Dr Alexander Morrison: List of publications

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MILITARY-POPULAR ADMINISTRATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS IN TSARIST CENTRAL ASIA

September 2023
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Journal article
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Rivista Storica Italiana
This paper explores the nature of voenno-narodnoe upravlenie (Military-Popular Administration) across Tsarist Central Asia, from its origins in the North Caucasus and its application in Central Asia in the late 1860s to the suppression of the Central Asian Revolt in 1916. Voenno-narodnoe upravlenie is best understood as a characteristically colonial form of administration, with a clear separation between a lower, ‘native’ level, and an upper, executive level manned exclusively by Europeans – army officers seconded from military service, who in many cases had participated in the campaigns of conquest that had made Central Asia part of the Russian empire. Military institutional conservatism and paranoid fears of Muslim ‘fanaticism’ ensured that despite frequent criticism and widespread awareness of its inadequacies, voenno-narodnoe upravlenie remained largely unreformed until the outbreak of the First World War, which would see its unravelling and collapse.
Colonialism, Russian Empire, Turkestan, Military

Bab'I Bunty in Semirech’e: gender, class and ethnicity in Central Asia during the First World War

June 2023
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Journal article
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Revolutionary Russia
<p><em>Bab'i bunty</em>&nbsp;&ndash; women's riots - were a form of collective action in which women responded to crisis by making conscious and explicit use of their sex to achieve clear political goals. Owing to rapidly rising prices of food and manufactured goods from 1916 onwards the First World War saw widespread&nbsp;<em>bab'i bunty</em>&nbsp;across the Russian empire. In Semirech'e &ndash; the only region of Russian Central Asia with a substantial settler population - the class politics of these protests were complicated by questions of ethnicity and religion. This article explores a series of&nbsp;<em>bab'i bunty</em>&nbsp;which erupted in the towns of Lepsinsk and Vernyi and their surrounding districts, in which Slavic soldiers' wives (<em>soldatki</em>) targeted Muslim-owned businesses, but also those owned by their fellow settlers. In between these outbreaks in the summer of 1916 Semirech'e would become the centre of a violent uprising by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz against the Tsarist regime.</p>
FFR

Commemorating the Russian conquest of Central Asia

June 2023
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Chapter
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Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia: Texts, Traditions and Practices, 10th-21st Centuries
Few places feel more utterly English, more serenely metropolitan, than the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. The key historical events associated with it, notably the martyrdom of St Thomas a’Becket, are often violent and highly political, but at first glance wholly domestic. A closer look reveals a different story, however, one that is intimately linked with the history of empire, and above all of imperial conquest and warfare. The chapel of the Royal East Kent regiment (The Buffs), with its rows of regimental colours and battle honours from Tel-el-Kebir, Sudan and the Boer War is the most obvious reminder, and a quick glance at the elaborate memorials that line the walls reveals many more. A memorial to eight officers, 27 NCOS and 264 private soldiers of Prince Albert’s Light Infantry who fell in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–1842; to Frederick Mackeson, Lt Col. of the Bengal Army and Commissioner of Peshawar, who died “of a wound inflicted by a Mahometan fanatic,”1 and others commemorating those who died in battles of the Anglo-Sikh Wars, or the Boer War. Canterbury is just one of the grandest examples—almost every parish church in Britain has memorials commemorating individuals and groups who served a now vanished empire, usually as soldiers, but also in many other capacities—the tiny church of Hubberholme in the Yorkshire Dales, for instance, commemorates George Andrew Hobson, who designed the Victoria Falls bridge over the Zambezi.
SBTMR

Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia By James Pickett

April 2023
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Other
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Journal of Islamic Studies
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5004 Religious Studies, 5005 Theology

The Qirghiz Baatir and the Russian Empire: A portrait of a local intermediary in Russian Central Asia

October 2022
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Other
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Central Asian Survey

Shoshana Keller. Russia and Central Asia: Conquest, Coexistence, Convergence

October 2022
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Other
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University of Toronto Quarterly
47 Language, Communication and Culture

Irina Viktorovna Erofeeva (1953–2020)

July 2021
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Other
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Central Asian Survey

The Russian Conquest of Central Asia.

