Afghanistan has long been conventionally regarded as a remote space peripheral to the wider world. Yet scholarship produced in the 2nd decade of the 21st century suggests its multiple connections to a wide array of regions and settings. Such connections are especially visible when viewed through the lens of the trade networks originating from the territories of modern Afghanistan. Scholars have come to recognize that Afghan traders have long been active players in many contexts across Asia and beyond. Such traders and the networks they form play a critically important role in connecting different parts of Asia with one another, including South Asia and Eurasia, as well as East and West Asia. The connective role performed by Afghan caravanners and religious minorities in the trade between India and Central Asia are especially well documented by historians. Increasingly so too are the activities of Afghan merchants in Ottoman territories. The trading networks Afghan traders have participated in are historically dynamic. Their orientating values shift across time and space between various forms of religious, ethno-linguistic, and political identity. The capacity to adapt to changing circumstances is helpful in understanding the continuing relevance of Afghan traders to 21st-century forms of globalized capitalism, in contexts as varied as the former Soviet Union, China, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Article
Afghan Trading Networks
Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins
Article
Central Asia in the Soviet Command Economy
Isaac Scarborough
The five republics of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—spent the majority of the 20th century as part of the USSR and the Soviet command economy. Over this period, their economies grew significantly, as did the standard of living enjoyed by their populations. At the same time, the Soviet command economy, along with its particular application in Central Asia, created both significant barriers and long-term economic damage in the region. Local salaries and access to goods remained far below the Soviet average; agricultural production took precedence over industrialization and modernization; the combination of expansionist planning and resource extraction meant that over decades little was done to change the system even as ecological disaster loomed. When the Soviet command economy receded in 1991, it left an ambiguous detritus, one remembered as violently forced and perhaps unwanted.
Article
Constructing Nations in Soviet Central Asia
Adeeb Khalid
The political map of Soviet Central Asia was radically transformed in 1924. The three existing republics of Turkestan, Bukhara, and Khorezm were dissolved and replaced by a series of republics that each bore the name of a national group. This so-called national-territorial delimitation was initiated by Moscow but carried out by Central Asian cadres. The process moved quite fast and was completed in a matter of months. Yet, this process of creating new republics was neither the beginning, nor the end of nation construction in Central Asia. Nation construction is an ongoing process that cannot be conflated with merely the creation of new boundaries.
The idea of the nation had arrived in Central Asia well before the revolution. Central Asian intellectuals had begun to reimagine their communities as nations. The Russian revolution of 1917 transformed the limits of the possible as it heightened national mobilization. Multiple national projects were underway in 1924, and these informed the positions different parties took in the debates of that year, which tended to be quite acrimonious. While authorities in Moscow had to approve the decisions, the debates were driven by Central Asian cadres. The creation of the republics nationalize territory in Soviet Central Asia, but it did not in itself produce fully formed nations. That was a long process facilitated by the existence of the republics and the “passportization” of national identity by the Soviet state. The breakup of the Soviet Union provided another impetus to nation building, as the post-Soviet states have used nationhood as the core of their legitimacy.
Article
The Emirate of Bukhara
Andreas Wilde
In the 19th century, the Emirate of Bukhara was one of three independent Uzbek principalities known as khanates. Ruled by the Manghit amīrs, Bukhara was the biggest and most important of the southern Central Asian polities and one of the major power centers in the wider region. To the readers of 19th-century European travelogues, Bukhara was known for the despotism of its rulers notorious for their cruelty and strange tastes. From a geopolitical point of view, the Bukharan Emirate was part of an anarchic transition space between Central and South Asia made up of half a dozen petty principalities without centralized power structures. While the bulk of the 19th- and 20th-century secondary sources stress the despotism of its amīrs and its isolation in view of the declining caravan trade on the Central Asian caravan routes, Bukhara and other urban centers such as Samarqand and Qarshi were embedded in transregional religious and trading networks. As a crossroads of commerce and an important religious center, Bukhara in particular and other Transoxanian towns as well attracted flows of goods and people from all directions and was well connected to other places and areas such as Siberia, China, India, and Persia. In the second half of the 19th century, the Emirate of Bukhara and its neighbors north of the Āmū Daryā River came into the focus of Russia. After a series of military defeats in 1868, Bukhara was turned into a Russian protectorate, which finally became a People’s Republic after the Bolshevik conquest in 1920. This political entity was absorbed into the emerging Soviet Union in 1924.
