Imperialism through Islamic Networks 45support from Russia’s Damascus vice-consul.^85 Titov essentially argued that
Russia could and should embrace a new role as patron of the hajj because it was
good for the empire. It would help Russia integrate newly conquered Muslim
populations that were proving resistant to Russian rule, allow Russia to expand
deeper into Ottoman lands, and undermine the sultan’s prestige and influence,
such as it was, over Russia’s Muslims.
Over the nineteenth century, human mobility influenced imperial policies
and the geographic shape of empires around the world. This observation is cen-
tral to several recent studies, which show the extent to which empires were built
upon the migratory patterns and moving bodies of merchants, missionaries,
labor migrants, and others, and, thus, were shaped by pressures from below.
These histories offer an alternate perspective to standard accounts of empire
building that highlight military conquests and describe a centralized, top-down
process.^86
In Russia, state patronage of the hajj was one way that the government built
new imperial agendas upon inherited mobility networks. This patronage began
on a small scale in the Caucasus and Syria, where Russian officials discovered
the hajj as an important network connecting the two regions, and tapped into it
for their own imperialist goals. Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus, then, was
more than the acquisition of new lands and peoples for the empire. Russia
emerged from this conquest a changed empire, connected to the Ottoman
Empire and other parts of the world in new and strategically important ways.
Russia would not, in the end, conquer Syria or other Arab lands under Otto-
man rule. But from the 1840s onward, it steadily expanded its ground-level
presence and influence into these lands, building new imperial pathways along
hajj routes. Russian support for the hajj began in response to Muslim needs and
demands, stemming from unrest and political instability in Ottoman Syria and
the Ottoman government’s failures to secure the Syrian hajj route. This impetus
came very much from below, from the movement of individual Muslims from
the Caucasus along established routes to Mecca, through Ottoman lands and
back home to Russia. This movement of bodies in turn generated among tsarist
officials who observed and encountered the traffic new ways of thinking about
Russia’s connections to the neighboring Ottoman Empire, and a new imperial
policy centered on the hajj.
New strategic realities thus stimulated a new direction in Russian imperial-
ism. In seizing the Caucasus from the Ottomans and Persians over the first half