Patrick Anthony: "Empire and Islam at the Caucasian meridian: Reorienting the archive of nineteenth-century survey sciences"

Patrick Anthony

Beskrivning:

This article reorients the archive of a nineteenth-century survey science in the cultural space it measured. Bent on reshaping the Caucasus, not as an interface but an outpost, the Russian empire turned to survey sciences. Around 1829, armed surveys launched from Dorpat (Tartu) in Russia’s Baltic provinces set out to take precise astronomical measures of the empire’s southern frontier, in the borderlands of modern Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The Baltic archive of Caucasian survey says much about the relationship between lines drawn on the land and lines drawn between people, as reports played up ethno-religious enmity amid resettlement and segregation. But surveyors’ tales of difference and demarcation severely obscure the fate of the Caucasian borderland and its place in wider west Asian information orders.

Imperial Russia’s wars on Caucasia—not only against eastern empires, but also against indigenous Muslims—hardened the imagined line between Europe and Asia, or what I call the Caucasian meridian. Working across that meridian, this article explores the contiguity and concurrence of knowledge systems usually set in absolute opposition. At stake is an alternative model of global history that juxtaposes the imperial enterprise with Islamic sciences of cartography, chronometry, and sacred geography. This is to reveal, for example, how European surveyors set up in dozens of Sunnimosques while a Shi’a military translator found Newton in the Quran. Far from the enclosure and demarcation implied by imperial survey, the new colonial order assailed and sometimes realigned but did not displace the Eurasian interface.