Russia's Caucasian frontier with Iran was in many ways as crucial an arena of the nineteenth-century Great Game as British India's frontier with Afghanistan. Both were of considerable strategic importance, and were crossed by major Asian trade routes. The main differences were in the nature of the terrain and the population. While the mountain ranges of the North-West Frontier of India were of marginal agricultural value, rugged, remote and defensible, Transcaucasia included some of the most fertile agricultural lands of the area and for this reason, as well as its comparative accessibility, could not provide so remote and defensible a refuge where tribal populations could flaunt their political autonomy in the face of the competing states and empires.

The two Russo–Iranian wars of the early nineteenth century raged across Shahsevan territory and resulted in the conquest of the best part of their winter quarters in Moghan by Russia. Chapter Eight narrates the main events leading to this turning point in Shahsevan history, laying stress on the role which the tribes and chiefs of Moghan are known to have played during the campaigns, and on the movements of tribes southwards at the end.