This deeply researched and carefully written monograph focuses on the so-called “Muslim Question” as a window into “the nature and possibilities and consequences of state-sponsored reform in Russia” (1) in the late imperial period, from the Crimean War (1853-6) to the collapse of the tsarist empire in 1917. Based on central archival sources and documents from local tsarist government agencies in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Simferopol, Kazan, and Tashkent, as well as collections in Berlin and Paris, Campbell's analysis of Russian policies toward Muslims spans the empire.

Campbell presents the Muslim Question as one of several major issues Russia faced after its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853-56), when state officials launched the Great Reforms. Accompanying debates about how best to modernize and unify Russia, a land-based empire that was both internally diverse and officially an Orthodox Christian state, in the context of rising nationalism and national unification in Europe, and the emergence of a pan-Islamic movement, also shaped the period. Campbell defines the Muslim question as “a historical term. . . [that] comprised a complex set of ideas and concerns that centered on the problems of reimagining and governing the tremendously diverse Russian empire in the face of challenges presented by the modernizing world” (1).

In addition to the Muslim Question, Campbell notes that post-Crimean War Russia faced the Constitutional Question, Clerical Question, Jewish Question, Nationality Question, Parish Question, Peasant Question, Polish Question, Russian Question, and School Question (and, beyond the domestic context, the Eastern Question). The formulation of “alien questions” at this time, Campbell argues, reveals the extent to which Russian officials had begun to see internal diversity as a challenge to imperial unity, and non-Orthodox groups in national terms (6). Campbell considers the Muslim Question in relation to the Polish and Russian Questions to suggest that tsarist officials’ attitudes and policies toward Muslims were necessarily shaped by their encounters with other non-Orthodox and non-Russian imperial populations, and as part of the larger debate about how to reconcile Russia's historical heterogeneity with the need to modernize.

At the same time, Campbell wants to show that the Muslim Question was a unique and central concern for the Russian state. She notes that after Russia's devastating military defeat against Japan in 1905, the Muslim Question became “one of the most polemical and highly charged issues in the periodical press, in the Duma [parliament], at missionary congresses and conferences, and in special government commissions” (9). She reminds us that Muslims were Russia's largest non-Orthodox confessional population (about 17 million by 1900). The origins of the Muslim Question are identified in urgent debates about Tatar “apostasies” from Orthodoxy to Islam in the Volga-Ural region. These debates indicate that Tsarist officials equated Russianness with Orthodoxy and feared the implications of the spread of Islam and the potential loss of Orthodoxy's dominant position in Russia's culture.

Empirically, this book covers familiar ground. In the past 20 years historians such as Robert Crews, Robert Geraci, Agnès Kefeli-Clay, Adeeb Khalid, Charles Steinwedel, Mustafa Tuna, and Paul Werth have published studies that explore Muslim experiences of Russian governance and integration in the Volga-Ural region and Turkestan during the late imperial period. Recent debates in these publications have focused on whether nineteenth-century tsarist policy toward Muslims was concerned primarily with accommodating difference—as Robert Crews argued in his 2006 book For Prophet and Tsar—or policing it. Some scholars have critiqued Crews's case as a pro-empire, over-generalized argument that underestimates the Orientalism and Islamophobia of tsarist officials. But few scholars have attempted to propose a counterargument that explains the how and why of Russian policy toward Muslims. For example, Mustafa Tuna's 2015 book Imperial Russia's Muslims, seeks to challenge Crews not by proposing an alternative theory for Russia, but instead by eschewing even the possibility of an overarching argument about the ability of empires to accommodate difference, due to their necessary messiness and complexity, and proposing instead a conceptual model for studying complex human interactions in imperial settings.

Refreshingly, Campbell helps to advance our understanding of Russian policy toward Muslims by engaging seriously with the arguments of both Crews and his critics, and not seeing them as mutually exclusive. She reconciles this scholarly debate based on a careful contextualization of state officials’ discussions about Muslims in the late imperial era of reform, revolution, and war. Campbell argues that late imperial Russian officials’ views on Islam and Muslims were complex. “Fears of Islam. . . were also mixed with hope,” and officials saw both threats and opportunities in Russia's Muslim communities (13-14). And while Orientalism and Islamophobia sometimes shaped Russian policies toward Muslims, Campbell stresses the context of modernization (by which she apparently means social and economic reforms) as decisive in shaping these policies. This context, she argues, “explains the often contradictory and indecisive Russian views and policies toward Islam in the last decades of the tsarist regime” (14).

Crucial to Campbell's argument is her discussion of how Russia differed historically in key ways from other European empires. Unlike Western European empires, she notes, “Russia's land-based empire evolved over centuries as a socially and culturally diverse political system.” One effect of this was that “many educated Russians” believed in the power of reform and modernization to reduce differences and unify the population (216).

This book, while vast in its thematic and geographic scope, is impressively grounded in extensive reading of scholarship on late imperial Russian history. This is a strength as well as a weakness of the book. So much is covered, often from high altitude, that it is not always clear which information Campbell wants to foreground for the reader, or where her original analysis lies. She uses the shorthand “modernization” throughout the book without defining it. Those unfamiliar with Russian imperial politics will have trouble keeping track of the dozens of tsarist officials she includes as actors in her story, and some may wish that she had done more to theorize about why Russian officials’ views about Muslims varied in the late imperial period, beyond citing the various internal and external events that influenced them. Her efforts to be careful and nuanced in allowing for the diversity of views among tsarist officials sometimes come at the expense of a clear argument.

Notwithstanding these issues, Campbell's rich study raises many questions about how Russia's internal diversity shaped its peculiar late nineteenth-century history as an empire trying to modernize, foster a collective sense of belonging among its heterogeneous subjects, and capitalize on its diversity while also preserving Orthodox privilege and predominance. For instance, Campbell notes that many Russian officials lamented the “loss” of hundreds of thousands of Muslims to the Ottoman Empire in the decades after the Crimean War, in part because it was “damaging to the self-image of Russia as a civilized European country, as well as to Russia's diplomatic efforts to protect Christians living in the Ottoman empire” (27). One wonders, did some tsarist officials also regret Russia's loss of some 2 million Jewish subjects to emigration in this same period, for political and strategic reasons?

This fine book is particularly recommended for courses on comparative empires, Muslims in world history, and European imperialism.