Imperial Settlement & the Oil Economy §

Capital, oil and class

Russian rule of the eastern Caucasus stabilised after the 1864 conclusion of the Caucasian War. The 1870s opened the Baku oil industry: the Baku Oil District law (1872) ended the state monopoly; the Branobel partnership (Nobel brothers, 1879) and Rothschild capital arrived; by 1901 Baku was producing approximately half the world's oil. Ethnically the industry stratified: Armenian and Russian capital (Mantashev, Lianozov, the Nobels and Rothschilds) and the petty bourgeoisie; Caucasian Tatar (Azerbaijani) and Persian labour. The 1897 Russian Imperial census gave Baku as roughly 36% Azerbaijani, 35% Russian, 17% Armenian, with substantial Persian, Lezgin and Jewish minorities.

Two nationalisms in one century

The intellectual founders of modern Azerbaijani secular culture worked in this period. Mirza Fatali Akhundov (1812-78), who had settled in Tiflis as a Russian Imperial translator from Sheki in the 1830s, wrote the first secular plays in any Turkic language in the 1850s and the explicitly anti-clerical Letters of Kamal-od-Dowleh in 1865. Hasan bey Zardabi founded Əkinçi, the first Azerbaijani-Turkic-language newspaper, in Baku in 1875. The Maarifçilik (Enlightenment) movement that grew from these foundations was Caucasian-Iranic-Turkic, not Pan-Turkist; it oriented toward Tiflis, Tabriz and Saint Petersburg, not Istanbul. The reading list of educated late-Imperial Azerbaijani intellectuals was Russian and Persian, with French and German via Russian translation.

The parallel Armenian intellectual revival ran through the Tiflis press, the Mkhitarist congregation in Venice (founded 1717 but flowering in the 19th c.), and the post-1828 Etchmiadzin revival under the Catholicosate. The Hunchakian (1887, founded in Geneva) and Dashnaktsutyun (1890, founded in Tiflis) parties brought these currents into organised politics. Both nationalisms were products of the same century, in the same Russian Imperial space, drawing on overlapping European source-texts.

The institutional record

The Caucasian Viceroyalty's Caucasian Calendar (Кавказский календарь) gazetteers, published annually from 1846 to 1917, are the principal demographic and administrative record of the period. The 1897 All-Russia Census is the foundational systematic enumeration. The infrastructure of the period included the Tiflis-Baku railway (completed 1883), the Tiflis-Kars line (1899), and the Baku-Batum oil pipeline (1907). Tiflis became the largest Armenian city of the empire (~36% Armenian by 1897, the largest single ethnic group); Baku became the largest concentration of Russian capital, Caucasian-Tatar labour, and a substantial Armenian merchant class.

Tensions accumulating

The same industrialisation that produced Baku's wealth produced its first major inter-communal violence: the 1905 Baku massacres sit at the very end of this period, prefiguring the 1918 March Days. The Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire (1894-96) were across the imperial border but their repercussions were felt across the Caucasus, with Ottoman Armenian refugees flowing into the Russian provinces and the Hunchakian-Dashnak political activity that followed.

The atlas's reading of this period is that it laid the cultural infrastructure of two nations, in close proximity, with overlapping economic interests and parallel political consciousness, before the political instruments to manage their conflict had been built. The next epoch (1905-1917) is when those instruments were tested and largely failed.