'There Is No Grass or Water': Settler Colonialism and Buryat Migration to Mongolia, 1880-1916

• In Event: Imperial Boundaries and Borderland Communities: Exploring Injustice in Eurasia

Abstract

From 1880 until the First World War, Russian imperial authorities intensified state-sponsored Slavic settler colonialism to the region around eastern Siberia’s Lake Baikal, eventually converting large swaths of Buryat pastureland into state treasury property. Scholars have explored Buryat responses to this process, including the formation of the Buryat intelligentsia, the Buryat national movement, and national activism during and after the 1905 revolutions. Using documents from Mongolia’s National Central Archive written in classical Mongolian by Mongolian border guards and provincial officials, this paper investigates an understudied Buryat reaction – migration to neighboring Mongolia. Surveying migrants’ social networks, geographic patterns of settlement, and economic activities across this period reveals that land shortages triggered Buryat resettlement to Mongolia and points to the anti-colonial orientations of many migrants.

Author

• Griffin B. Creech, U of Pennsylvania