9 The Discourse of Empiretransformed folk tales and ethnographic reports into literature, ex-
plained to a reviewer in the 1880s: “I saw that the highland [mtiuli] re-
gion of Georgia was barely considered to be Georgian, and I tried to
make these people known to Georgians, to acquaint the public with
their innermost feelings, which they have since ancient times devoted
to the common cause.”^30 Giorgi Tsereteli and numerous others de-
picted “frontier” inhabitants such as the Khevsur as “well-off and dis-
tinguished tillers of the soil, brave and freedom-loving” peasants who
stood their ground in the face of Georgia’s many historic enemies.^31
Georgian nativists claimed to see Georgians everywhere on the edges
of Georgia, in need of cultural, religious, and linguistic direction and
support.^32 They appealed for attention to the matter from the new
scholarly societies and from Georgian educated society generally, and
lobbied the imperial state to school their frontier peoples in the
Georgian language and culture. While the Russian journey to the impe-
rial frontier, as was common to Europeans in the colonial context, was
not just a movement through space but also backward in time, the
Georgian exploration of this frontier was a journey to a specifically
Georgian past. Georgia’s historic dilemmas on the frontier of Islam
provided a local colouring and urgency to Russia’s visions of empire in
the Caucasus. The nativism that emerged as a product of the encounter
with Islam was a version of the empire that foreshadowed the Soviet
ethno-territorial state of the twentieth century.
Russia’s growing consciousness of its exotic borderlands and peo-
ples, evident in the Caucasus especially from the 1840s and 1850 s,
meant a rethinking of the historic practices and mentality of what
Geoffrey Hosking has called the “Asiatic imperial style.”^33 Tradition-
ally, diverse “men of power” offered loyalty to the throne in exchange
for local wealth and privilege.^34 The introductory discussion of the
history of the conquest addresses historic traditions of allegiance and
“subjecthood” (poddanstvo) on the frontier. Loyalty to the “nation”
was irrelevant in a world of big states, small peoples, and local elites
accustomed to careful alliances with the surrounding empires. The
emergence of new and more modern ideas about civic participation
and the social order inspired genuine efforts to think through the na-
ture of the multi-ethnic community and the role of Russia and its em-
pire in its eastern borderlands.
Several issues form the background to this rethinking of empire.
Educated society and officialdom reacted negatively to the long and
destructive history of military conquest and exile in the North
Caucasus, hardly a sign of “enlightened” imperial policy, and they
were frustrated by the failures of imperial integration. The next chap-
ter describes this history, the background to the efforts to reimagine