December 2020
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Book
The Russian conquest of Central Asia was the 19th century's most dramatic and successful example of European imperial expansion, adding 1.5 million square miles of territory and at least 6 million people - most of them Muslims - to the Tsar's domains. This book is the first comprehensive military and diplomatic history of the conquest to be published for over a hundred years. From the earliest conflicts on the steppe frontier in the 1830s, to the annexation of the Pamirs in the early 1900s, it gives a detailed account of the logistics and operational history of Russian wars against Khoqand, Bukhara and Khiva, the capture of Tashkent and Samarkand, the bloody subjection of the Turkmen, and the decision-making processes that launched these campaigns. It also explores in depth Russian diplomatic relations with Central Asian states and peoples, China, Persia and the British Empire. Based on ten years of archival research in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia and India, on Persianate chronicles and an abundance of campaign memoirs, this book explains how Russia acquired and governed a colonial empire in Central Asia, with consequences that still resonate today.
Turkestan, Central Asia, Russian Empire, Colonialism, Military History

Russia’s Turn to Persia: Orientalism in Diplomacy and Intelligence By Denis V. Volkov

September 2020
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Other
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Journal of Islamic Studies
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5004 Religious Studies, 5005 Theology

Settler Bolsheviks in the Soviet “Eastern”

July 2020
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Chapter
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Cinematic Settlers
The Revolutionary and Civil War period in Central Asia became a popular subject for novels and films in the USSR, portraying Russians as the main agents of progress in Central Asia against the villainous Basmachi, bandits who resisted the new Soviet order. In the 1960s these stories developed into a hugely popular genre of film, the Soviet “Eastern” that was strongly influenced by American “Westerns,” with the Basmachi playing the role of American Indians, and Bolshevik commissars and soldiers the cowboys and cavalry. This paper will explore the extent to which Soviet Easterns reflect settler colonial narratives, and the degree to which the Bolshevik claim to be bringing enlightenment and progress to a backward region has commonalities with settler colonialism elsewhere. It will focus on Semirechie, the main Russian settler colony in southern Central Asia, and in particular the film Alye Maki Issyk-Kulya (The Scarlet Poppies of Issyk-Kul, Bolotbek Shamshiev, 1972) and the novel on which it was based, Alexander Sytin’s Kontrabandisty Tian’-Shanya (The Smugglers of the Tian-Shan, 1930). It argues that while Sytin’s writing certainly does touch on settler colonial themes, these are muted in the film, which is instead suffused with Kyrgyz national narratives and symbolism.
36 Creative Arts and Writing, 4705 Literary Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, 47 Language, Communication and Culture

Refugees, resettlement and revolutionary violence in Semirech'e after the 1916 revolt

January 2020
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Chapter
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CENTRAL ASIAN REVOLT OF 1916: A COLLAPSING EMPIRE IN THE AGE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION

The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in an Age of War and Revolution

September 2019
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Edited book
The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.
SBTMR

"The extraordinary successes which the Russians have achieved". The Conquest of Central Asia in Callwell's 'Small Wars'.

August 2019
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Journal article
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Small Wars and Insurgencies
Charles Callwell’s Small Wars (1896, 1899, 1906) is widely considered both an ur-text for modern counter-insurgency studies, and a primer for the racialized late-Victorian approach to war against ‘savages’: either way it is usually only considered within a British context. Alongside the numerous examples Callwell used from British colonial campaigns, he frequently referred to those of other European powers – notably the Russian conquest of Central Asia. This article will seek to analyse Callwell’s views of Russian colonial warfare, establish the sources on which he relied, and evaluate his accuracy and the effect which the Russian example had on his thinking.

Convicts and Concentration Camps

May 2019
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Other
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Kritika (Bloomington): explorations in Russian and Eurasian history
Review Article on Clare Anderson, ed., A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies and Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–1903.

Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia By Paolo Sartori

May 2019
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Other
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Journal of Islamic Studies
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5004 Religious Studies, 5005 Theology

On Dunganskaya Street. Vernyi Town as a “Plural Society”

January 2019
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Journal article
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Istoriya
© Ltd Integration: Education and Science. All rights reserved. 19th and early 20th-century Vernyi is usually seen as a Russian settler or Cossack town, laid out on a classic colonial grid pattern and the centre of a new settler colony in Semirech’e. This paper suggests a new way of looking at Vernyi and Semirech’e — as a “plural society”, a phrase taken from J. S. Furnivall’s studies of Colonial South-east Asia. Located close to the Chinese frontier, Semirech’e saw significant in-migration of different ethnic and religious groups from China — Manchus, Qalmyqs, Dungans and Taranchis — as well as Muslims from other parts of Russian Turkestan such as Ferghana and Tashkent. This was reflected in Vernyi’s diverse population and atmosphere, which some contemporary observers compared to that of a Chinese treaty port.

