The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands

Alfred J. Rieber’s conceptual study locates the great crises of the twentieth century along the complex fault lines of European and Asian empires (Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, Iranian and Qing), or the Eurasian borderlands. The book is thus a study in political orogenesis, if one thinks of emerging empires as continental plates colliding at the edges. It is these edges that form the subject of Rieber’s book and show that borderlands of empires not only matter, but are just as important as the imperial heartland and vital for a pathology of empire. As the author points out in the introduction, the inspiration for this book came from years of teaching and questions that arose therefrom: ‘How is it possible to explain that, with the exceptions of the wars of Italian and German unification, all the major wars and some minor ones fought in Europe and Asia from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the mid-20th-century began in the Eurasian borderlands, those territories located on the peripheries of the multinational continental empires, which after the civil wars and interventions from 1918 to 1920, became successor states? ... How to further explain that the continental empires, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, Safavid-Qajar, and Qing, having survived the rivalry over these same territories for centuries, collapsed in revolution and war within little more than a decade between 1911 and 1923? Why was it, finally, that Imperial Russia was involved directly or indirectly in most of these conflicts?’

Ancient history · Archaeology · Economic history · Empire · German · Political science · Politics · Rivalry · Successor cardinal · Classics · History · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Post-Soviet Geopolitical Dynamics · Soviet and Russian History