In the early 2000s, I added Daniel Power and Naomi Standen's edited Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) to the reading list in my graduate course on Muslim–Christian encounters in the early modern world. Situating the essays in the Turner frontier thesis historiography, the editors of Frontiers in Question explored its usefulness to other discussions concerning other regions of the world, which my students then appreciated as a novel approach for early modern territories such as Andalusia and the Ottoman–Habsburg border. Last week, I finished Alfred Rieber's monumental The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), one of several works of late to point to the centrality of Russia to modern history as well as to the importance of borderlands (Polish–Lithuanian, Trans-Caucasus, and Trans-Caspian), border cultures, and peoples as part of the evolution of empires and nation-states. The theory of borderlands, in other words, is now a well-established subfield of history, as argued in an interesting critique on its ubiquity and utility prefacing a special issue of the Journal of American History (2011) by Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett.

The Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914, by Sabri Ateş, is clearly immersed in that historiography. He has produced a sophisticated and well-documented look at a long neglected (and misunderstood) border between Ottoman Sunni Turks and Safavid/Qajar Shiʿi Iranians. Ateş first informs us of the earlier history of the frontier territories: Ottoman-Iranian Sunni/Shiʿi politics and the nature of Kurdish culture, as it is largely Kurdish tribesmen under discussion here. Those of us in the field have understood this border to have been settled first in the treaty of 1639. The center of this history is the contestation over the lands shared by present-day Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the lands of Kurdistan to some. Ateş's real contribution lies in the discussion of events leading to the Ottoman-Iranian Erzurum Treaty of 1847, and intriguing accounts of various commissions repeatedly established to convert a restless frontier into a nation-state border. By focusing on the drawing of a fixed line, Ateş can explore Mahmudian and later Tanzimat policies towards the settlement and incorporation of what had been an autonomous and highly locally contested region, site of several significant revolts from the 1820s onward. Ateş is particularly good on the late Ottoman intent to redefine the relationship with tribal cultures, both introducing conscription and restrictions on nomadism following the defeat of Mehmed Ali of Egypt in 1841. The story continues into the late Ottoman period when the state seemed determined to extend its boundaries into northwestern Iran, occupying Azerbaijan from 1905 to 1912, with the pretense of the predominance of Sunnism there. The Border Commission of 1913–14, with Russian and British imperial intermediaries, many of whom were multilingual in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, gets full treatment, with wonderful maps and a few contemporary photographs. Ateş notes acutely that the borderlanders caught between three post-1918 states continued their lifestyle of crossing putative frontiers until minefields prevented them from doing so. The porosity and self-governance of such environments remind me of the work of George Gavrilis on the early Ottoman–Greek border settlements of the 1830s.

This is not a book about sectarianism per se, or about Kurdish nationalism; rather it illuminates both the gradual imposition of modern forms of governance over unruly tribal societies, and their resistance to such new impositions. There is an argument to be made, as Ateş concludes, that the “state-imposed destruction of local dynasties—fundamentally atomized Kurdish society,” leaving it without brokers in the World War I reconstruction projects (p. 319).

In short, Ateş's book contributes to an emerging body of work describing the vexed question of Eurasian frontiers in an era now generally accepted as a unique period of Ottoman colonialism. The work joins the community of scholars such as Isa Blumi and Thomas Kuhn on Albania and Yemen, Ryan Gingeras on the Aegean, Janet Klein on the Kurdish Hamidiye cavalry, and Michael Reynolds on the end of empires in the Caucasus. I believe this to be an important study, and its implications for understanding contemporary politics of the area are obvious.