Article
Ethnic Conflict in Modern Central Asia
Sergey Abashin
Pre-modern Central Asia saw a lot of violence and wars that had religious underpinnings or originated from genealogical claims. The colonial and Soviet reforms brought about reconsideration of cultural diversity in the logic of ethnic division. In the 20th century, reference to ethnicity became the main language of spontaneous violence escalation and explanation. With the weakening of Soviet rule, the region saw a series of heated conflicts. The most massive of them were the 1989 pogroms against Meskhi Turks in Uzbekistan and the 1990 clashes in Kyrgyzstan that took the shape of ethnic confrontation between the Kyrgyz majority and the Uzbek minority. Lesser disturbances also emerged in the borderlands and in mixed-ethnicity villages.
After the collapse of the USSR, the 1990s saw an increase in social and religious violence in Central Asia. However, despite the violence being different in character, Central Asia had already gained a reputation of a very conflict-ridden region precisely in the ethnic sense. Many experts and politicians listed manifold potential ethnic conflicts about to break out in the region. In 2010, one of these predictions came true in the south of Kyrgyzstan, where a clash erupted between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. These expert assessments were also borne out by occasional conflicts over land and water arising between communities that live in the border areas.
Nevertheless, the label of ethnic conflict does not always explain the reasons for violence. The conflicts in Central Asia arise and develop as a variety of local actions, which have different sequences, logic, and motivation. These actions are performed by very different agents—people, groups, and institutes that have their own interests and dispositions. Social and political slogans sound during the events, while the line of confrontation lies between local communities and particular groups of people, not between “nations” or “ethnic groups.” The label of ethnic conflict simplifies all these entanglements; there is usually a political interest or a certain intellectual tradition behind it, which essentializes and historicizes the reasons for aggression.
Article
The History of Anthropometry and Fingerprinting in Colonial South Asia
Mira Rai Waits
In the late 19th century, an obsession with identifying and classifying people emerged in the West. Efforts to develop lines of inquiry to support this obsession were common; visual technologies were harnessed and invented to further the acquisition of knowledge about human identity and classification. Anthropometry, the measurement of the human individual to understand physical variation, was used as the foundation for Bertillonage, a system designed to identify recidivists through a standardized collection of images and data sets about the human body. Consequently, anthropometry came to be associated with broader efforts to manage crime in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as law enforcement touted the potential of visual technologies and their related archival systems as mechanisms for improving criminal identification.
This interest in visual technologies and criminal identification coupled with the colonial exploration of South Asia in the 19th century led to anthropometric studies of South Asian peoples. Some of these studies were tied to institutions of colonial law enforcement, such as the police or prison system, but others, including the late 19th-century study of the people of the Andaman Islands, demonstrate how the broader obsession with human identification and classification was tied to efforts to study race as a measurable subject. Colonial civil servants also turned to visual technologies for assistance with the management of colonial subjects. In 1858, Sir William James Herschel, the chief administrator of the Hooghly district of Bengal, after observing a native practice where fingermarks were used as marks of authenticity for the illiterate, began to experiment with taking handprints and fingerprints as identifying images. Scottish doctor Henry Faulds had contemporaneously expressed a similar interest in studying fingerprints after observing sample prints on ancient pottery while serving as a medical missionary in Japan. Herschel shared his findings with Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who, after reviewing Herschel’s findings, posited that fingerprints were permanent visual markers of identity. Following this observation, Sir Edward Richard Henry, inspector-general of police of Bengal, along with police sub-inspectors Chandra Bose and Azizul Haque, developed a classification system for using fingerprints to identify recidivist criminals. This system was exported from colonial India to Britain and then on to police organizations globally.
