E-Books →Russian–Arab Worlds A Documentary History

Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars, and spies. A set of specially commissioned maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover.