Chapter six sets a counterpoint to this argument, exploring cases in which the Muslim population proved uncooperative with, or openly resisted, state institutions, including the judiciary, police, and local administration. Most of these cases were related to land issues and the fear of forced conversion in the Volga region. In Crimea, where forced conversion was less of a threat and where land had been surveyed and demarcated earlier, most remaining disputes could be fought out in court by the 1870s.

Introducing the two regions at the heart of this study, chapter two maps out the geographical, political, economic, and cultural setting of the book. While it focuses on the years around the Great Reforms, it puts this period into broader perspective, tracing continuity and change throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, the chapter combines elements of temporal and spatial comparison, highlighting the distinctiveness of the two regions and their similarities. First, it discusses their dynamic, and diverging, role in the imperial imagination. While both regions were considered to be different from both the empire’s peripheries and traditional heartlands, they were appropriated as part of the imperial core, in discourse and in practice. Second, the chapter reviews the demographic composition of the two territories, their changing institutional landscapes and forms of governance. Finally, it charts the socio-economic conditions under which people lived, while paying close attention to the effects of migration. In all of these questions, the situation of Muslim Tatars is foregrounded.

Chapter five discusses the ways in which Muslim Tatars and other minorities actively used the circuit courts in civil and criminal cases, arguing that accommodation rather than conflict was the most striking form of interaction.