James H. Meyer. Turks across Empires

James H. Meyer’s Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 is a skillfully crafted and soundly constructed account of the world in which well-known Pan-Turkist activists such as Yusuf Akçura, İsmail Gasprinskii, and Ahmet Ağaoğlu lived, moved, produced their intellectual work, and interacted with both Muslim communities and Russian and Ottoman authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter maps out the trans-imperial context of the Pan-Turkists, which was marked by a series of Muslim exoduses from Russia to the Ottoman Empire, the issue of dual subjecthood, the Porte’s reactions to the refugee crises, and the tsarist authorities’ dealings with their emigrating and returning Muslim subjects throughout the long nineteenth century. The next three chapters examine the Russian Muslim political and cultural contexts out of which the Pan-Turkists emerged. Chapter 4 portrays the Muslim “culture wars” of early-twentieth-century Russia. Chapters 5 and 6, expressly abstaining from replicating the dominant and somewhat sterile framework of identity formulation within which Pan-Turkism has traditionally been placed and analyzed, offer new ways of perceiving and understanding the political, cultural, and economic scene that caused the Pan-Turkist idea and movement to materialize.

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