Jim Meyer's Borderlands: June 2021

Fresh Prince of Belgrade

Monday, June 21, 2021

Back in the waning months of quarantine, I read Gone With the Wind for the first time. To be honest, I was mainly interested in the book due to the connections I assumed I would find with War and Peace, which is one of my favorites. However, it was Anna Karenina that Margaret Mitchell's book would end up reminding me of the most.

The common denominator is land. Most people are familiar with Gerald O'Hara's admonition that "land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for." In Anna Karenina, meanwhile, Levin throws himself into working on his estate in response to an outside world that has disappointed him.

Other than revealing a predilection for reading unfashionable literature, what does any of this have to do with me? Well, as I mentioned in a post a couple of months ago, I have recently purchased some land of my own in Belgrade, MT, the little mountain town with a Balkan flavor.

Biden's Meeting with Erdoğan in Brussels

Saturday, June 19, 2021

If Joe Biden's meeting with Putin doesn't quite qualify as a summit in my books, the US president's meeting with Turkish president Tayyip Erdoğan was even shorter, as part of a broader meeting with NATO leaders in Brussels.

All smiles for now...

The meeting was important, though. US relations with Turkey have been at various stages of rocky for years, with the months following the July, 2016 coup attempt (or coup attempt-like events) in Turkey constituting a real low point. It was at this time, in 2017, that Moscow offered to sell its S-400 missile defense system. In response to Ankara's purchase of the system, the US put sanctions on Turkey and will not sell it weaponry for now.

Kumbaya and Crimea: the Biden-Putin Meeting in Geneva

Friday, June 18, 2021

Up here at the Borderlands Lodge, summer is quietly approaching. The freezing nights of winter have receded, and now we're having nice temperatures in the 70s and low 80s in the daytime. I've been spending a lot of my time on the house and buying novel items--who knew that a string trimmer is not for trimming strings?

Lava Lake, encore une fois

Moving house took up a lot of my time and energy in March-April, so I hadn't gotten outside so much--it didn't help that my bike was a shell of its former itself. But now my bike is in beautiful working order again I've been able to shake off a bit of the rust.

With the arrival of warmer temperatures, there have also been some chances to get outside. Despite the mountains to the north, historic downtown Belgrade is a pretty flat area, good for bike riding. On the other hand, the bikeable area of Belgrade is smaller than what I had in Bozeman, so I tend to cover a lot of the same ground repeatedly. But there are lots of nice places to go outside in this part of Montana.

NATO's Other Purpose

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Greetings from historic downtown Belgrade (MT), to which the Borderlands Lodge has recently transferred its operations.

There's been a lot going on lately. I've learned that buying a house is a 3-step process: purchasing the new place, moving out of the old one, and setting up the new one. All three steps can involve a lot of work. I finished the first of them in March, the second one in early May, and the third...I'm slowly realizing that the third step will go on for as long as I live in this house.

Even in the Bel-zone we get the papers, and this week I've been reading about the meeting of NATO leaders this past Monday in Brussels.

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I am an historian of the Turkic World, with over 30 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My first impressions of the region came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA from Princeton and a PhD from Brown, I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Altogether, I've spent almost ten years of my life in Turkey, and about four years in the former USSR.

Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of full professor since July, 2024. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014. A paperback version of Turks Across Empires came out in July, 2019.

I spent the 2016-2017 academic year in Russia through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant. Now I am back at MSU, where I typically teach two classes per semester on topics relating to the Balkans, the Middle East, and former Soviet space. My new book, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation came out in March of 2023.

My books in podcasts and other media

Discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea on Turkey Book Talk podcast with William Armstrong.

Red Star over the Black Sea on the New Books Network podcast with Reuben Silverman.

Panel discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea with the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Online lecture on Red Star over the Black Sea for the Anglo-Turkish Society.

Discussion of Red Star over the Black Sea at the Belgrade (Montana) Community Library.

Red Star over the Black Sea featured in Flamman (in Swedish)

Red Star over the Black Sea on Andruck - Deutschlandfunk (in German).

Turks Across Empires on the Ottoman History Podcast.

Interview with one of my students at MSU about Turks Across Empires on the History Roundtable

Brief discussion of Turks Across Empires (in Turkish) on NTV Radio, April 2021.

Review Excerpts for Turks Across Empires

"path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] 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... 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."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities of Russia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"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…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Le projet est particulièrement ambitieux et l’ouvrage est très riche, reposant sur des sources en plusieurs langues...Meyer offre une contribution très importante à l’étude des conflits, des tensions et des dissensions au sein même du monde musulman de l’Empire russe, dans la région de la Volga, entre le clergé institutionnalisé des Assemblées spirituelles et de nouvelles élites intellectuelles ou marchandes qui tentent de s’octroyer, au gré des soubresauts de la vie politique, un espace grandissant de liberté."--Bulletin des Annales Islamologiques

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review