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Le Caucase est souvent vu comme une région morcelée, en proie à des rivalités géopolitiques et à des nationalismes virulents. Cette recherche propose de rompre avec ces perceptions, en relisant son histoire récente. Elle reconstitue la trajectoire des confins de la Turquie, de l’Iran et de la Russie dans le premier tiers du 20e siècle, en présentant d’abord une histoire des circulations transfrontalière au cours de cette période de révolutions, de conflits et de bouleversements politiques. L’étude de la frontière caucasienne est mise au service d’une analyse des formes d’autonomie politico-administrative dans ces confins. Les institutions régionales puissantes qui s’appuient sur l’ouverture de la frontière jusqu’à la fin des années 1930 jouent un rôle majeur dans les évolutions intérieures des empires, mais aussi dans les relations interétatiques. Elites régionales et consuls en poste dans la région donnent naissance une véritable paradiplomatie caucasienne. Cette diplomatie frontalière est une ressource pour les élites régionales dans leurs rapports de force avec les gouvernements centraux, et énonce des enjeux très différents de ceux des diplomaties centrales : migrations, questions policières et judiciaires, défis environnementaux constituent certains des champs de cette coopération entre Etats, qui donne lieu à des influences et échanges peu connus. En les mettant en lumière, cette recherche suggère de dépasser une historiographie centrée sur l’impérialisme des puissances. On ne peut comprendre l’histoire caucasienne sans mettre au premier plan ses acteurs régionaux et leur capacité à se positionner dans les interstices de politiques étatiques et de territoires impériaux. / The Caucasus is often perceived as a fragmented area, dominated by geopolitical rivalries and rabid nationalisms. This research attempts to break with such an interpretation by rethinking its recent history. It reconstructs the shared dynamics of the Caucasian borderlands between Turkey, Iran and Russia in the first third of the 20th century, by presenting a history of cross-border circulations in this moment of revolutions, conflicts and political upheavals. This study of border interactions is inserted into a wider analysis of political-administrative autonomy in these borderlands. Until the late 1930s, powerful autonomous institutions rely upon the open Caucasian border and play a major role within each empire and between them. Regional elites and consular networks give rise to a genuine Caucasian paradiplomacy. This border diplomacy creates resources for regional elites in the balance of powers with central governments and focuses on issues neglected by a focus on central diplomacies: migrations, police and judicial matters, environmental challenges are but a few of these fields which foster interstate cooperation, enabling little-known influences and exchanges. By highlighting them, this dissertation suggests a way to go beyond a historiography of great powers imperialism. It contends that Caucasian history cannot be properly understood without putting at the forefront regional actors and their ability to exploits the interstices of state policies and imperial territories.

This dissertation will analyse the grand strategy of the Russian empire against its southern rivals, namely the Ottoman empire and Iran, in the Caucasus, between 1821 and 1833. This research is interested in explaining how the Russian imperial machine devised and executed successful strategies to use its relative superiority over the Ottomans and the Qājārs and secure domination of the region. Russian success needs, however, to be understood within a broader context that also takes in Ottoman and Iranian policy-making and perspectives, and is informed by a comparative sense of the strengths and weaknesses of all three imperial regimes. In this thesis, the question of why Russia was more successful than the Ottoman state and Iran in the Caucasus between 1821 and 1833 is explained in three main ways: the first and most important factor in this process was the well-functioning fiscal-military machine of the Russian empire; the second factor was the diplomatic and military skill of the Russian leadership which helped to avert any effective political and military alliance between the Ottoman empire and Iran and defeated its rivals in two separate and successive wars; the last main factor in Russian success was its geopolitically superior position.

