Making Sense of Maritime Environments in Central Asia: Settlers, Nomads, and Commercial Fisheries in the Caspian Sea, 1890s-1910s

• In Event: Settler Colonialism and Borderlands Capitalism in Siberia and Central Asia

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Caspian Sea with its three tributary rivers became a major site of the Russian fishing industry. This paper will demonstrate how the maritime fish trade in the Caspian basin reverberated into the dynamics of settler and nomadic livelihoods, anchoring them in broader capitalist transformations. It develops the argument that just as commercial steamship companies rewired the region along the demands of the expanding Russian state, they also exacerbated the ecological and economic vulnerability of the Kazakh and Turkmen fishermen.

Author

• Ruslana Bovhyria, Freie U Berlin (Germany)