The Making of the Georgian Nation

Ronald Grigor Suny's The Making of the Georgian Nation, published by Indiana University Press in its second edition of 1994, is a comprehensive scholarly history tracing Georgian national identity from its medieval Christian kingdom through Russian and Soviet rule to independence, written by a historian specializing in nationalism and the Caucasus and Soviet successor states. Its strength is the sweep of a single sustained historical argument connecting Georgia's ancient Christian identity, central to its self understanding as a nation, to its modern political development, backed by a university press's scholarly review process. Its limit is that a broad national history covering more than a thousand years necessarily compresses complex regional and religious episodes, including the details of Georgian Orthodox Christianity's own internal history, so a claim needing that finer grained religious detail benefits from a source focused specifically on the Georgian Church rather than the nation's political history as a whole.