Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands engages with the evolving historiography around the concept of belonging in the Russian and Ottoman empires. The contributors to this book argue that the popular notion that empires do not care about belonging is simplistic and wrong.

PrefaceList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands1. Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective from the Russian and Ottoman EmpiresPart One: Negations of Belonging2. Bloody Belonging: Writing Transcaspia into the Russian Empire3. The Armenian Genocide of 1915: Lineaments of a Comparative History4. "Do you want me to exterminate all of them or just the ones who oppose us?": The 1916 Revolt in Semirech'e5. "What Are They Doing? After All, We're Not Germans": Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar ExperiencePart Two: Belonging via Standardization6. Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation: Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus7. Reforming the Language of Our Nation: Dictionaries, Identity, and the Tatar Lexical Revolution, 1900-19708. Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent: Literacy, Language Ideology, and Belonging in Early Soviet ArmeniaPart Three: Belonging and Mythmaking9. Making a Home for the Soviet People: World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod10. Dismantling "Georgia's Spiritual Mission": Sacral Ethnocentrism, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and Primordial Awakenings at the Soviet Collapse11. New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia: Competing Visions and the Decoupling of the Soviet UnionConclusionNotesContributorsIndex