In this excellent study, Danielle Ross explores the history of a “rural gentry” of Tatar pious ʿulama’ and merchant families in the Volga-Kama area whose sons combined business and piety with diplomacy and other services for the empire, thereby contributing to Russia's colonial expansion. The Russian pacification of the Bashkirs in the eighteenth century was accompanied by the transfer of Tatar settlers from the Volga to the South Urals, where they established villages and Islamic centres of learning. In the absence of a Tatar nobility, these communities were often led by ʿulama’. Under the protection of the Russian army, Tatars assumed the role of Muslim middlemen, and acted as cultural leaders over the indigenous Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim populations. Tatar long-distance traders sponsored Tatar Islamic institutions also in West Siberia and Turkestan, selling among other things thousands of Qurans and Islamic primers printed in Kazan since the early 1800s. The extent to which Tatars were operating as Russia's vanguard in the Steppe is evident from the fact that the imperial Tatar Muftiate that Catherine the Great established in 1788 was located not in Kazan but in the new frontier town of Orenburg, close to the Kazakhs, whose aristocrats hired Tatar ʿulama’ for educating their children. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century the Russian administration began to see Islam increasingly as a threat to the empire, and as a competitor to Russia's own civilizing mission. Accordingly, the space for Tatar middlemen was reduced. Bashkirs and Kazakhs gradually liberated themselves from Tatar Islamic tutelage, and by 1917 they came up with projects to establish their own national units in the envisaged new Russia, which materialized in the republics of the USSR. The book thus follows the expansion of a Tatar religious, educational and economic network that ended together with the empire that stimulated and protected it.

Danielle Ross, through an impressive array of Tatar and Russian printed and archival sources, analyses the history of communities, schools and the muftiate; Islamic thought as expressed in historical and theological writings by Tatar ‘ulama’; Tatar settlement practice in unison with imperial policies; the resistance of the Bashkirs in several uprisings (partly under “warrior scholars”); the economic history of Russia's frontier region; the fluidity of imperial policies towards Islam; the emergence of Tatar Muslim modernism (Jadidism); and finally, political activism and national identities. The author strikes an excellent balance between micro history (zooming in on characteristic personalities and families) and macro analysis (changing attitudes, networks, political constellations and alliances).

With this perspective (pioneered by Allen Frank, in several monographs), Ross offers a counterpoint to studies that emphasize the importance of Tatar intellectual links to the Ottoman Empire, and the impact of European thought (in particular James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian–Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914, Oxford University Press, 2014). Importantly, the present book is also a powerful contribution to the ongoing debunking of Jadidism. Until recently, most Tatar, Soviet/Russian, Turkish, Tatar and Western historians have argued that the 1880s saw the emergence of a brand new (“Jadid”) and neatly identifiable movement of Tatar Muslim intellectuals who, under the banner of progress and enlightenment, attacked and replaced the stagnant “traditional” Islamic culture, by introducing Tatar/Muslim newspapers and by reforming the madrasa education system according to “modern” lines. As Danielle Ross demonstrates, change had been underway long before Ismail Gasprinskii's first “Muslim” newspaper and his educational reforms reached Kazan in the 1880s. Several major Tatar madrasas in the Volga-Kama region carried out their own reforms (including the introduction of female classes), and their hundreds of students had access to the Russian and Ottoman newspapers. There is limited archival documentation available about these schools, but Ross suggests that these madrasas produced more graduates than the labour market could absorb, and the ensuing frustration made these jobless graduates adopt Gasprinskii's Jadid rhetoric of progress against the generation of their masters. The Jadids thus embodied the educational success of a system that the Jadids claimed was inept. At the same time the secular-minded Gasprinskii was not central to this discourse; rather, many leading Kazan Tatar Jadids developed what we today would call Salafi convictions. The depiction of Tatar Jadidism as a “secular” movement paving the way to nationalism and socialism is a Soviet invention.

I find most of the arguments here compelling (and inviting of further inquiry), and have been amazed by the power of this book. Of course, Ross is far from claiming that the Kazan Tatars hoped to establish a “Tatar Empire” or protectorate in Russia, as the book's title might suggest. Rather, the Tatars maintained highly flexible networks, with personal relations to influential Tsarist officers and orientalists being key. Indeed, Ross describes many of her Tatar protagonists in the Volga basin as members of a “Machkaran network”, arguing they cherished a common identity going back to a few scholars and students who, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, worked at the small madrasa of a village called Maskara in what is today the Republic of Tatarstan. But this appellation is an innovation of the author: in the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Tatar biographical sources I have never encountered the term “Machkaran” as an extended group name for people other than the few who actually hailed from tiny Maskara or worked there. There were many other centres of learning, and Tatar students and teachers were mobile and collected affiliations and work experience from many madrasas in the broader Tatar region, adding to earlier links. It seems that for the sake of her argument Ross puts little emphasis on the wide Naqshbandiyya Sufi links that created strong ties also beyond the Kazan Tatar family/patronage clusters. In fact, two of the three huge Tatar madrasas that Ross singles out as “reforming before Jadidism” were run by wealthy Tatar Sufi masters – Muhammad Dhakir al-Chistawi from Chistopol, and ‘Ali Tuntari from Tuntar – who had established their reputations by joining Sufi and trade networks reaching as far as the North Caucasus, Central Asia and even India. To emphasize their “deep connection with the Machkaran network” (p. 164) is perhaps not reflecting the whole picture. Well-researched, clearly written, and quite provocative on several fronts, this book will change the state of the art on the role of the Tatars in imperial Russia.