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Browsing Articles by Subject "Central Asian Studies"
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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 Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire(2012) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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.Item Open Access Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917(2015) Morrison, Alexander StephenThis 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.Item Open Access Russia, Khoqand, and the search for a "Natural" Frontier, 1863–1865(2014) Morrison, Alexander StephenAbstract 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.Item 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.