The Karapapaks and their shifting loyalties on the imperial borderlands during the nineteenth century

Abstract

The Karapapaks were one of the less known native Turkish ethnic groups of the Transcaucasia, who overwhelmingly took refuge in the Ottoman and Qajar Empires in the late 1820s, after the expansion of Tsarist Russia into their homelands. This paper analyses how the literature regarding Karapapak movements and society was overwhelmingly shaped by selective, essentialist, and anachronistic approaches by some historians in Turkey and Iran. While the former determined that they were a loyal pro-Ottoman and pro-Sunni Karapapak society, the latter constructed an opposing pro-Iranian and pro-Shiite narrative. This paper deconstructs both approaches, and asserts that the collective ethnic and sectarian identities of this society played a secondary role in regards to influencing their cross-border movements. This paper argues that the approach of the current literature cannot explain this borderland society’s perpetual, multiple and multi-directional cross-border movement. Instead, the Karapapaks often manoeuvred the frontiers of the empires, and defected to another empire when it was necessary to, first and foremost, satisfy the needs of their own society, over those of any imperial allies.