Property in Transition: Architecture, Migration, and the Translation of Land Regimes in the Ottoman South Caucasus under the Russian Empire, 1877-1921
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Scholars in different disciplines have pointed out that land and property are key to understanding histories of imperialism, colonialism, and nation-building. However, architectural scholarship has only recently taken up the question of how land and property relations shape the built environment. Through transnational archival work and fieldwork, this dissertation looks at the intertwinement of imperialism, property, and architecture in the rarely studied South Caucasus. Focusing on the seldomly examined period of 1877-1921—from the annexation of the former Ottoman regions of Kars and Batumi by the Russian Empire to the dissolution of the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the emergence of nation-states in the region—this dissertation examines the material transformation and discursive production of the South Caucasus built and ruinated environment. After the Russian annexation, the borderlands of the South Caucasus became a center of power struggles where different imperialisms, as well as socialist and nationalist movements, overlapped and competed which resulted in rapid and consequential urban and rural developments, as well as archaeological excavations. The dissertation underscores how the reorganization of property relations in the region at times enabled capitalist urban and rural development and, at other times, played a role in resistance movements. It brings together underutilized legal and policy documents, property maps, title registers and deeds, court cases, architectural photographs, city plans, and site drawings, as well as the region’s remaining network of infrastructure, settlements, and buildings constructed at the turn of the twentieth century. Pursuing the late nineteenth-century metamorphosis of the region, this dissertation shows that the built and ruinated environment of the South Caucasus is a product of contestations over property and between property regimes during the period in which the region changed hands from the Ottoman to the Russian Empire. It brings together Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian studies; Ottoman and Turkish studies; and postcolonial architectural scholarship around the questions of land and property.