Article
The Ismaili of Central Asia
Daniel Beben
The Ismailis are one of the largest Muslim minority populations of Central Asia, and they make up the second largest Shiʿi Muslim community globally. First emerging in the second half of the 8th century, the Ismaili missionary movement spread into many areas of the Islamic world in the 10th century, under the leadership of the Ismaili Fatimids caliphs in Egypt. The movement achieved astounding success in Central Asia in the 10th century, when many of the political and cultural elites of the region were converted. However, a series of repressions over the following century led to its almost complete disappearance from the metropolitan centers of Central Asia. The movement later re-emerged in the mountainous Badakhshan region of Central Asia (which encompasses the territories of present-day eastern Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan), where it was introduced by the renowned 11th-century Persian poet, philosopher, and Ismaili missionary Nasir-i Khusraw. Over the following centuries the Ismaili movement expanded among the populations of Badakhshan, reaching a population of over 200,000 in the 21st century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Ismailis suffered a series of severe repressions, first under local Sunni Muslim rulers and later under the antireligious policies of the Soviet Union. However, in the decades since the end of the Soviet period, the Ismailis of the region have become increasingly connected with the global Ismaili community and its leadership. While many aspects of the history of Ismailism in the Badakhshan region remain obscure and unexplored, the discoveries of significant corpuses of manuscripts in private collections since the 1990s in the Badakhshan region have opened up wide possibilities for future research.
Article
The Kazakhs, 16th–19th Centuries
Jin Noda
The Kazakh khans considered themselves the descendants of Juchi, the son of Chinggis Khan. Leading a group of Turkic Muslim nomads, they established their own authority on the Kazakh steppe (previously called the Qipchaq steppe) by the end of the 15th century. During the 16th century, the Kazakhs further expanded their territory, by fighting with the Shibanid Uzbek dynasty, the Noghays, and the Moghuls. However, the 17th century found the Kazakhs in turn being pressured from without by the Junghars, a group of Mongolian nomads. While it was through this struggle with the Junghars that the Kazakhs gradually attained a unique identity, this identity came at the price of a loss of unity between the three clan confederations (known as Zhuz).
After the fall of the Junghars during the mid-18th century, the Kazakhs began conducting a policy of “bilateral diplomacy” with the Russian Empire and Qing China. Simply put, the Kazakh khans sent envoys to both Russia and the Qing court. The relations between the Kazakhs and the Qing are worthy of particular attention as several members of the Kazakh dynasty were even bestowed official titles by the Qing emperor. This bestowal guaranteed the right to trade in Xinjiang and further strengthened Kazakh authority throughout the steppe as well.
During the 19th century, the territory of the Kazakh nomads was split up by the Russian and Qing empires. This fracturing was mainly caused by Russia’s expansion into Central Asia. From this time, great political changes began occurring on the Kazakh steppe, leading to mass rebellions and other social unrest. During this tumultuous period under Russian influence, however, Kazakh society also produced many intellectuals, further strengthening their national identity.
Significant changes in Kazakh historiography after the onset of the Soviet era are characterized by a focus on two elements: namely, the close relationship between the Kazakhs and the Qing Empire, and the impact of Islam on Kazakh society. Historical research on these topics has been influenced by newly available archival sources in both Russia and China.
Article
Khojas of Kashgar
Alexandre Papas
The Khojas of Kashgar name a Sufi lineage, which became a ruling dynasty in eastern Turkestan or present-day Xinjiang in western China. Founded by the Samarkandi spiritual master Ahmad Kāsānī (d. 1542), a member of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order strongly implicated in politics, the lineage divided into two competing branches, one led by Ishāq Khoja (d. 1599) and the other by Āfāq Khoja (d. 1694). Both leaders were influential at the court in Yarkand and engaged in frequent proselytizing missions among Turkic, Mongol, Tibetan, and Chinese populations. Yet, only Āfāq Khoja and his group of followers, the Āfāqiyya, with the support of Zunghar Mongols, created a kind of theocracy whose religious capital was Kashgar, and which was based on Sufi organization, practice, and ideology. Venerated as Sufi saints (īshān), the Khojas embodied a politico-religious form of Islamic sanctity (walāya) while promoting a doctrine of mystical renunciation. Paradoxically, although the regime did not survive internecine conflicts and the Qing conquest in 1759, the Khojas of Kashgar, including the Ishāqiyya sublineage, continued to be very active in the long run. They conducted insurrections throughout the Tarim basin and created short-lived enclaves until their complete neutralization in 1866 with the forced exile of the last great Khoja, Buzurg Khān Töre (d. 1869). In Xinjiang, the Khojas have remained venerated figures of the past until now, although collective memory kept a contradictory picture of them, oscillating between holy heroes and feudal oppressors. Descendants of the exiled Khojas in eastern Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan formed communities that still preserve relics and oral as well as written traditions.
