Kelly O’Neill. Claiming Crimea

Kelly O’Neill’s Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great’s Southern Empire is a timely analysis of Russia’s southern empire that positions the region as a pivotal arena for Russia’s developing relationship with its Muslim subjects. O’Neill focuses on the annexation of Crimea in the eighteenth century and its slow integration into the empire over the next seventy years, ending her narrative just before the Crimean War. O’Neill argues that her monograph “tests the concept of imperial topology” (5) by positioning the acquisition of Crimea and its peoples as a process distinct from Russia’s contemporaneous expansion west to the Baltic and Poland, south to the Caucasus, and east to Central Asia and the North Pacific. While Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) appears in the title of the book and her reign may be pivotal, it hardly frames O’Neill’s interests. O’Neill acknowledges that Russia’s conquest of a Muslim population was not a new phenomenon when Russia acquired Crimea, but this expansion occurred during “Catherine’s reinvention of Russia as a state saturated in Enlightenment principles such as religious toleration and rational, equitable rule” (2). At the same time, Enlightenment-inspired tolerance had limits, as O’Neill illustrates throughout her text, ultimately revealing that the state’s policies were both innovative, in order to meet new challenges, and dependent upon more than a century of existing imperial processes. One of the key differences between Crimea’s Muslims and the existing populations under Russian rule was the region’s classical past and its long relationship with the Ottoman Empire. By unpacking the Ottoman imperial imprint in the region, and its legacy under Russian rule, O’Neill reveals Russia’s challenge in incorporating Ottoman traditions within its own colonial system. Russian Crimea, therefore, was a product of both Catherine’s “Enlightened” policies and the region’s own distinctive colonial past. The colony’s legal pluralism, for example, with “Karaite, Roman Catholic, and Islamic courts, in addition to the full panoply of Russian courts” (78), was not a product of Enlightenment tolerance but rather an Ottoman one. Russia’s response to this plurality arrived in the 1820s when the Russian Senate began to remove some of the judicial distinctions between these courts.

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