Alan Fisher’s A Precarious Balance explores the meeting point between two great empires, the Ottoman and the Russian. While the Russians and the Ottomans were embroiled in wars from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries, Fisher does not fail to address the times in which the frontier was the site of exchanges – be they commercial or diplomatic. The two main focal points of contact, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, were of great importance to the development of relations as the Russians began to shift the balance in their favour. Fisher describes the changing shape of interaction, from cross-border slave trade to the mass migration of Muslims into the Ottoman Empire following the Crimean War. Fisher’s works reveal the importance of the multifaceted relations over the centuries until both empires collapsed due to the First World War.