The archives talk-Paolo Sartori’s contribution to the history of central Asia

January 2019
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Journal article
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Ab Imperio
© 2018, Ab Imperio. All rights reserved. This review essay discusses the book: Paolo Sartori, Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (= Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic and Central Asian Studies, Vol. 24) (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016). 392 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-90-04-33090-0. The author expands his analysis to other publications by Sartori and offers his understanding of the scholar’s overall contribution to the field of Central Asian Studies.

The 'Turkestan Generals' and Russian military history

May 2018
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Journal article
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War in History
This article is a short collective biography of six so-called ‘Turkestan Generals’, all of whom played a prominent role in the Russian conquest and administration of Central Asia. These campaigns are usually seen as marginal to the military history of the Russian empire in the nineteenth century, but they were central to the reputations of three of the most prominent generals of the period, who became important public figures – Cherniaev, Skobelev, and Kuropatkin. The article shows that this was not accidental, but the product of a carefully constructed narrative in Russian military historiography.
colonialism, military historiography, Russian Empire, Turkestan, conquest, Central Asia

Timur Kasymovich Beisembiev, 1955–2016

July 2017
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Other
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Central Asian Survey

Beyond the Great Game': The Russian origins of the second Anglo-Afghan War

May 2017
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Journal article
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Modern Asian Studies
© 2017 Cambridge University Press. Drawing on published documents and research in Russian, Uzbek, British, and Indian archives, this article explains how a hasty attempt by Russia to put pressure on the British in Central Asia unintentionally triggered the second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80. This conflict is usually interpreted within the framework of the so-called â € Great Game', which assumes that only the European â € Great Powers' had any agency in Central Asia, pursuing a coherent strategy with a clearly defined set of goals and mutually understood rules. The outbreak of the Second Anglo-Afghan war is usually seen as a deliberate attempt by the Russians to embroil the British disastrously in Afghan affairs, leading to the eventual installation of â € Abd al-Rahman Khan, hosted for many years by the Russians in Samarkand, on the Afghan throne. In fact, the Russians did not foresee any of this. â € Abd al-Rahman's ascent to the Afghan throne owed nothing to Russian support, and everything to British desperation. What at first seems like a classic â € Great Game' episode was a tale of blundering and unintended consequences on both sides. Central Asian rulers were not merely passive bystanders who provided a picturesque backdrop for Anglo-Russian relations, but important actors in their own right.

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance.

January 2017
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

January 2017
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Journal article
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SLAVIC REVIEW

The Touch of Civilization Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization

January 2017
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Other
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CAHIERS DU MONDE RUSSE

Threads of Empire:' Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552-1917

January 2017
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Ter Minassian, Taline Most Secret Agent of Empire: Reginald Teague-Jones, Master Spy of the Great Game Trans. Tom Rees New York: Oxford University Press 283 pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-021076-2 Publication Date: September 2014

September 2016
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Other
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History Reviews of New Books
4404 Development Studies, 44 Human Society

Imperial Russia's Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788-1914

January 2016
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Proceedings of the XIIth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies: Central Asia: A Maturing Field

January 2016
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Edited book

Russian settler colonialism

January 2016
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Chapter
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The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism

The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia

January 2016
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Creating a Colonial Shari'a for Russian Turkestan: Count Pahlen, the Hidaya and Anglo-Muhammadan Law

January 2015
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Chapter

The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution.

January 2015
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: too soon to talk of echoes?

December 2014
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Chapter
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Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and the Legacy of Imperialism
Russia is often considered to be an anomaly amongst the European empires, and its ambivalent status is further clouded by the seventy years of aggressively modernising Soviet rule that preceded its collapse. Across all its former territories, elements of the Soviet and even the Tsarist legacy are still live political issues: tangled borders, new nationalities, patterns of migration, strategic imperatives, and open warfare all function within the ghostly framework of the Russian Empire. This is so even though the destinies of its constituent parts over the last twenty years have been so divergent, ranging from EU membership for the Baltic States to a return to the personality cult in post-communist Turkmenistan. In part this is simply a function of the empire’s vastness, and accordingly any assessment, however brief and superficial (as this chapter inevitably will be), must take into a account the long process of Russian expansion, the different circumstances under which territories were incorporated into the empire, and their varied experiences of imperial or Soviet rule. As political circumstances within and outside the former USSR have changed, so, inevitably, have interpretations of Russian imperial history. Immediacy is what makes the Russian case truly distinctive: Russia’s relations with the former republics are far from postcolonial, and the Russian federation remains an imperial polity rather than a nation-state. Accordingly, we are not dealing with ‘echoes’ of imperialism here at all, but with a cacophony of urgent and immediate legacies.
Legacies, Europe, Empire, SBTMR, Colonialism

