Definitions, Methodology, and Argument John P. Ledonne (bio) Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War. 652 pp., maps. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1107043091. $95.00. Alfred Rieber incorporates the now fashionable term “Eurasia” into his new and voluminous political history, which covers that huge land mass from the days of the Mongol Empire to the disintegration that followed World War I. It is an ambitious and impressive work, and full credit must be given to Rieber’s erudition. The book is divided into six chapters, each usually subdivided into another six subchapters devoted to the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Iranian, and Manchu empires, and—in deference to Polish exceptionalism—the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The chapters are arranged by topic (imperial space, ideologies, institutions, frontier encounters, crises, and legacies), the subchapters by territory. Such an organization creates a certain awkward overlapping—something the author himself recognizes in his introduction (3), but that may be inevitable in a work of such scope. The book reads well but requires sustained concentration. It raises some important issues, and it is quite fitting that the editors of Kritika should make it the subject of a forum in which scholars of different fields may offer a rewarding criticism. For my part, rather than offer a systematic critique of the work, I have selected three large issues requiring further discussion and focus on the Russian case, with which I am most familiar. The first major issue has to do with definitions. Nowhere did I find a definition of “Eurasia.” Some scholars, like Robert Kaplan, use the word to mean Europe and Asia.1 Others simply avoid the issue by saying it means the same thing as Central Asia. I use it to mean very much what Halford [End Page 943] Mackinder meant by the Heartland—that is, Russia as its core surrounded by Sweden, Poland, Anatolia, Iran, and Outer Mongolia abutting against the Scandinavian Alps, the Balkans, the Taurus and Zagros mountains, the Hindu Kush, and the Gobi Desert.2 In that sense, Russia partakes of both Europe and Asia. One may disagree with definitions, but the writer must be clear about what s/he means by the terms. It simply will not do to use that term everywhere, including in the title, and take it for granted that the reader will know what it means. There is a reference to the unity of Eurasia (21) in the days of the Mongol Empire: does this mean that Eurasia included China, the Russian lands south of the Volga, the Ukrainian lands, and a Greater Iran including Central Asia? That may be so, but why then should it be called Eurasia? What was the European part? Twenty pages later, we find the term West Eurasia as the title of a subchapter (41); it will never again reappear in the text. It seems that West Eurasia included the Polish and Lithuanian lands, Hungary, even Bohemia. There is a hint that it may also include the Baltic lands conquered by the Teutonic and Livonian Knights. What of Novgorod and the northwestern Russian lands? Where does West Eurasia begin? If there is a West Eurasia, there must be a Central and an East Eurasia as well. What were they? Rieber’s lack of precision about the geography of Eurasia becomes manifest when Hungary, first placed in West Eurasia, is then described as an “Asiatic colony in the heart of Europe” (193). I know that the Central European University is based in Budapest, but still … If Hungary is to be the center of Europe, where does Europe end in the east? Along the Urals? But I thought the Urals were in Eurasia. We are told at one point that Belarus is at one end of Eurasia and Xinjiang at the other end (62). I do not see China as the “oldest continuous empire in Eurasia” (281). China is in Asia, not in Eurasia. We also need to be clear about the meaning of frontier and borderland. In American usage, a frontier is not a boundary but a zone.3 There is no...