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Browsing Articles by Author "Morrison, Alexander Stephen"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    ‘Applied Orientalism’ in British India and Tsarist Turkestan
    (2009-07) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    ‘We cannot promise to those who may choose Oriental scholarship, that they shall find themselves abreast, in all the various high-roads of life which lead to profit and distinction, with the men who shall have devoted themselves to acquiring the knowledge which in these days is power, the intellectual treasures which make fifty years of Europe better than a cycle in Cathay, which are the sinews of peaceful empire as surely as money is the sinew of war.’
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    Camels and Colonial Armies. The Logistics of warfare in Central Asia in the early 19th century
    (2014) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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.
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    Central Asia as a part of the Russian Empire
    (2011) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    An excessively lengthy review article analysing the collectively-authored volume 'Tsentral'naya Aziya v Sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii', published by 'Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie' in 2007
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    Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire
    (2012) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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 between European and Asiatic Russia, with Central Asia in particular emerging as a separate, military-ruled 'colony', not just in cultural, but also in institutional terms.
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    ‘Nechto Eroticheskoe’, 'Courir après l'ombre'? – logistical imperatives and the fall of Tashkent, 1859 – 1865
    (2014-05) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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.
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    Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917
    (2015) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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.
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    Russia, Khoqand, and the search for a "Natural" Frontier, 1863–1865
    (2014) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    Abstract 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.
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    Russian Rule in Turkestan and the Example of British India ca1865 - 1917
    (2006) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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 Russian travellers' accounts of British India, and the `Asianist' tradition which argued that Russians had a greater affinity with Asian peoples than other Europeans, and that the nature of their empire was consequently different. In the case of Turkestan it rejects this assumption on the basis of research in Russian and Uzbek archives, and of the differing views expressed in books and journals by Russian military officers and imperial administrators of the day
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    “Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region”: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910
    (2012) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    This article examines the institutional background to the decision to send Senator Count K. K. Pahlen's Commission of Inspection to Turkestan in 1908. It concentrates on the divisive issue of 'pereselenie', or peasant resettlement, which Pahlen was supposed to be facilitating but ended up opposing. The article also seeks to establish the value or otherwise to the historian of the Pahlen Commission's multi-volume report.
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    Sufism, Panislamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the aftermath of the Andijan Uprising
    (2012) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    This article explores a hitherto unknown incident in the region between Aulie-Ata and Chimkent in the eighteen months following the Andijan Uprising against Russian rule in Central Asia in 1898, in which the late Tsarist Orientalist-Administrator Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin found himself called upon to uproot an imaginary conspiracy. It uses this to explore late Russian imperial attitudes to Islam, and the degree to which, despite his unusual knowledge of Central Asian culture and society, Lykoshin's attitudes were in many ways highly typical of Russian officialdom in this period.
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    The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Colonial Comparisons
    (2012) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
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    Twin Imperial Disasters. The invasions of Khiva and Afghanistan in the Russian and British official mind, 1839–1842
    (2014) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    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 attitudes 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.
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    White Todas’. The Politics of Race and Class amongst European Settlers on the Nilgiri Hills c1860 – 1900
    (2004) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    This article argues that it is not possible to generalise about the politics and racial attitudes of so-called 'unofficial' Europeans in India from observations of the community in Calcutta which, precisely because it was so large, was atypical. Elsewhere where the number of Europeans was smaller, attitudes towards Indians were more complex, and hostility towards the 'official element' of Europeans in civil and military employ with the Government of India was often greater than racial antagonism towards Indians. The Nilgiri Hills in South India, with a population of about 1,500 settlers, are a case in point. The 'White Todas' (the name is taken from a pastoral Hill-tribe) felt distinct from the 'official' Europeans who came up to the main hill-station, Ootacamund, the summer capital of the Madras Presidency, during the hot weather. To avoid complete political emasculation, the 'Todas' at times had to forge political alliances with wealthy Indian mercantile elites, with whom their interests often coincided.