2026 Theses Doctoral

Mobilizing Empire: Labor, Infrastructure, and Power on the Georgian Military Highway

Sadleir, William T.

This dissertation examines the Georgian Military Highway as a central yet understudied instrument of Russian imperial incorporation in the South Caucasus. During the nineteenth century, the road evolved from a strategic military passage into a vital economic artery and tourist corridor. Improvements in infrastructure facilitated the movement of goods and people across the Greater Caucasus, transforming an ancient mountain route into a bustling, multicultural thoroughfare. By mid-century, the highway carried significant commercial traffic and hosted a diverse cast of travelers, including Russian officials, Armenian merchants, Ossetian and Mokhevian transport workers, roadside vendors, and tourists.

Despite its significance, the Georgian Military Highway has received limited sustained historical analysis. Earlier scholarship on Russian expansion in the South Caucasus has focused primarily on military conquest, administrative reforms, and high-level imperial policy. Historians have emphasized debates in St. Petersburg surrounding the 1801 annexation of Kartli-Kakheti, the shifting balance between centralizing and regionalizing governance, and the cultivation of alliances with local elites. Georgian nobles, linked to Russia through shared Orthodoxy, were incorporated into imperial hierarchies in exchange for loyalty, while Armenian communities became indispensable intermediaries in commerce and administration. Later in the century, increasingly assertive Russification policies sought deeper cultural integration but provoked resistance, especially among Muslim populations.

Recent scholarship has begun to foreground the lived experience of empire. Studies of Cossack settlements and sectarian religious migrants highlight how the Russian state used settler populations to secure frontiers and reshape imperial space. Building on this perspective, this dissertation argues that infrastructure and mobility were equally critical mechanisms of imperial integration. Prior to Russian rule, Georgia was oriented within an east–west commercial world linking it to Persia and the Ottoman Empire. The construction and expansion of the Georgian Military Highway imposed a new north–south axis that redirected trade, travel, and social interaction toward Russia. This spatial reorientation transformed everyday life: Georgian and Ossetian highlanders became embedded in imperial economies as their carts, labor, and roadside enterprises serviced the route.

By centering infrastructure and movement, this study demonstrates that imperial power operated not only through policy and institutions but also through commerce, labor, and daily mobility. The Georgian Military Highway thus functioned as a material conduit of empire, restructuring economic geography and integrating diverse populations into imperial systems. In foregrounding these processes, the dissertation shifts the study of Russian expansion in the South Caucasus away from administrative narratives and toward the material and experiential transformations that accompanied imperial rule.