The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War by Alfred J. Rieber (review)

Alfred J. Rieber’s book deals mainly with five dynastic, multicultural Eurasian empires built by conquest, from whose histories he has attempted to fashion a coherent explanation for most of Europe’s wars in the Early Modern and Modern periods. He has produced an encyclopedic political history of mid-fifteenth- through twentieth-century Eastern Europe and much of Asia (except for the Arab and Indian worlds), with many forays into the Middle Ages and an emphasis on the period since 1815. The book includes an imposing wealth of factual material and comparisons, and a vast array of footnotes covering secondary literature in many languages on practically every important question related to the rise and decline of empires. The author’s hypothesis is that the rise, decline, and collapse of his empires is best understood by focusing on their struggle to control their peripheries or borderlands, and on the wars that resulted from that struggle. The validation of his hypothesis rests on, among other things, his definition and use of the concept of “Eurasian borderlands.”

Europe and Asia as separate concepts, embracing a cultural as well as a geographic distinction, have never been replaced in common use. This is true despite the proposal by many physical geographers since the mid-nineteenth century to envision Europe and Asia as one continent, Eurasia – a single land mass uninterrupted in any significant way by the Urals or by the Don River (the latter feature had been used for that purpose from Greek antiquity to the eighteenth century). The idea of a single land mass has been both bolstered and limited since the 1960s by the acceptance of the theory of an underlying Eurasian tectonic plate that extends from Iceland and the Azores to Kamchatka and Japan and is bounded on the south by the African, Arabian, and Indian plates. At the start of the twentieth century, the British geographer Halford MacKinder argued that control of continental Eurasia’s heartland, then occupied by the Russian Empire, was the key to political control of the entire land mass. The Eurasianists of the 1920s – Russian intellectuals in exile after the 1917–21 Revolution – limited the term Eurasia to MacKinder’s heartland, which they claimed was an historico-cultural space distinct from both Europe and Asia. A variant of their usage has become popular since 1991 throughout much of the former Soviet Union and among Western scholars; it was adopted by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2010 when that group renamed itself the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Rieber uses the term Eurasia somewhat differently from all of the above by including both the western borderlands of the tsarist empire and most of the post–World War II Soviet bloc in East Central and Southeast Europe – a region he labels “West” or “western” Eurasia. He also uses “western Eurasia” to describe the nomadic Kalmyks’ new home in the mid-seventeenth century on the steppe north of the Caspian Sea (P. 360). The author’s implicit definition of Eurasia is linked closely to the steppe (the mostly treeless grasslands that run from Manchuria to the middle Danube) and its nomadic groups. The nomads’ equine culture and the mobile source of food provided by their herds “gave them a military advantage over the sedentary population on the margins of the grasslands and steppe” for two millennia. Their advantage was eliminated “only with the gunpowder revolution and the manufacture of effective firearms perfected under the centralized leadership of the multicultural agrarian empires.” Rieber gives pride of place among the steppe nomads to the Mongols, who first created “a vast land empire stretching over the 6,000-mile longitudinal expanse of Eurasia” from Russia to Korea and indluding the...