‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate

"I would frame Donald Rayfield’s Seditious and Sinister Tribe as an example of an important historical study that destabilizes our very West-centric vision of international relations and world history. There was another important book that came out a few years ago by Ayse Zarakol that did the same. It was called Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders . We live with a very Western-oriented view of how the world operates and how international society evolved after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It’s about Western values, it’s very Eurocentric, there’s colonialism. This is all part of our vision of how the world operates. If you read A Seditious and Sinister Tribe , all of a sudden you understand that there were other important imperial formations and political powers about which we have forgotten entirely, or which we cannot appreciate because we don’t know much of that history. The book shows how the Crimean khanate, which existed between the 14th and 18th centuries, was an important geopolitical power that played a role in economic and political dynamics in the region, along with the Ottomans, the Russians, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. There was complex diplomacy between these powers. The Crimean khanate made decisions on the economic flows, on slavery, etc. For four centuries, it was an important political formation. The book also looks at what happened after. In the 19th century, Russia’s imperial drive brought it to Central Asia. With Crimea, it started even earlier, in the 18th century, with Catherine the Great extending the Russian Empire as the Ottoman Empire declined. That led to the Crimean khanate being gobbled up. Then, in the 20th century, there were the Stalinist policies towards the Crimean Tatars. They were driven out of Crimea and sent into exile in 1944. The story then brings us to 2014 and the annexation of Crimea. There is this historical timeline of a declining community, a nation that’s under pressure from the Russian imperial drive that continues up until today, you could say. But most of the book is about the Crimean khanate as an important geopolitical actor over those four centuries. It gives the political context of what was there before, but also brings up questions of where we’re at now. How did we get here? What happens to nations over time? How long will Europe, America, and Britain be around? How long is this setup going to continue, and what will happen a couple of centuries into the future? The book shows the impermanence, the change, and the dynamics in global affairs, with the focus on the specific successions, politics, and economics of that part of the world and a political entity that we in Europe don’t know much about. Absolutely, you have to read all of them! I hope I’ve done them all justice. They’re incredible books."