ixpr e fac e: sou rc e s a n d m a p s
This study was made possible by an accidental discovery in the Russian impe-
rial foreign policy archives in Moscow (AVPRI). Looking for material on Rus-
sian Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I found folders of correspondence
about Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of them with blank
tags, indicating that they had never been read by researchers. AVPRI, I later
discovered through a more deliberate search, is a trove of documents on the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hajj, as understood by Russian con-
sular officials posted along routes to Mecca in Ottoman, Persian, and Indian
lands. Reading through these sources, I was struck by the confounding image
of the Russian Empire they conjured—seemingly disparate regions of the
empire were revealed to be closely connected; imperial populations appeared
out of place; and Russian officials operated in parts of the world and in ways not
captured by standard narratives. Gradually, these sources revealed to me a sys-
tem: a cross-border hajj infrastructure that the tsarist state built to support the
movement of Muslims between Russian-ruled lands and Arabia. This infra-
structure had administrative and political coherence of its own, and it seemed
ideally suited to study, given the abundance and accessibility of material.
I wrote this book to document a fascinating and virtually unknown chapter
of Russian history, and in the hope that a history of Russia told through a focus
on human mobility might illuminate how rapid changes sweeping the globe in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped Russia’s history in
ways that conventional domestic frameworks have so far obscured. One of the