In the first decade of the twentieth century, socialist and national liberationist volunteers moved across borders to join in the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–11), and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. United by shared ideas and visions of political remaking, these revolutionaries lent each other aid at critical moments, securing some victories against autocratic resistance.
By the outbreak of the First World War, the revolutionaries’ transnational solidarity had fractured. Ethnic tensions and competing national interests divided former allies, leading to conflict and, ultimately, genocide. Yet remnants of this earlier internationalism persisted in places like Iran’s northern Gilan province, where Mirza Kuchek Khan’s Jangal Insurgency (1914–21) formed alliances with both the Central Powers and the Bolsheviks. This talk examines the Jangalis’ continuing attempts at internationalism, asking how they understood Iran’s role within a broader revolutionary landscape and why their coalition-building efforts ultimately failed. In so doing, it interrogates the end of transnationalism in Gilan, and asks how Iranian monarchy withstood the political upheavals that remade the Soviet and Turkish republics.
Kayhan A. Nejad is the Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Nejad’s research centers on the linkages between Iran, the greater Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. His book manuscript, From the Oilfield to the Battlefield: Revolutionary Internationalism on the Imperial Borderlands, draws on sources in Persian, Russian, and modern and Ottoman Turkish to proffer a new explanation for the re-establishment of monarchy in Iran in 1921. His articles appear or are forthcoming in Slavic Review, Iranian Studies, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Choon Hwee Kwoh is Assistant Professor of Ottoman history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In her first book, The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service (Yale University Press, 2024) she examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors—the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.