Local Agency and the Limits of Imperial Knowledge in the Kazakh Steppe and Beyond

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Earlier historians of Central Asia like Martha Olcott have stressed the Russian Empire’s repressive nature and native people’s violent resistance against it. By contrast, Ian Campbell claimed that the Russian Empire saw the Kazakh Steppe “like a half-blind state,” suggesting both a desire to know, administer, and control the steppe’s land and people and a fundamental inability to achieve the basic tasks of governance. His circumscribed view of Russian state power avoids the pitfalls of reifying imperial rule or of viewing all interactions between the imperial state and non-Western subjects through the blanket lens of “Orientalism.” Additionally, focusing on the limits of imperial rule returns agency to local actors, including ordinary Central Asian herders and townspeople, who have historically been excluded by earlier scholars’ focus on top-down policies. Building on Campbell’s approach, this panel examines the limits of knowledge and power in the Romanov state’s political and administrative practices in the Kazakh steppe and Tashkent from the mid-18th to the early 20th century. It shows how local actors used lacunae in imperial capacity to escape imperial control or to demand benefits for themselves and their communities. The papers in this panel reveal that whether they were bargaining for return of fugitive captives, petitioning for appointment of Islamic judges, negotiating lease contracts for their pastureland, or avoiding questions from state census-takers, Central Asians found ways to resist the depredations of imperial rule. This panel thus develops new lines of inquiry about the political, religious, economic, and demographic history in Central Asia.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Jennifer Keating, U College Dublin (Ireland)

Papers

• The Torghud Exodus and the Qazaq Zhuz: Imperial Subjecthood on the 18th Century Steppe - Daniil Kabotyanski, Indiana U Bloomington

• Dreams of the Muftiate: The Kazakhs and the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (1868–1920) - Nurlan Kabdylkhak, UNC at Chapel Hill

• Dazed and Confused: Russian Provincial Administrators vs. Rental Contracts for Kazakh Land, 1868–1916 - Danielle Ross, Utah State U

Discussant

• Ian Wylie Campbell, UC Davis