The 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change began on November 11, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The COP is happening at a critical time. This year has broken all global temperature records. Extreme weather events are now the norm and not the exception. India’s capital and the second-largest city of its neighbour, part of the same great plain, are in the middle of one of the worst smog episodes anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, war and conflict are raging in the Ukraine, Gaza, the Sudan and several other areas of the world. And humanity is nowhere near to decreasing inequity.
Can Baku and the region it is in, the Caucasus, make a difference here? For millennia, this land has served as a meeting place of cultures, as a bridge rather than a divide. Azerbaijan, the Caucasus and Baku have an Indian connection as well, as this article shows.
Down To Earth spoke to one of the best-known authorities on the Caucasus, Scott Cameron Levi.
Levi is Professor and Chair at the Department of History, Ohio State University, United States. He is a specialist of the social and economic history of early modern Central Asia. He is also the author of several books including those exploring the link between India and the Caucasus.
Excerpts from the interview.
Q. As someone who has studied the Caucasus in detail, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you look at the region’s unique geographical shape on the map, of a mountainous land between two great bodies of water?
A. Like Central Asia, the Caucasus region has served as both a frontier at the outer edge of multiple empires and a civilizational crossroads since antiquity. The fact that it is surrounded by mountains to the north and bodies of water to the east and west adds a unique level of ethnic and linguistic stability to the region. Thus, whereas the movement of migratory populations into and through Central Asia is a defining feature of the region, this is less the case for the Caucasus. Like only the Tajiks in Central Asia, the Georgian and Armenian peoples have ancient roots in the Caucasus. The Azeri Turks are more recent arrivals (if a thousand years ago can be considered ‘recent’).
Q. Would you agree that the Caucasus caught the eye of the world (read Western World) when Tsarist Russia (Orthodox Christianity) clashed with the Chechens, Avars and Circassians (Sunni Islam) in the region during the 19th century? That while it may have been known to the Graeco-Roman World and during the Viking Age, it was always on the periphery of Western consciousness?
A. Yes, I think that’s true. The region was certainly on everyone’s mind during and after the Crimean War (1853-56). That said, early modern European travelers, including diplomats, merchants, and explorers who made their way into and through both the Ottoman and Safavid territories in Anatolia and Persia were well aware of the region, its peoples, and its distinctive cultures. Whether their principal objective was to serve their empire or their pocketbooks, many of these individuals authored wonderful accounts of their travels through region and interactions with the local peoples. I would encourage your readers to visit the region and I would strongly encourage those who do to familiarize themselves with its fascinating history before they do. It will add great value to their experiences of the peoples, landscape, ancient cities, museums, and wonderful cuisine.
Q. The West, Russia and Islam – the Caucasus’ fate continues to be determined by these three different civilisations. Your thoughts?
A. This is very much the case, and I see it as a product of historical geography. The region has rich soil and a continental climate with abundant water resources. This has made it a viable home for settled agricultural populations since the ancient period. It is also tightly bound by mountains to the north and bodies of water to the west and the east, which limits the number of people that the land can host. Rather than evolve as a grand civilizational center, it has survived as a comparatively rich and highly desirable frontier zone, attracting the (perhaps unwanted) attention of much larger, more populous, and more powerful civilizations in Russia, Anatolia, and Persia. Even today, the region retains this geopolitical importance and, since the beginning of the twentieth century, distant powers, including especially Russia, are increasingly interested in its natural and mineral resources as well.
Q. You have famously profiled the role of Punjabi Khatri traders operating the trade routes from the Subcontinent and Afghanistan to the Caucasus. What does this instance of trans-continental trade teach us in today’s hyper-globalised world?
A. Thanks very much for asking this great question. While conducting the research for my first book, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1500-1900 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), which I then published in a revised and updated format as Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road (Gurgaon: Penguin Books India, 2015), I was stunned to find communities of Indian merchants from in and around the city of Multan active as far afield as the Caucasus. Indian merchants maintained many communities there during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. One of the most significant Indian merchant communities was in Baku, in modern Azerbaijan, where they maintained a shrine that foreign visitors occasionally mistook as a Zoroastrian fire temple (ateshgah). This was due to the worship of the perpetual flame made possible by gaseous emissions from the region’s naphtha deposits. In fact, it was a Jvala Mukhi temple to the goddess Durga, attended to by Indian merchants who had traveled for months to reach it and spent years of their lives living and working in the Caucasus. So, there was a spiritual draw to the region, but for these individuals, there was also a great commercial incentive to position themselves in the Caucasus.
The globalisation that we all experience today appears to be such a modern phenomenon. But applying a historical lens, the evidence demonstrates that peoples have always maintained contact across great distances, sometimes directly, mediated by caravan traders or diasporic merchant communities, and sometimes indirectly. The globalizing patterns that were taking shape during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries have continue since then, and the quickening tempo that defines transregional interactions during the early modern era has culminated in the crescendo that we feel so acutely today.
Q. By all accounts, the Caucasus are suffering from the climate crisis like the rest of the world. The Caspian is drying, its sturgeon are on the brink of extinction, temperatures and extreme weather in the region are on the rise. Can a COP being held in the region at a time of intense war and conflict (in its north and south in Ukraine and Gaza) make a difference?
A. That’s another very good question. Azerbaijan is an oil rich country, and the same is true of last year’s COP host, Dubai. There is no question that our collective addiction to oil and the resulting carbon emissions are principle causal factors driving the climate crisis. It may seem counter intuitive to discuss the underlying causes of this crisis and its many manifestations that societies are experiencing in the Caucasus and around the globe in such a location.
My personal perspective is that we cannot afford not to hold such discussions wherever we can, and if placing them in Dubai, Baku, and other oil-producing regions helps draw participants from the countries most directly involved in driving carbon emissions, then that is all the better. As for the conflicts in neighboring regions, here, too, I look to history. Wars proliferate during times of crisis (for the seventeenth century, see the amazing book by my colleague Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). As the climate crisis continues to worsen in the twenty-first century, I am afraid we are destined to see wars proliferate. As that happens, finding a peaceful location to gather and strategise a way forward will become increasingly difficult.
On the bright side, I have two other colleagues from my department currently in Baku, leading a group of 10 students who are dedicated to building careers that address these very issues. Even as the crisis worsens and conflicts spread, their efforts spark hope for a better future.