Article
Khorezm and the Khanate of Khiva
William Wood
The Khanate of Khiva, one of the Uzbek khanates of Central Asia, refers to a political entity in the region of Khorezm from the early 16th century until 1920. The term itself, which was not used by locals who instead used the name vilayet Khwārazm (“country of Khwārazm”), dates from 18th-century Russian usage. Khorezm is an ancient center of sedentary civilization with a distinct culture and history that came under Uzbek rule as the latter migrated southward from their pasturelands on the steppe beginning in the early 16th century. In contrast to the related dynasties in Transoxiana, the Khanate of Khiva retained a greater degree of pastoralism, though the state was still fundamentally built on sedentary agriculture. Though no doubt affected by historical variations in the volume and routes of the overland caravan trade, Khiva remained a key center for transregional trade throughout its history, especially with the growing Russia Empire to the north. Political structures in Khiva remained weak and decentralized until the 19th century, when the Qongrat dynasty succeeded in transforming the khanate into the most centralized state in the region. Among the legacies of the khanate is its promotion of a distinctive Turkic literary culture, which interacted fruitfully with the dominant Persian culture of neighboring regions. As with other states in Central Asia, by the second half of the 19th century Khiva became a target of the expanding Russian Empire, which conquered Khorezm in 1873. While the tsarist state initially preserved a portion of the khanate under Qongrat rule as a protectorate, after the Bolshevik Revolution this state was soon dissolved and absorbed into the Soviet Union.
Article
Land and Water in Tsarist and Early Soviet Central Asia
Beatrice Penati
Precipitation and elevation shape land and water usage in Central Asia, distinguishing the southern irrigated oases from the steppes, deserts, and prairies, where instead nomadic pastoralism (sometimes rain-fed agriculture) is economically rational. The former was included in Russian Turkestan, the latter in the Steppe provinces. The colonial state recognized land usage rights of the nomads; while not formally admitting land property among the settled population, it allowed them to enjoy it within Islamic law. Nomads paid a capitation; at first tilled land continued to be taxed as a share of the real harvest. Land-assessment works from the 1890s, though, imposed a tax based on the estimated harvest value, initially on irrigated land and then, with some differences, on rain-fed land. Irrigation was paid for eminently through corvées. The increase in the share of land under cotton did not derive from state coercion but from factor endowments and absolute and relative prices. Subsidies, in the form of import duties and, above all, a growing tax break contributed to this. Despite political claims, new irrigation had a limited impact under the tsars. While the “cotton boom” altered the landscape and local economy of the oases, in the Steppe and Semirechie (now south-eastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) the natives lost land to settler peasants from European Russia. The latter received land that statisticians and surveyors had deemed excess for the nomads and former nomads. Conflicts around land, water, and forests coalesced in the 1916 uprising, which in turn initiated a cycle of violent retaliation between Russians and natives that would last until the early 1920s. With the establishment of Soviet power, a first land reform “decolonized” former resettlement areas; in 1925 and 1927 another land reform aimed at reducing landlessness in southern Central Asia, while restoring pre-war output levels and cotton procurement mechanisms.
Article
Modern Armenia
Simon Payaslian
The Armenian people entered the modern era with their historic lands of more than three millennia divided between two empires—the Ottoman and Persian empires. The Ottomans ruled the western and larger part, while the Persians ruled the eastern lands. Ottoman rule extended from the fourteenth century to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The latter inherited the historic Armenian lands as a successor state to the Ottoman Empire. The Persian Empire ruled Armenian lands in the east until the signing of the Treaty of Turkmenchai in 1828, which, in the aftermath of the Russo-Persian wars, fulfilled Russian imperial expansionist objectives into the Caucasus by replacing Persian rule. For centuries, therefore, Armenians experienced the various aspects and phases of modernization—the Enlightenment, the emergence of capitalism, urbanization, nationalism—as a subject people. They did not achieve modern statehood until 1918 as the Ottoman and Russian empires collapsed under the weight of the First World War.
