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Browsing Articles by Subject "Central Asia (History)"
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Item Open Access Camels and Colonial Armies. The Logistics of warfare in Central Asia in the early 19th century(2014) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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.Item Open Access Central Asia as a part of the Russian Empire(2011) Morrison, Alexander StephenAn excessively lengthy review article analysing the collectively-authored volume 'Tsentral'naya Aziya v Sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii', published by 'Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie' in 2007Item Open Access Russian Rule in Turkestan and the Example of British India ca1865 - 1917(2006) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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 dayItem Open Access “Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region”: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910(2012) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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.Item Open Access Sufism, Panislamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the aftermath of the Andijan Uprising(2012) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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.