XConclusions
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several different
forces disrupted the status quo in Iran and its Caucasian marches.
After decades of disunity and internecine warfare, a new dynasty
overcame various local rulers to gather many fragments of the Safavi
empire under a single centralized authority. This fit into a well-estab-
lished cycle of empire building and dissolution. A more novel and ul-
timately more unsettling change was the permanent involvement of
Russia in the affairs of this region. The shifting rivalries of the Napo-
leonic wars were also mirrored in this area, as France and Britain and,
to a lesser degree, Russia tried to use pressure in this quarter to af-
fect the outcome of the wars in Europe. Caught in the middle of this
multifaceted rivalry were the inhabitants of the borderlands, who
tried to find some balance between the ideal of maintaining their in-
dependence and the necessity of dealing with more powerful outside
forces.
Russian expansion in this part of Asia, for all its momentous con-
sequences, was more the product of accident than of a carefully con-
sidered master plan. A series of decisions of limited scope designed
to meet specific circumstances achieved a cumulative power that was
greater than the sum of the parts. Tentative, not particularly success-
ful efforts in the reign of Catherine the Great to use parts of the
Caucasus as a base of operations against the Ottoman Empire and as
a commercial base (also including parts of Iran's Caspian coast) for
increased trade with Asia were transformed into a crusade to uphold
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