Modern Armenia emerged when the Republic of Armenia was established as a sovereign state in May 1918, after centuries of foreign rule but in the midst of war and the ongoing genocide by the Young Turks ruling in Constantinople (now Istanbul) against its Armenian population. The fragile Republic of Armenia could not withstand the calamitous consequences of war. Moreover, thousands of Armenian refugees generated by the genocidal policies of the Young Turk regime arrived in the republic. The new government lacked the resources necessary for a functioning economy and polity, and the unfolding military conflicts led to its demise and sovietization after the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Yerevan in 1921. The Communist regime established a dictatorial system in Soviet Armenia and across the Soviet Union, but the severest brutalities were experienced under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, as his government forced agricultural collectivization and rapid industrialization at the expense enormous human sacrifices. Despite the political difficulties, Soviet Armenia registered successes in the areas of economy and culture in the long term. Armenians benefited from the cultural development witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s, largely as a result of Nikita Khrushchev’s reform oriented policies. By the 1970s, however, the economy had grown stagnant under Leonid Brezhnev, and his successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, in the early 1980s failed to ameliorate the conditions, while the Soviet regime experienced a political legitimacy crisis. In the meantime, nationalism had emerged as a powerful force across the Soviet Union, and calls for secession from Moscow grew louder. Mikhail Gorbachev’s experimentation with perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) could not reverse the loss of legitimacy, a situation further exacerbated in Soviet Armenia in the aftermath of the earthquake in December 1988 and the escalating military conflict in Nagorno-Karabagh. The Soviet regime collapsed in 1991, creating an opportunity for a second declaration of independence for Armenian sovereign statehood in the 20th century. Although independence from the Soviet Union energized the Armenian people and gave rise to expectations concerning their economic and political well-being in post-Soviet Armenia, the country became mired in the twin crises of recovering from the earthquake while at the same time surviving an undeclared war with Azerbaijan, the latter being supported by Turkey. The economic blockade they imposed on Armenia further exacerbated the situation. Since independence, the Republic of Armenia, under its four successive leaders—Presidents Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Robert Kocharyan, Serge Sargsyan, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan—has struggled to develop its economy and infrastructure and to address the chronic problems of poverty and unemployment. The country lacks the economic and financial ingredients necessary to develop a modern, competitive productive basis for competition in global markets. Further, systemic corruption has obstructed efforts to improve the situation, while various government agencies have routinely engaged in violations of human rights. Efforts by nascent civil society to advance civil and political rights and democratization in general have been undermined by state policies, including gross violations of citizens’ rights in time of elections. The experiences gained after twenty-five years of independence pose major challenges for economic development while offering little hope for democratization. It remains to be seen whether the “velvet revolution” (March 31–May 8, 2018) led by Nikol Pashinyan can introduce fundamental changes in the Armenian political system. Former opposition activist and member of the National Assembly, Pashinyan emerged as the country’s prime minister after the “velvet revolution” forced the resignation of Serge Sargsyan on April 23, 2018.