Camels and Colonial Armies: The Logistics of Warfare in Central Asia in the Early 19th Century

September 2014
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Journal article
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Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
This article explores the use of camels for baggage transport by European colonial armies in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on two episodes: the Russian winter expedition to Khiva, and the march of the Army of the Indus into Afghanistan, both of which took place in 1839. However sophisticated their weapons and other technology, until at least the 1880s European colonial armies were forced to rely exclusively on baggage animals if they wanted to move around: railways arrived very late in the history of European expansion. In Central Asia this meant rounding up, loading, managing and feeding tens of thousands of camels, which could only be furnished by the pastoral groups who inhabited the region, who in some cases were also the objects of conquest. Camel transport placed certain structural constraints on European conquest in Central Asia: firstly it meant that the forces involved were almost always very small; secondly it prevented the launching of spontaneous or unauthorised campaigns by “men on the spot,” as every advance had to be preceded by the rounding up of the necessary baggage animals, and the creation of a budget to pay for then. Finally, the constraints imposed by camel transport ensured that British and Russian armies would never meet in Central Asia, and that a Russian invasion of India was a chimera.
Afghanistan, Camels, Colonialism, Warfare, SBTMR, Khiva, Commissariat

Afterword

September 2014
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Other
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Études de lettres
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilising mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917

September 2014
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Journal article
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Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.
SBTMR

Russia, Khoqand, and the Search for a “Natural” Frontier, 1863–1865

September 2014
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Journal article
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Ab Imperio
<p style="text-align:justify;"> Russian expansion into Central Asia in the nineteenth century is usually seen either as the product of lobbying by big capitalist interests in Moscow or as a wholly unplanned process driven by “men on the spot” who slipped beyond St. Petersburg’s control. This article is a microstudy of one of the campaigns that immediately preceded the fall of Tashkent in 1865, during which Russian forces under General M. G. Cherniaev united the Orenburg and Siberian “lines” of fortification to create what was meant to be a permanent new frontier on the steppe. It demonstrates that neither of these explanations is satisfactory – economic calculations played a minor role in Russian decision making, while there was an authorized plan for expansion in the region. However this plan rested on the premise that the Russians could identify a “natural” frontier in the region, marked by a river, watershed, or mountain range. The instructions given to Cherniaev and other “men on the spot” reflected this, but a lack of detailed geographical knowledge meant that these orders were often contradictory or impossible to fulfill. It was this that allowed Cherniaev to determine the timetable (though not the direction) of Russian expansion, and that would see the fall of Tashkent in June 1865. </p>
SBTMR

Introduction: Killing the cotton canard and getting rid of the great game: rewriting the Russian conquest of Central Asia, 1814–1895

May 2014
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Journal article
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Central Asian Survey
SBTMR

‘Nechto eroticheskoe’, ‘courir après l'ombre’? – logistical imperatives and the fall of Tashkent, 1859–1865

May 2014
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Journal article
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Central Asian Survey
This article explores the debates that preceded the Russian conquest of Tashkent in 1865. It argues that none of the explanations usually given for this – the ‘men on the spot’, ‘cotton hunger’, or the Great Game with Britain – is satisfactory. Instead, it shows that the War Ministry and the governors of Orenburg had advocated the capture of Tashkent from the late 1850s, and that General Cherniaev's assault in 1865 was at least tacitly authorized. The motives for the Russian advance combined the need for better supply chains to the steppe fortresses, a desire to ‘anchor’ their new frontier in a region with a sedentary population, and concern for security from attacks by the Khoqand Khanate. Economic considerations and rivalry with Britain played very minor roles.
imperialism, steppe, Orenburg, Omsk, Cherniaev, Tashkent, Khoqand, Miliutin, SBTMR

Le rôle des fortifications dans les stratégies de conquête et de pacification des espaces désertiques: les exemples russe en Asie central et français dans le "Grand Sud" algérien XIXe - XXe sièc

