Urban Resilience of Ganja/Elizavetpol: Environment, Economy, and Multiethnicity from the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century

Abstrakt

Drawing on Armenian, Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and European sources, this article examines the long-term urban resilience of Ganja (Gandzak/Elizavetpol) as one of the principal urban centres of the South Caucasus from the late Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. Its central argument is that urban resilience in Ganja was shaped by three structural factors: inter-ethnic economic interdependence, environmental constraints, and the city’s position within shifting imperial networks-rather than by imperial modernisation or administrative integration alone. The analysis shows that Ganja’s urban continuity rested on adaptive reconfiguration rather than institutional stability. The earthquake of 1139, the Ottoman-Safavid conflicts, and the Russian imperial transformation each remolded the city’s economic and social foundations without dismantling them entirely. Resilience was rooted in multiethnic coexistence, which sustained trade networks, craft production, and horticultural systems throughout repeated episodes of political upheaval. At the same time, the article foregrounds the structural limits of that resilience. The collapse of the imperial order between 1917 and 1923 dismantled the regulatory framework that had sustained inter-communal interdependence, converting multiethnicity from a source of urban stability into a vector of conflict. The result was a rapid demographic and socio economic contraction that reveals the conditional character of resilience in imperial borderlands. More broadly, the evidence from Ganja suggests that urban development in the South Caucasus was shaped by the long-term coexistence of heterogeneous economic forms rather than by a linear transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ systems, thereby challenging received models of modernisation.