Review of Donald Rayfield's 'Edge of Empires. a History of Georgia'
Edge of Empires. A History of Georgia Donald Rayfield London: Reaktion Books, 2012, 479 pp, £35 hardback. Rayfield (hereafter DR) began his Slavonic Review assessment of Ronald Suny’s The Making of the Georgian Nation (Tauris, 1989; 2nd edition, Indiana University Press, 1994) thus: ‘Any publisher commissioning a book of this title would expect by right a work that began with the connections of the Georgians with ancient Anatolia, the presumed Indo-Europeans and Semites of the upper Euphrates, as well as the autochthonous Caucasians, and then went on to deal with the Kartvelian peoples (the Svans, Laz, Mingrelians and Georgians), moving into recorded history to discuss the effects of Greeks, Iranians, Mongols, Turks, and Russians on Georgia’s genetic stock, language, culture, sense of identity, finally examining the relationship of the nation to the state, its own and its oppressors’ and protectors’, concluding with an examination of the very disturbing resurgence of Georgian nationalism, even chauvinism, and some relevant predictions.’ He went on to criticise Suny’s devoting five times more space to the preceding century than to the previous two millennia and concluded: ‘A book still needs to be written on the unfinished making of the Georgian nation; Suny’s work gives us some leads and some material, but will be remembered only as a precursor.’ And so, readers, approaching the book with their own perspectives, must judge how far in their eyes DR has succeeded in meeting both their expectations and the standards of his own template. Drawing on sources in a variety of languages, he has certainly rebalanced Suny’s weighting, for the first 305 pages bring us to 1885, leaving only 95 pages to take the story up to (pre-election) 2012.
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