James H. Meyer's Turks Across Empires focuses on several key actors who crossed Russian-Ottoman frontiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and participated in the political life and intellectual formation of subsequent Turkic, national, pan-Turkic and even Turanian identities. His main focus is the Volga Tatar Yusuf Akcura (Akchurin in Russia), with much attention paid also to Crimean Tatar Ismail Gasprali (Gasprinskii) and Azerbaijani Ahmet Agaoglu (Agayev). Other figures come in and out of the narrative as they cross paths with these principles, sometimes as significant participants, sometimes as examples of particular problems of identity or bureaucracy. The scope of the book is not quite as broad as the title suggests; most of the discussion and analysis focuses on the 1880s to World War I. This is not a major problem because it was the main period of activity for these intellectual leaders and the unfolding of these and related trends. In his epilogue, Meyer completes the picture of his chief figures in the interwar decades.

The book presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan (then sometimes called “Azerbaijani Turkic” but not simply “Azerbaijani”). As a result, Meyer's narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories.

Chapters 1 and 6, as well as the introduction and epilogue address directly the topic of the Turks who travelled and lived across the Ottoman and Russian Empires, and at times the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires as well. Here an interested reader will find useful descriptions of such empire-level actions as Russian pressures on Crimea and the north Caucasus that unleashed mass migrations of Muslim people into the Balkans and Turkey. Meyer contrasts the relatively greater regard in which the economically important Crimean Tatars were held by officials of both Russian and Ottoman Empires compared to those from the north Caucasus who “experienced difficulties” (32).

Appropriately these chapters focus on the intellectual leaders and their biographies. The narrative of Gasprali's life leads us to newspaper publishing which came to have a great impact on Turkic consciousness and political programs. But it was both Akcura and Agaoglu who were the travelers and studied in Paris after living in Istanbul (Akcura) or St. Petersburg (Agaoglu). We learn more about their lives than the evolution of their thought. The many footnotes often include asides by the author or explanatory material that could be in the text or excluded; some are a distraction. In the end, Meyer boldly claims that without this trans-imperial context “pan-Turkism never would have existed” (47). This may well be true, but evidence is not presented nor is the argument sufficiently developed to convince. Meyer notes main political-literary figures who traveled back and forth and enjoyed dual citizenship, but little about the evolution of their thinking and ideas that would demonstrate the development of a pan-Turkish identity.

Chapters 2 through 5 turn almost entirely to matters within the Russian Empire rather than transimperial relations or issues. It feels like reading a different book within the book. The topics of these middle chapters are significant, but the disjunction is confusing. Setting aside the question of coherence, the topics and archival documents presented here are beneficial to students of this period. Chapters 2 and 3 show applications of Russian state policy, especially toward Volga Tatars (farthest from the border and perhaps the least “trans-imperial” of the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire), and struggles around the empire's Spiritual Assemblies as conducted by the Tatar power brokers (with attention to the influential Iunusov and Apanaev families). The information on the role of the Turkic ulema in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Ittifak movement of the Muslim Congresses (chapter 3) reveals Tatar impact at the all-Russian level. However, the “Speaking Sharia” section on use of religious terminology in chapter 2, the “Crimean Tensions” and “Ufa Imbroglio” of chapter 3, and the entire subject of “The Great Muslim Teacher Wars” of chapter 4 are examples of Meyer's tendency to overstate the substance and drama of several topics. For example the “teacher wars” refer to the well-known conflict between the jadid (new method) and traditional approaches to schooling and efforts to draw pupils from one style teacher to another—not “great” and hardly “wars.” The Chapter 5, “Politics of Naming,” begins to bring the reader back to the wider identity issues with a discussion of Akcura's famous “Three Types of Policy” (1904) in which he examines Ottoman, pan-Islamic, and pan-Turkic identity in what Meyer calls a “detached, even scholarly” manner rather than as a polemic (135). It is a section of five pages in a twenty-page chapter; the question of “Gasprinskii's language issue” later in the chapter is too short to explore the depth of the conflict between calling Turkic languages “Turkic” or by a local name such as Tatar.

In short, Meyer's book is well researched and full of information, but, sadly, marred by disjointed structure and sometimes incomplete consideration of major themes.