Until Houri Berberian published her monograph Roving Revolutionaries, the question had been: what was the role of Armenian revolutionaries in the early early twentieth-century revolutions that shook the Russian, Ottoman, and Qajar Empires? Since then, it has been: how did they connect those three revolutions? In a magisterial example of histoires croiseés, Berberian focuses on the South Caucasus, which was, following Roland Wenzlhuemer’s ideas, the epitome of “time-space compression” and a “playground and battleground of revolutionary ideas” which permeated the empires (p. 84). It was, the author demonstrates, through technological developments such as steamships, railways, and telegraph lines that the revolutionaries’ “worlds simultaneously shrank and expanded” (p. 43). In this shrinking and expanding world, revolutionaries whom the author defines as “connectors” (p. 19) and “border-crossing activists” (p. 41) not only facilitated the revolutions through their mobility and circulation of arms and ideas in print but also connected the three revolutions—and hence the empires—as they circulated global ideas of constitutionalism, federalism, and socialism across borders.

Berberian’s work substantially expands the existing scholarship on the subject, particularly supplementing the earlier works of scholars including Anahide Ter Minassian and Ronald Suny. Suny, for instance, has pointed out the tension between socialism and the national character of the acts of the Armenian revolutionaries and the eclectic character of their ideologies.Footnote ¹ Likewise, Ter Minassian, in her seminal works on the subject, highlights the internationalist emphasis of the Armenian revolutionaries and evaluates their participation in the three revolutions of the Caucasus as a tactic to materialize their goals. Moreover, she has drawn attention to the central role that the press played in the Armenian revolutionary activities.Footnote ² Berberian, in the Roving Revolutionaries, adds to these within the connected contexts of the three empires and the global intellectual and revolutionary milieus. Moreover, Berberian’s authoritative use of both unpublished and published sources is a significant contribution to the field, and the way in which she gathers her data from dispersed sources over wide geographies in itself shows how global these local and regional histories were.

The first chapter of Roving Revolutionaries is an extensive introduction in which the author discusses the potential explanatory power of histoires croiseés or connected histories, and its advantages over other methodologies, particularly that of comparative history. In the book, however, the reader notices two levels of connectedness. The first one is the physical connectedness of the three empires; the second, the connectedness of global, regional, and local dynamics. Both of these, as the rest of the book demonstrates, were facilitated by the mobility of the revolutionaries and their agency in the circulation of global ideas as they translated them, both literally and metaphorically, into local and regional vernaculars.

The main body of Roving Revolutionaries, Chapters 2 to 4, expands on these connected histories. In the second chapter of the book, “Active and Moving Spirits of Disturbance,” Berberian shows how global, regional, and local dynamics intermingled through global technological developments, revolutionary cells, and party organizations across the regions. The author fleshes out these global technological developments in communication and transportation by interweaving them with the life stories and activities of individual revolutionaries, connecting macro- to micro-level analyses. For instance, the reader will be fascinated to learn how the steamship facilitated the mobility of individual revolutionaries like Stepan Zorian and others across Europe and into the Caucasus; enabled the circulation of Droshak, the organ of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) or publications of the Young Turks; and created networks of party cells in Tbilisi, Baku, Trebizond, and Tabriz. Berberian thus leads the reader to think about technological developments beyond simple modernization of infrastructure, and shows the potential for study of their impact in shaping political and social worlds.

In Chapters 3 and 4, Berberian builds upon the technological developments she examines in the second chapter to understand how they facilitated the circulation of certain global ideas. In the revolutionary space of the three empires, she discusses constitutionalism and federalism in the third chapter and socialism in the fourth. Constitutionalism, the author shows, was enmeshed with the ideas of federalism among the Armenian revolutionaries, who translated these ideas into the realities on the ground. Yet, there was not a unified opinion about either of these ideas, as each empire had its own dynamics. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, some socialists, particularly the ARF, interpreted the constitution positively as a “secret of strength” and a cure to all ills, whereas for others, particularly the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party, the constitution was a way to hide the “murderous reality” and was autocratic in nature. In Iran, however, the constitution had aroused greater hopes and emphasized an awakening from the Ottoman Empire to China. In all three revolutions, as Berberian demonstrates, the ARF played a central role with their knowledge of the constitution and with their collaborations with other groups. It was in this context of the translation of constitutionalism into the local dynamics and realities of Armenian communities in these empires that federalism, a global idea of the time due to American and Swiss examples, made its way into debates on constitutionalism. Federalism was seen as a way to solve the national question in the multiethnic empires of the nineteenth century and was presented as a way to deter separatism, a view also shared by some Balkan socialists. Yet, these views were not immune to criticism either. Some socialists demanded territorial rights rather than cultural ones, while others criticized federalism for elevating the national question at the expense of class struggle.

Thus, in the fourth chapter, “Socialism across Imperial Frontiers,” Berberian further discusses the ways in which socialism, the foundational idea for the Armenian revolutionaries, was translated into local contexts. The author shows how “deeply enmeshed [nationalist ideas] were with socialist ideas” (p. 146) in the period. It was also a period in which many socialists across the globe, not only Armenians, dealt with the national question and understood the nation in socialist terms. Berberian skillfully demonstrates how this phenomenon led to Armenian revolutionaries’ eclectic use of various socialist ideas they borrowed from a range of thinkers, from Russian populists to Austrian and French socialists, among whom Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, and Jean Jaurès were of prime importance. For instance, Bebel’s emphasis on possession of land allowed Armenian socialists to reconcile socialism with a certain form of nationalism, and Jaurès’ insertion of politics into the Marxist framework permitted ARF to justify its reformism while still placing emphasis on the class struggle and labor rights. Meanwhile, ideas borrowed from Russian populists led them to form the necessary links between the agrarian question and socialism. Thus, as Berberian demonstrates, Armenian revolutionaries consciously and out of necessity moved away from orthodox Marxism to its derivatives to tackle the national question. They successfully brought these ideas into the orbit of political discussions during the constitutional regimes in the three empires.

Houri Berberian’s Roving Revolutionaries is a sound example of the extensive research necessary to carry out the difficult task of writing histoires croiseés of three empires in the early twentieth century. As Sebouh Aslanian’s seminal work on the Armenian merchant communities in the early modern world has shown, this methodology provides excellent opportunities to study mobile groups and their cross-regional actions within a global context;Footnote ³ and Berberian’s study of mobility of the revolutionaries and the circulation of the global ideas well proves this point. Despite its usefulness in connecting the local to the global, one still wonders about how this methodology can be used to understand the relations on the ground. For instance, between the concrete activities of the Armenian revolutionaries among the local populations and other revolutionary groups, beyond their shared concerns and ideological positions in their periodicals, for the success of the revolutions. Regardless, one would find Roving Revolutionaries as an example of excellent research and creative scholarship as it offers significant methodological contributions to the study of these empires; it also makes a much-needed intervention into the field of Armenian studies by showing how Armenians were actors of global history, not merely its victims.