January 2014
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Chapter
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Coloniser, pacifier, administrer (XIXe-XXe siècle)
Colonies

Twin Imperial Disasters. The invasions of Khiva and Afghanistan in the Russian and British official mind, 1839-1842

January 2014
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Journal article
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MODERN ASIAN STUDIES
This paper examines two linked cases of abortive Imperial expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan and the Russian winter expedition to Khiva both took place in 1839, and both ended in disaster. These events were linked, not merely by coincidence, but by mutual reactions to intelligence received in Orenburg, St Petersburg, Calcutta, London and Tehran. British and Russian officials shared similar fears about each other’s ambitions in Central Asia, similar patterns of prejudice, arrogance and ignorance, and a similar sense of entitlement as the self-conscious agents of two ‘Great Powers’. By examining the decision-making process which preceded these twin cases of expansion, and the British and Russian attitude to Central Asian rulers and informants, the paper provides not only a deeper understanding of what provoked these particular disasters, but also of the wider process of European imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

Oriel and the Wider World

November 2013
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Chapter
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Oriel College, a History
SBTMR

Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk Land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest

July 2013
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Chapter
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Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia (19th- Early 20th Century)
This paper is a revision and correction of Chapter 3 of my 2008 monograph ('Russian Rule in Samarkand') in which I made a number of errors and misjudgements. The most glaring of these was to confuse a Bukharan tax official (the amlakdar) with the owner of 'mulk' (a category of landed property which usually carried some form of tax exemption). I have disentangled these, added some further evidence, and reconsidered the evidence which I put forward in my book. I argue that Russian attempts to implement at what is sometimes called 'land reform' in the Zarafshan Valley in the 1860s and 1870s are better understood as a fiscal measure, rather than anything to do with property rights. The Russians found the Bukharan land tax system impossible to understand, and so proceeded to dismantle it, abolishing the annual assessment of the quantity and value of the harvest (which had been the responsibility of the amlakdar) and also refusing to recognise claims made by religious elites in the region that they were entitled to tax breaks on their mulk property. However, the system the Russians put in place instead placed enormous power in the hands of village oligarchies, ensuring that at the lower levels the Russians had little control over how the tax burden was allocated, and almost certainly collected far less than their Bukharan predecessors. The Russians also failed in their attempt to have the region's land declared the patrimony of the state. The paradoxical result was that, at least in the Zarafshan Valley (and quite possibly in other sedentary regions of Central Asia) the advent of the colonial regime meant a reduced tax burden, less state oversight, and security of property at least equal to what had existed before.
SBTMR

Bol'shaia igra, 1856-1907: Mify i realii rossiisko-britanskikh otnoshenii v Tsentral'noi i Vostochnoi Azii. By E. Iu. Sergeev. Moscow: Tovarishchestvo nauchnykh izdanii KMK, 2012. 454 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. I...

January 2013
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Other
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Slavic Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Internal Colonization. Russia's Imperial Experience by Alexander Etkind (review)

January 2013
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Other
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Ab Imperio

The Andijan Uprising of 1898 and Its Leader Dukchi Ishan Described by Contemporary Poets by Aftandil S. Erkinov (review)

January 2013
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Other
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Ab Imperio
3602 Creative and Professional Writing, 51 Physical Sciences, 36 Creative Arts and Writing

The Pahlen Commission and the Re-Establishment of Rectitude in Transcaspia, 1908-1909

January 2013
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Journal article
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Monde(s)

“Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region”: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910

March 2012
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Journal article
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Acta Slavica Iaponica
Pahlen, Russia, Colonialism, SBTMR, Resettlement, Turkestan

Sufism, Pan-Islamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the Aftermath of the Andijan Uprising*

February 2012
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Journal article
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Past & Present
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire

January 2012
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Journal article
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Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Nomadic Lifeworlds and tsarist Politics: The Rising in Central Asia 1916

January 2012
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Journal article
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RUSSIAN REVIEW

The Caucasus under Soviet Rule

January 2012
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Journal article
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Colonial Comparisons

January 2012
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Journal article
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Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Central Asia as part of the Russian Empire.

