in Ottoman-Qajar relations; 2. Laying the ground: the concert of Zagros; 3. The long journey of the first survey commission; 4. The borderland between the Crimean War and Berlin congress; 5. Sunnis for the sultan: the Ottoman occupation of northwestern Iran, 1905–12; 6. Boundary at last; Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

"Ateş' study is full of new information, new arguments, and offers new perspectives to historians who aim to study frontier regions, centre-periphery relations and state formation processes in general and Kurdish history in particular."
Yener Koç, Kurdish Studies

From the Publisher