The decades between the Crimean War and World War I saw the emergence of a Muslim public space that straddled the Russian and the Ottoman empires. People, commodities, and ideas flowed back and forth across the imperial boundaries. It was in this transimperial space that Muslim intellectuals discovered Turkism and pan-Turkism. While the transimperial space ceased to exist with the onset of war in 1914, many of the interactions it engendered had long afterlives. The Turkish nationalism that developed under the republic owed a substantial debt to this space, for many of its most prominent proponents were born in the Russian Empire. James Meyer explores this world between the empires. His point of entry is what he calls the “pan-Turkic scene in Istanbul” that existed in the era of the Constitutional Revolution, but the book covers a lot more.

The transimperial traffic, Meyer reminds us, was not simply one way, of disgruntled or oppressed Muslims leaving the Russian for the Ottoman Empire. As Meyer documents in rich archival detail, Russian Muslims came to the Ottoman Empire for a variety of reasons and most kept their Russian papers. Many went back and forth. Meyer is most interested, he says, in the Turks who existed between the two empires, who repeatedly crossed the boundaries back and forth. He focuses on three figures from different parts of the Russian Empire to make his point: Yusuf Akçura from the Volga region, Ahmet Ağaoğlu from the Caucasus, and Ismail Gasprinskii from the Crimea, all of whom were connected to the pan-Turkist journal Türk Yurdu, which itself had been established on the basis of a bequest from the estate of the Orenburg millionaire Mahmut Hüseyinov. These figures, while unusual, were also emblematic of larger processes going on in their societies, and it was concerns in these societies that led them to pan-Turkism. Meyer's main goal is to place pan-Turkism not in a teleological trajectory of the rise of identity but in the historical contingencies of the era and in conflicts that beset the societies from which its activists came. The context in which pan-Turkism emerged, he argues, was “not purely an intellectual one” (p. 149), but rather was embedded in power relations in society. People had “practical reasons” for talking about identity, which could be invoked for select groups and marketed in “an act of salesmanship” (p. 20). Indeed, the pan-Turkists were “identity freelancers” who could invoke different identities at different times. The book is Meyer's attempt to explain how pan-Turkists came to market pan-Turkism in Istanbul on the eve of World War I.

Meyer takes us the long way, with many tangents and sideshows. He brings prodigious linguistic and archival skills to bear on his work. Understanding the dynamics of this transimperial space requires a command of the historiographies of both empires as well as knowledge of Ottoman Turkish and Russian to benefit from the riches stored in the two sets of archives. Since few scholars have this range of expertise, our understanding of this space has been held hostage to one historiography or the other. Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills. He has toiled in archives in St. Petersburg, Kazan, Baku, Tbilisi, and the Crimea, as well as in Istanbul. He also makes use of the press (in various forms of Turkic) and memoirs, and he can follow his subjects back and forth across the imperial border. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to an exploration of the Russian background of the three figures and the broader processes that affected them. We get three chapters that explore various kinds of conflict and competition in the Muslim societies of the Russian Empire in the decades preceding World War I. The first describes the place of the Tatars in the Russian Empire. They were “insider Muslims,” integrated into the fabric of empire. The state dealt with them through the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly created in 1788, whose leadership became the intermediaries between the state and the region's Muslim population. The next two chapters trace the emerging conflict between the clerical elite in the Spiritual Assembly and a new, mostly mercantile elite that challenged its authority and its right to speak for the community. The new elites organized the Ittifak ul-Muslimin (Union of Muslims) as the voice of the community and sought to enter Russian imperial public life as a political party. Opposition to the Spiritual Assembly also came from those who sought to reform Islamic education. The so-called new method of teaching challenged old ways of learning. This was Jadidism, which has often been studied as the ineluctable rise of modernism and national self-awareness. Meyer depicts it in all its contentiousness as “the Great Muslim Teacher Wars.” At issue, he argues, was not just new methods of teaching but also resources and power. Meticulous work in the archives allows Meyer to paint a nuanced picture of community politics in the Volga–Ural region, with occasional glances at the Crimea and the Caucasus. Akçura, Ağaoğlu, and Gasprinskii appear as significant actors here, although they do not drive the narrative. The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English—but it is not entirely clear what direct connection it has to the articulation of pan-Turkism that frames the book.

Few would disagree that articulations of identity are always embedded in power relations and intertwined with everyday concerns of communities. The stark contrast between “purely intellectual” and “practical” motivations that Meyer draws is, therefore, problematic. Identity for Meyer is largely instrumental, a cover for more practical considerations, and a commodity to be marketed. This leads him to a studied disinterest in all cultural issues. Meyer has little concern with exploring the new worldviews that made the new identities possible or in analyzing the changes wrought by new forms of communication in society. Newspapers, theater, and novels all appear in the text but are never analyzed. In general, the richness of the archival detail is not sufficiently balanced by the rigor of explanation. Meyer seldom explains why events took a certain course, why things happened, or why individuals acted the way that they did. Why, for instance, did our activists turn to Turkism and pan-Turkism, and why not some other “identity”? Ultimately, the marketing metaphor remains unsatisfactory. To be sure, a number of different identity claims competed in the public sphere, but identity was not a commodity, nor was the public sphere a capitalist marketplace. We need some explanation of the appeal of pan-Turkism, and that is to be sought in cultural transformations as much as in the political struggle with which cultural transformations were intertwined. The book is much stronger on political struggles within Muslim societies in the Russian Empire. That is where, ultimately, its considerable achievement lies, and it is for that that we must thank Meyer.