January 2011
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Islam and the Russian Empire. Reform and Revolution in Central Asia By Hélène Carrèred’Encausse

January 2011
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Other
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Journal of Islamic Studies
43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 5004 Religious Studies, 5005 Theology

Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration

January 2011
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Journal article
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus

January 2011
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Journal article
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

‘Studies on Central Asia’, a special issue of Oriente Moderno, LXXXVII (1), 2007

March 2010
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Other
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Central Asian Survey

Le Turkestan Russe: Une colonie comme les autres? ed. by Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin (review)

January 2010
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Other
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Ab Imperio

Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923

January 2010
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Revolyutsiya naoborot. Srednyaya Aziya mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR [A revolution in reverse. Central Asia between the fall of the Tsarist empire and the creation of the USSR]

December 2009
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Other
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Central Asian Survey
4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth

“Applied Orientalism” in British India and Tsarist Turkestan

July 2009
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Journal article
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Comparative Studies in Society and History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Russian Bureaucracy and the State

January 2009
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Chapter

The Military Bureaucracy in the Samarkand Oblast’; of Russian Turkestan

January 2009
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Chapter
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Russian Bureaucracy and the State
4807 Public Law, 44 Human Society, 48 Law and Legal Studies, 4407 Policy and Administration, 4408 Political Science, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Russian rule in Samarkand 1868-1910 a comparison with British India

September 2008
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Book
Opening with the background to the political situation in Central Asia and a narrative of the Russian conquest itself, the book moves on to analyse official attitudes to Islam and to pre-colonial elites, and the earliest attempts to ...
History, SBTMR

For prophet and Tsar: Islam and empire in Russia and Central Asia

January 2008
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus

January 2008
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Other
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SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW

Russian rule in Turkestan and the example of British India, c. 1860-1917

December 2006
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Journal article
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Slavonic and East European Review

‘White Todas’: the politics of race and class amongst European settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c.1860–1900

May 2004
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Journal article
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The Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Book Review: Endgame: Britain, Russia and the Final Struggle for Central Asia

January 2004
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Other
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War in History
4303 Historical Studies, 4408 Political Science, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society

On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia, by Jennifer Keating

Other
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The English Historical Review
4303 Historical Studies, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology

Russian Colonial Warfare in the Caucasus and Central Asia

Chapter
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The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies
This paper provides an overview of Russian colonial campaigns of conquest and 'pacification' in the Caucasus and Central Asia in the 19th century. It explores the nature of this type of asymmetric warfare, the development of specific military doctrines in these settings, and the nature of the violence used. It also looks at the institutional evolution of specialised units of the imperial Russian army to serve and fight in these regions.
Caucasus, Central Asia, Colonialism, Russian Empire, Warfare

Russian Turkestan and the First World War

Chapter
The First World War had a profound impact even on regions of the Russian Empire that were very distant from the front. This was particularly true of its most colonial periphery, the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan, which saw the first major rebellion against the Tsarist regime in the summer of 1916. This article explores the direct links between Turkestan and the front, the conscription of soldiers and labourers from the region and its hosting of tens of thousands of Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. It examines the economic impact of the war, the course of the 1916 revolt, and the role of wartime legacies in the revolutionary and civil war years that followed.
Central Asia, Colonialism, First World War, Russian Empire, Turkestan

The Murder of Smorguner. Tashkent, 1899. ‘Honour’, class, and antisemitism in the Late Imperial Russian Army Officer Corps

Journal article
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Journal of Central Asian History
Using court records and published accounts, this article explores the circumstances of a little-known murder which took place in Tashkent in 1899. The victim, Aaron Smorguner, was Jewish, and both a prominent lawyer and the editor of Russkii Turkestan, one of the few unofficial newspapers published in the region. His murderer, Col Arsenii Stashevskii, was the commander of one of the regiments of the local garrison. This article reconstructs the sequence of events which led to the murder, and assesses its significance for understanding the culture of ‘honour’ and antisemitism in the late imperial Russian army officer corps when contextualised within the empire as a whole. This violent episode also sheds significant light on the setting for the murder – colonial Tashkent – and the role played by the military within Russian society there.
Tashkent, Murder, antisemitism, FFR, Military, Colonialism

‘Agir à l’anglaise’ – Britain, France and Russia in the Imperial mirror, 1814–1914

Chapter
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Modern Transimperial and Interimperial Histories
This paper offers an overview of the pooling and sharing of knowledge between the British, French and Russian empires in the 19th century. It begins by exploring how far the Russian ruling elite saw the British and French Empires as exemplars and borrowed techniques and tools of conquest and rule from them, before looking at how far this was reciprocated, and at Russian views of the Asian empires that were its neighbours – the Ottoman Empire, China and Japan.
imperialism, British empire, transimperial, Russian empire, French empire