Azerbaijan

An oil state on the Caspian, Turkic-speaking and Shia-majority, whose modern history runs through two petroleum booms and one long war. Baku produced roughly half the world's oil around 1900, drawing the Nobel and Rothschild families and creating an industrial working class in which Stalin organised early. A short independent republic in 1918 was the first secular parliamentary state in the Muslim world and gave women the vote before Britain did; the Red Army ended it in 1920. Soviet Azerbaijan's oil fuelled the Second World War and was the objective of the German drive to the Caucasus in 1942. Independence in 1991 arrived alongside war over Nagorno-Karabakh, which Armenia won by 1994, displacing hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis and leaving the issue central to national politics for a generation. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, opened in 2005 and routed to avoid both Russia and Iran, funded a rearmament that reversed the outcome: Azerbaijan retook most of Karabakh in a six-week war in 2020 with Turkish and Israeli drones, and the rest in 2023. Heydar Aliyev and then his son have governed since 1993. Zoroastrian fire temples stand over natural gas seeps. Baku is the capital and its walled old city a World Heritage site. The country is divided by Armenian territory from its Nakhchivan exclave. Caspian caviar was long a major export. Azerbaijani is close enough to Turkish for speakers to understand each other. The country has more mud volcanoes than anywhere else on earth. Mugham, its classical vocal music, is recognised by Unesco.

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