Article
Modern Georgia
Adrian Brisku
Arguably, an account of modern Georgia is one about the country’s emergence as a political nation (independent republic and nation-state) in the region of the Caucasus—geographically straddled in between the Eurasian landmass—and the challenges of redefining, developing, and preserving itself. It is also about how it was forged under and often against its powerful neighbors, most notably the tsarist Soviet and Russian state, and about its equally uneven interactions with other neighboring nations and nationalities within its political borders. And while one cannot put a precise date on the cultural and political processes as to when this modern Georgia emerged, the late 19th century is that period when people within the two tsarist governorates of Tbilisi and Kutaisi interacted more intensively among themselves, but also within the imperial cultural and political centers of St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as beyond the imperial confines, in Central and Western European capitals. This in turn—following impactful events: the 1861 tsarist Emancipation of Serfs, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the First World War, the February and October Revolutions of 1917, the brief making of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (1918)—led to a diffusion of and reaction to political, economic, and cultural ideas from European and imperial metropoles that on May 26, 1918, culminated with the establishment, for the first time, of Georgia as a nation-state: the Georgian Democratic Republic. A social democratic nation-state in its political content, the political life of this first republic was cut short on February 25, 1921, by the Red Army of a re-emerging Russian (Soviet) state. In the ensuing seventy years in the Soviet Union—initially, from 1922 to 1936, as a constitutive republic of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and then as a separate Soviet Socialist Republic until the implosion of the union in 1991—the republic and its society experienced the effects of the making and unmaking of the Soviet Marxist-Leninist modernization project. Especially impactful for the republic and its society was the period of the 1930s and 1940s under the hyper-centralized rule of the Georgian-born Soviet Communist Party leader Joseph V. Stalin: a period marked by implementation of a centrally planned economic model and political purges as well as a consolidation of the nation’s ethnocultural and territorial makeup. Also important was the late Soviet period, particularly that under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whereby thanks to the economic and political reforms undertaken in the later 1980s, calls for the recovering of the republic’s political independence were intensified and ultimately realized. This happened on April 9, 1991—with the first Georgian president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, declaring the independence of the Republic of Georgia before the Soviet Union’s dissolution on December 26, 1991—and its international recognition would come easily and fast. But what would prove difficult and slow, from the outset, was building a European-style nation-state—meaning a liberal democratic order based on the rule of law and a market society—as was the case in the brief presidency of Gamsakhurdia (1991–1992). The latter’s term was marred by an ethnopolitical war in the South Ossetian region and brought to an end by a civil war fought in the capital city of Tbilisi and the Megrelian region. It continued to be difficult during the long and interrupted presidency of the former Georgian Communist Party boss, Eduard Shevardnadze (1995–2003)—the 1995 Constitution established a semi-presidential system of government—in which an ethnopolitical war with Abkhazia started and ended (1992–1993), state institutions stabilized, and a pro-Euro-Atlantic as opposed to a pro-Russian foreign policy was articulated, but state corruption also thrived. A European-style republic appeared closer during the full-term “hyper-presidency” of the Western-educated president Mikheil Saakashvili (2004–2013), marked by concrete steps toward Euro-Atlantic integration (NATO membership and EU partnership/toward membership) and a distancing from Russia as well as top-down neoliberal domestic reforms. But the republic was scarred by a war with Russia in August 2008 and a growing authoritarianism at home. It remains so despite a shift, since 2013, from a presidential to a parliamentary republic with the last directly elected president being the first woman president, Salome Zurabishvili (2018–). Since 2012, the Georgian Dream Party—established by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili (prime minister, 2012–2013)—governs the republic by pursuing Western-oriented domestic reforms, EU and NATO integration, and a nonconfrontational position against Russia. The latter continues to undermine the country’s territorial integrity, having recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s independence in 2008 and maintaining its military bases there.
Article
Modern Tajikistan
Muriel Atkin
Tajikistan became an independent country in 1991, but it also owes its existence as an arbitrary creation to the central Soviet authorities. Since the Soviet era the term “Tajik” has been applied to identify speakers of Persian and several Eastern Iranian languages in Central Asia. Political and cultural leaders in Tajikistan have grappled with the meaning of Tajik identity in relation to Persian speakers beyond Central Asia, as well as other identities among Tajiks within Central Asia. During the Soviet era, Tajikistan was faced with several projects, such as modernization and “internationalization” of society and the economy, as well as its mistrust of nationalism and ties to kindred peoples within and outside of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Soviet period and in the early years of independence, Tajikistan was wracked by a power struggle between coalitions of factions that wanted to depart from the old Communist authoritarian rule and the neo-Communist elite who tried to maintain power. This escalated into a civil war (1992–1997), which was costly in terms of lives being lost and economic damage to the country. Since the civil war, Tajikistan remains a poor country with an authoritarian government.
Article
Modern Uzbekistan
Adeeb Khalid
Uzbekistan was created in 1924 as a result of the so-called national-territorial delimitation of Soviet Central Asia. Although created in the context of the implementation of the Soviet policy of granting territorial autonomy to different nationalities in the Soviet multinational state, Uzbekistan was in many ways the embodiment of a national idea of the Central Asian intelligentsia.
