Lost khanates and the pre-Russian frame

Qajar Persia controlled much of the eastern South Caucasus before the Russian advance of the early nineteenth century. The khanates of Erivan, Nakhichevan, Karabakh, Ganja, Shirvan, Baku and others were not modern national units. They were dynastic, fiscal and military jurisdictions in which Armenian Christian, Turkic Muslim, Persian, Kurdish and other communities lived under layered authority. This matters because later national narratives often project modern national borders backward onto a khanate world that did not work that way. editorial

The Russo-Persian wars ended that order. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 ceded several khanates to Russia, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828 ceded Erivan and Nakhichevan. Turkmenchay also enabled organised Armenian migration from Persia into Russian-held territory. Armenian narratives often remember this as return to historical eastern Armenia; Azerbaijani narratives often remember it as the demographic beginning of Armenian political predominance. Both readings compress a more complicated imperial process into national causality. contested

Qajar Persia remained important after losing the khanates because Iranian Azerbaijan, especially Tabriz, Khoy and Salmas, continued to supply migration, trade, clerical networks and refuge. The new Russian-Persian border did not cut social life cleanly. It transformed it into a borderland. For the atlas, Qajar Persia is therefore the pre-Russian frame without which the 1828 migration, Erivan's demographic shift and Nakhichevan's treaty history cannot be understood.