Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia

In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction: The Empire that Tatars Built 1. The Age of the Settler Ulamā 2. The Art of Accruing Scholarly Prestige 3. Colonial Trade and Religious Revival 4. A Shaykhly Rural Gentry 5. Knowledge, History-Writing, and Becoming Colonial 6. Muslim Cultural Reform and Kazan Tatar Cultural Imperialism 7. Fundamentalism, Nationalism, and Social Conflict 8. At War with the Tatar Kingdom 9. An Empire without Russians Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Danielle Ross is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Utah State University.

Review :
"This is a rich study that makes important contributions to the historiography of the Russian Empire, sharpening our picture of an empire in which lines between colonizer and colonized were far from clear."—The Middle Ground Journal "Ross offers a fascinating, well-researched narrative that fills an important lacuna in our understanding of Russia's engagement with Islam. As her clearly clearly shows, Ross engages not only with topics related to the study of Islam but also with some of the key themes of Russian history: Empire and Nation, Islam and Modernity, and the way empire worked by mutual relations and not by a unidirectional vector of power and control. Her study of the Machkaran network of scholars provides an important corrective to an image of Islamic reform dominated by Central Asian and Crimean Jadidism; it is bound tostimulate further research."—Orel Beilinson, Euraian Geography and Economics "Danielle Ross' monograph, Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia, offers a substantive and thought-provoking addition to the historiography of both the Russian Empire in general and its relationship with its subject Muslim peoples in particular. . . . Tatar Empire is a fascinating and well-written contribution to the field. It is recommended not only to scholars interested in the history of Russian-Muslim relations, but also to a wider audience of experts interested in questions of empire, religion, and the emergence of nationalism."—John M. Romero, Canadian-American Slavic Studies