Intermediaries, Model Subjects, or Lost Souls?: Assessing the Transformations of North Caucasians Converted or Trained by Western European Expatriates

• In Event: Modern Challenges of the Russian Empire: Nationalism, Imperial Governance, and Hybridity

Abstract

With the encouragement of tsarist authorities in the nineteenth-century Caucasus, Scottish missionaries and German colonists exerted didactic influence upon small numbers of indigenous residents. A handful were converted to Christianity, others were trained in the technical or business skills the Europeans valued. This paper examines the cases of three men-- Kattı Geray, Mirza Muhammad Ali Kazim-beg, and Akhmet Saukhalov—to ask how we should assess the “success” or “failure” of their transformations through Western tutelage and Russian oversight. Are such reified categories useful for our understanding of complex imperial encounters, or should we instead embrace the ambiguities of hybrid colonial offspring?

Author

• Stephen Badalyan Riegg, Texas A&M U