For the first sixty-seven years of its existence, Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union. It experienced the massive transformations unleashed by the Soviet regime in the realms of politics, society, and culture (the establishment of a command economy, collectivization, an assault on Islam, forced unveiling) that reshaped society in significant ways. Purges in the 1930s removed from the scene all actors with any experience of public life before the consolidation of Soviet power and installed new political and cultural elites in their place.
The Second World War was in many ways a watershed. Participation in the war integrated Uzbekistan and its citizens into the Soviet Union. The postwar period saw increased investment in the republic and the achievement of mass education and universal literacy. The postwar era also saw the consolidation of Uzbek political elites at the helm of the republic as well as the crystallization of an Uzbek national identity, the work of the Uzbek Soviet intelligentsia. Yet, Uzbekistan’s primary duty to the Soviet economy remained that of producing as much cotton as possible. Production quotas kept on increasing (by the early 1980s, the hope was to produce 6 million tons of raw cotton annually) and the cotton monoculture meant that the Uzbek population remained primarily rural and socially conservative. A complex gender regime emerged in which women had legal equality, access to education, and high rates of participation in the labor market, but were also the guardians of national tradition. The later Soviet period also witnessed high rates of population growth that doubled the ethnic Uzbek population between 1959 and 1979.
By the early 1980s, the high costs of the cotton monoculture were becoming obvious. An anti-corruption campaign directed from Moscow antagonized both the Uzbek party elite and the general population, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began the series of reforms that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this turbulent period, the Uzbek party elite refashioned itself as the champion of the Uzbek nation and emerged in control of the state as Uzbekistan became independent.
The independent Uzbek state has sought its legitimacy by its claim to serve the interests of the Uzbek nation. It works on the basis of an Uzbek national identity that had predated the Soviet Union but had crystallized during it. Now, after independence, that identity can be articulated without the constraints placed on national expression during the Soviet period. There remain significant continuities with the Soviet period in terms of basic assumptions about politics and society, and they are the most clearly visible in the state’s fraught relationship with Islam.
Article
Nomads and the State in Soviet Kazakhstan
Niccolò Pianciola
After the military conquest of the Kazakh Steppe in 1920, Russian and Kazakh Bolsheviks implemented policies of hard decolonization (1921–1922): tens of thousands of Slavic settlers were expropriated and land was distributed to nomads. During the period of 1923–1927, soft decolonization prevailed: Kazakhstan was created as an ethnonational administrative region and agricultural immigration was prohibited. Kazakhs were given priority in access to land and water and they were included in the state and party administrations. No sedentarization plans were drafted. With the Soviet economic policy turn of 1928, Kazakhstan became the object of plans for expansion of grain cultivation (to this end, peasant colonization from Russia was made legal again) and of industrialization. Moscow lunched an offensive in order both to subjugate and to incorporate Kazakh society: Kazakh pastoral elites and former Tsarist administrators were expropriated and deported; and young Kazakh men were drafted into the Red Army for the first time. In 1929, plans for the total sedentarization of Kazakh nomadic pastoralists were suddenly proclaimed, then rapidly became of secondary concern as they were merged with the total collectivization drive. Policies toward nomadic pastoralists were dependent and auxiliary to grain production policies from 1928 to early 1930. Then, from late 1930 to 1932, Kazakh livestock was requisitioned in order to feed Moscow, Leningrad, and the army, as the Soviet peasants had slaughtered their animals during collectivization. Procurements turned an ongoing starvation crisis into a calamitous famine that killed one-third of the Kazakhs. When no livestock were left, procurements were discontinued in Kazakhstan. Private ownership of animals and pastoral nomadic ways were explicitly allowed again. Kazakh mobile pastoralism had been transformed: pastoral routes were shortened; pastoralists were a smaller share of the population; and their work was organized within state and collective farms. The famine turned the Kazakhs into a minority in Kazakhstan and forced them into Soviet state institutions.
Article
Sakhalin/Karafuto
Naoki Amano
The modern history of Sakhalin Island, a border island between Russia and Japan, has been one of demarcation, colonization, re-demarcation, and refugee resettlement, with a total of four demarcations and re-demarcations since the late 19th century, the first through diplomatic negotiations and the remaining three through war. One of the most significant features of the modern history of the border island is that each time the sovereignty of the islands changed, the population was completely replaced.
