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Post-Cold War historiography of modern Central Asia has been characterized by a focus on cultural history. Most of this scholarship rests on a set of assumptions about traditional institutions and social practices which merely reflect the bias of Soviet or even Tsarist-era historiography. 'Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia addresses the need for a remedy to this state of affairs and thus offers new insights on a number of subjects relating to the social history of the region. It includes essays dealing with property relations, resource management, forms of local administration, the constitution of new social groups, the construction of identity categories, and an enquiry into the landscape of Islamic practices among the nomads.
This introduction to Central Asia and its relationship with Russia helps restore Central Asia to the general narrative of Russian and world history.
Agricultural Economists in Early Twentieth-Century Italy describes how Italian agricultural economists collected information about the economy of Italy, between the Giolittian and the Fascist era. The book carefully describes three main forms of economic observation: enquiries, statistics, and farm surveys. For each of these forms of observation, the main participants to the investigation are discussed with their respective agendas, alongside the purposes of the investigation, and its practical constraints. This work introduces the concept of "stakeholder statistics", and stresses the two-way relation between the observer and the observed in the co-production of observational knowledge. Prac...
A long environmental history of the Aral Sea region, focusing on colonization and development in Russian and Soviet Central Asia.
India’s caravan trade with central Asia was at the heart of the complex web of routes making up the Silk Roads. But what was the fate of these overland connections in the ages of sail and steam? Jagjeet Lally sets out to answer this question by bringing the world of caravan trade to life—a world of merchants, mercenaries, pastoralists and pilgrims, but also of kings, bureaucrats and their subjects in the countryside and towns. The livelihoods of these figures did not become obsolete with the advent of ‘modern’ technologies and the consequent emergence of new global networks. Terrestrial routes remained critically important, not only handling flows of goods and money, but also fosteri...
Central Asia is a region singularly marked by attempts to transform social life by transforming place. Drawing together established scholars and a new generation of historians, geographers and anthropologists, this volume brings empirical specificity and theoretical depth to debates about the politics of place-making in this diverse region, making an important contribution to Central Asian studies and a distinctive regional comparison to the ‘spatial turn’ in social analysis. Case studies draw on archival research and oral history to explore the workings—and unintended consequences—of policies aimed at sedentarizing, collectivizing and resettling populations as a means to fix and ter...
This book examines Kazakhstan’s struggle to distance itself from its Soviet past over 25 years after its independence. To a very large extent, the affirmation of its sovereignty and a unique Kazakhstani way remain largely a matter of rhetoric. This book looks to explain the various aspects that show the continuity of Kazakhstan’s political system and governance with its colonial legacy, namely through its foreign policy, the country’s environmental policies, the judicial system, the management of religious diversity, the way youth organizations are structured and administered or how those who were born after the collapse of Soviet Union are still showing a typical Soviet behavioral att...
Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence. Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Isaac McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support thei...
A comprehensive diplomatic and military history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, spanning the whole of the nineteenth century.
Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan, but it is not focused on Party decisions. Instead, Marianne Kamp offers a history of everyday life that relies on oral history accounts from those she calls the collectivization generation. Born between the early 1900s and the early 1920s, the collectivization generation were rural youth who participated in the transformation of agricultural life in the early 1930s as teens or young adults. A top-down restructuring ruptured their predictable life trajectories and created new categories for understanding self and society. For many, the newly formed kolkhozes became their economic, social, and political milieu throughout their working years, shaping their identities and their material lives. In Collectivization Generation, we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor.