This article analyses the Russian policy towards foreign Buddhist clergy who penetrated into the Russian Empire from Mongolia and Tibet between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archive materials, ...

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 ...

In “The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety” (2015), Neil Sinhababu and I gave Backward Clock, a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s (1981) truth-tracking analysis of knowledge. In “Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True ...

This article reviews recent literature on legal and civic ideas of citizenship within the Russian empire, arguing that much of it fails to take into account the many legal and administrative inequalities which existed ...

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 ...

Tibetan Buddhism, in the eyes of Orthodox Christian polemicists, was always seen as a harmful paganism, and fifighting against this ‘superstition’ was a high priority. Based on analysis of nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox ...

In 1925, the USSR communist party’s Central Asian Bureau ordered an inquiry on the countryside, resulting in the series The Modern Central Asian Village. It combined pre-revolutionary methods with Soviet attention to social ...

In the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, medical experts (virologists, epidemiologists, public health scholars, and statisticians alike) have become instrumental in suggesting policies to counteract the spread of coronavirus. Given ...

This article argues that Russia's Empire in Central Asia is best understood in comparison with the other Western Colonial Empires of the nineteenth century, specifically Britain's Indian Empire. It examines nineteenth-century ...