During the Russian Empire, the city was the administrative center of the Kazakh uezd of the Elizavetpol Governorate.

Many Armenian inhabitants as a result fled to Tbilisi and other nearby Armenian-populated areas.

[7] When the South Caucasus came under British occupation, Sir John Oliver Wardrop, British Chief Commissioner in the South Caucasus, decided that assigning the Erivan Governorate and the Kars Oblast to Democratic Republic of Armenia (DRA) and the Elisabethpol and Baku Governorates to the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) would solve the region's outstanding disputes.

The area has major strategic importance for modern-day Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey regional communication and energy projects.

[citation needed] During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, Armenian troops took control of several villages of the Gazakh district.

Gazakh region is located in the western part of the republic, in the western part of the vast Ganja-Gazakh plain, which starts from the slopes of the mountain range of the Lesser Caucasus and extends along the right bank of the Kura river.

Some of the city's many prestigious residents include: poets Samad Vurgun, Molla Panah Vagif, Mirvarid Dilbazi and Nusrat Kasamanli, scholar Molla Vali Vidadi, lieutenant-general of the Russian imperial army Ali-Agha Shikhlinski, writer Ismayil Shykhly and wrestler Hasan Aliyev.