The Caucasus is a strategically and economically important region in contemporary global affairs. Western interest in the Caucasus has grown rapidly since 1991, fuelled by the admixture of oil politics, great power rivalry, ethnic separatism and terrorism that characterizes the region. However, until now there has been little understanding of how these issues came to assume the importance they have today.

1. The North Caucasus: Between gazavat and Modern Revolution 1700-1905. 2. 1905-1917: The First Crisis of Modernity in the Caucasus. 3. 1917-1918 in the Caucasus-from World War to Civil War. 4. 1919-1920: The British and Denikin's Caucasus. 5. Insurgency, Corruption, and the Search for a New Socialist Order, 1920-25. 6. Decossackization, Demarcation, Categorization: Creating the Soviet Caucasus, 1920-27. 7. Forging the Proletariat: Women, Collectivization, and Repression, 1928-1934. 8. Dreams of Unity, Myths of Power: The Caucasian Diaspora. 9. The Purges and Industrial Modernization: the Soviet Caucasus in the 1930s. 10. Dealing with 'Bandits': Cleansing and Ethnic Repression in the Soviet Caucasus, 1941-45. 11. The Final Structural Crisis of the Soviet State, 1953-91. 12. Three Dystopias of the Post-Soviet Caucasus, 1991-2008. Afterword - The North Caucasus as a Regional Security Complex: Vladimir Putin, Pipelines, and the Rebuilding of the Russian Federal State.