The Caucasus is a land corridor between the Black and Caspian seas, linking Africa to Northern Eurasia, and is considered a migratory route for Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH). Numerous cave sites in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and southwestern Russia indicate that Neanderthals and AMH occupied the region, but poor chronological control meant that the precise timing of the occupations was unknown. This work involved identifying and geochemically characterising volcanic ash layers (tephra) in archaeological cave and open air sites spanning approximately 125 ka to 30 ka to generate a tephrostratigraphic framework. This framework was used to correlate the sites and assess the synchronicity of Neanderthal and AMH occupation across the region. Tephra investigations were also carried out on a core (M72/5-25-GC1) from the southeast Black Sea (that spans the last ~ 60 ka), with the aim of linking the archaeological sites to this palaeoenvironmental archive, to investigate the impact changes in climate had on the archaeology in the region. Eleven of the archaeological sites investigated (Gubs rock shelter and Weasel Cave in Russia; Ortvale Klde, Ortvale Cave, Sakajia and Undo Cave in Georgia; Aghitue 3, Lusakert 1, Fantan and Kagasi in Armenia; and Azokh Cave in Azerbaijan) had tephra, 30 cryptotephras and 8 visible layers, preserved. Twenty-two tephra layers were identified in the Black Sea core, with distinct periods of frequent volcanic activity separated by long periods, up to 9 ka, of seemingly volcanic quiescence in the region. The glass chemistry of the tephra found in the archaeological sites and the core, determined using a wavelength-dispersive electron microprobe, was used to characterise and correlate the units between the sedimentary sequences. Although some widespread tephra from the major Mediterranean sources (3.6 ka Minoan eruption from Santorini, Greece and the ~39 ka Campanian Ignimbrite super eruption from Campi Flegrei, Italy) were identified in the Black Sea core, none of the archaeological sites contained Mediterranean tephra. Most of the tephra layers in the archaeological sites investigated and the Black Sea core are from sources in the Caucasus and Turkey. The limited information on the volcanic history and compositional data of these sources in the region does not allow most of the units to be correlated to particular eruptions or volcanoes. However, some of the cryptotephra units have been correlated to eruptions from Nemrut, Acigöl and Erciyes Dagi volcanoes in Turkey. Unfortunately, there are no tephra layers that are common to the Black Sea core and any of the archaeological sites, prohibiting direct correlation of the sites to this detailed palaeoenvironmental record. However, the ~30 ka Nemrut Formation (NF) eruption from Nemrut volcano, Turkey, is found in the Lake Van palaeoenvironmental record and in two of the archaeological sites. This allows the archaeological sites to be correlated to each other and palaeoclimate information can also be imported into these sites. More detailed characterisation of the proximal deposits may allow more units to be correlated to eruptions and will enable these distal records to be used to further constrain the tempo of explosive volcanic activity in the region. A few compositionally distinct tephra layers were found and a suite of new radiocarbon dates were obtained at various sites, allowing archaeological occupations to be dated and the synchronicity between sites to be assessed. A distinct rhyolitic tephra correlates a layer with an Upper Palaeolithic stone technology, associated with AMH, in Azokh Cave (Azerbaijan) to a layer in Sakajia cave (Georgia) that contains Neanderthal remains. This is clear evidence that AMH and Neanderthals were in the region (within 600 km) at the same time. Other sites have also been correlated with tephra. A dacitic tephra correlates a unit with an Upper Palaeolithic lithic and bone tool techno-complex in Ortvale Klde (Georgia) to a unit with a Middle Palaeolithic lithic assemblage in Lusakert 1 (Armenia). The Middle Paleolithic tool assemblage in Lusakert 1 is clearly different from the Upper Paleolithic assemblage that is clearly associated with AMH in Ortvale Klde, but it is not clear whether the other assemblage is associated with Neanderthals, archaic modern humans or AMH. This correlation between different lithic assemblages clearly indicates that there were different groups, with different technologies, occupying the region at the same time. The NF tephra is also found shallower in the sequences at both Lusakert 1 and Ortvale Klde. This time marker shows that the Middle Paleolithic assemblage is still being used in Lusakert 1 at ~30 ka, indicating that a less diverse stone techno-complex was used for a prolonged period of time in central Armenia. There does not appear to be any direct relationship between occupation in the region and the climate at the time, implying that this had little effect on the archaeological story in the region. A new radiocarbon based age model that combines new dates with published data for the sites within the Caucasus shows temporal overlap between AMH and Neanderthals in the region. This confirms the tephra correlations and clearly indicates both species co-existed in the Caucasus. The new radiocarbon data also suggest that AMH arrived in the region earlier than previously thought, at ~50-44 ka cal BP. The arrival of AMH in the Caucasus is now temporally similar to other early AMH sites in northern Eurasia.