Labor, Race, and Ethnicity in the Energy Industries of Late Imperial Kazakhstan

• In Event: Liberatory Antagonisms in Labor and Cultural Production in Central Asia

Abstract

In the late Russian empire, the Kazakh steppe was already the site of two large-scale energy producing projects: the oil fields at Dossor near the Caspian Sea, and the coal mines at Ekibastuz deep in the steppe. Both of these locations created particular geographic, technological, and environmental challenges for the global (mostly British) capitalist firms that owned and operated these concerns. However, the extraction of coal and crude from the ground required not only complex technical machinery and engineering, but also relied on a large force of workers drawn from Kazakhs and local Russian settlers, as well as technicians, managers, and engineers from Europe and the Russian metropole.

Author

• John Britton Seitz, Tennessee Wesleyan U