Four major events shaped the history of Sakhalin Island: the Treaty of St Petersburg of 1875, which de-bordered the island from the traditional international system of East Asia and incorporated it into the modern international system of the West; the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which resulted in the Japanese acquisition of the southern half of the island; the end of the five-year military occupation of northern Sakhalin by the Japanese in 1925; and the Soviet occupation of southern Sakhalin in 1945. Through each of these occasions, a holistic picture of the modern history of the Russo-Japanese border island can be discerned by focusing on the mobility of its inhabitants, how the inhabitants became displaced and were forced to leave their homes, and how the island was settled by the new sovereigns who replaced them.
Article
Soviet Collectivization in Central Asia
Marianne Kamp
In Soviet Central Asia, efforts at the mass collectivization of agriculture began in early 1930, and by 1935, more than 80 percent of all farming and herding households joined collective farms (kolkhoz) or state farms (sovkhoz). The Communist Party’s main purpose was to control peasant lives and labor. Collectivization was supposed to lead to increased agricultural production due to modernized methods and intensification. The USSR’s Central Asian republics were given unachievable plans to raise their output of cotton, wheat, and meat, while wealthier herders and peasants were threatened with arrest and exile if they resisted collectivization. Collectivization was devastating for Kazakh nomadic herders, whose livestock numbers plummeted, and who endured a three-year long famine that killed more than one-fourth of the Kazakh population. Investments went into expanding irrigation canals and irrigable fields, forcing an ever-increasing number of kolkhoz members to expend most of their labor on cotton cultivation.
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The Soviet Legacy in Central Asian Politics and Society
Vincent Artman
To trace the Soviet legacy in Central Asia is to trace the contours of a complex, multifaceted, and in many ways unfinished process. Between the advent of Russian imperial rule in the late 19th century and the collapse of Soviet power in 1991, the dynastic monarchies and nomadic federations of Central Asia were subdued, and the region was refashioned first into a European settler colony and then into industrialized national republics. Everything from political geography and institutions, economic patterns, urban patterns, and normative identities were indelibly shaped by the Soviet experience. Despite the legacies of the Soviet period, however, each of the states of Central Asia has also followed its own distinct trajectory since 1991, complicating the search for a coherent regional narrative. All of the post-Soviet states of Central Asia share certain common political, economic, and cultural “inheritances,” but their divergent histories since 1991 highlight not only the enduring significance of this shared patrimony, but also their remarkably different responses and trajectories since 1991.
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The Uyghurs: Making a Nation
David Brophy
The Uyghurs comprise a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim nationality of China, with communities living in the independent republics of Central Asia that date to the 19th century, and now a global diaspora. As in the case of many national histories, the consolidation of a Uyghur nation was an early 20th-century innovation, which appropriated and revived the legacy of an earlier Uyghur people in Central Asia. This imagined past was grounded in the history of a Uyghur nomadic state and its successor principalities in Gansu and the Hami-Turfan region (known to Islamic geographers as “Uyghuristan”). From the late 19th century onward, the scholarly rediscovery of a Uyghur past in Central Asia presented an attractive civilizational narrative to Muslim intellectuals across Eurasia who were interested in forms of “Turkist” racial thinking. During the First World War, Muslim émigrés from Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan) living in Russian territory laid claim to the Uyghur legacy as part of their communal genealogy. This group of budding “Uyghurists” then took advantage of conditions created by the Russian Revolution, particularly in the 1920s, to effect a radical redefinition of the community. In the wake of 1917, Uyghurist discourse was first mobilized as a cultural rallying point for all Muslims with links to China; it was then refracted through the lens of Soviet nationalities policy and made to conform with the Stalinist template of the nation. From Soviet territory, the newly refined idea of a Uyghur nation was exported to Xinjiang through official and unofficial conduits, and in the 1930s the Uyghur identity of Xinjiang’s Muslim majority was given state recognition. Since then, Uyghur nationhood has been a pillar of Beijing’s minzu system but has also provided grounds for opposition to Beijing’s policies, which many Uyghurs feel have failed to realize the rights that should accord to them as an Uyghur nation.
