Across the Caucasian meridian: European empire, Islamic sciences, and concurrence in global history

This article reads European and Islamic-world sciences within and against each other, rearticulating the global history of science in Edward Said’s terms of concurrence and discrepancy rather than encounter and incorporation. The stakes are especially high for sciences implicated in European hostility against the so-called Orient. One example is a series of armed geodetic surveys sent to measure the rim of the Russian Empire’s expanded Caucasian colony in 1829, as its military command moved to remake the region around Mt. Ararat along ethno-religious lines. The “religious sorting” of Muslims and Christians not only precipitated genocidal violence in the region but also reflected an emerging world order drawn along a cultural and political meridian dividing East and West. This study works across that line, what I call the Caucasian meridian. Neither mediation nor appropriation account for the Caucasian case, where “go-betweens” and local knowledge are not as salient in the Russian and German records as in comparable colonial enterprises. In a move beyond “brokered worlds,” the approach here juxtaposes multiple, overlapping cultures of measurement: one coordinated at the Russian Empire’s premier site of astronomy and military-topographic training, the observatory in Dorpat (Tartu), the other based in a sacred geography that linked the Caucasus to centers of power, learning, and worship across West Asia, from Isfahan and Istanbul to Mecca. Their concurrence is vividly illustrated in the Russian Imperial surveyors who set up in Sunni mosques and the Shi‘a writer Abbas Quli Agha Bakikhanov who, in turn, sat Muslim readers in Dorpat-style observatories.