Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia

Abstract

Comparative responses to global processes that affected China and the other early modern empires. Central Eurasia during the seventeent and eighteenth centuries offers one important site because three agrarian states contended for power: the Muscovite/Russian empire, expanding eastwards across Siberia; the Manchu Qing expanding first south-east, then northwest into the Central Asian steppes, deserts, and oases; and the Mongolian empire of the Zunghars, who created an autonomous state in western Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet. Although, between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, the Zunghars rivalled Russian and Chinese power, by 1760 the Qing had crushed the state and exterminated the Zunghar people. The Qing then established permanent control, which lasted until the fall of the empire in 1911, over all of present-day Mongolia (Inner and Outer), Xinjiang, and Tibet. The elimination of a powerful, independent Mongol-nomadic state in the steppe was a world-historical event. The closure of the steppe frontier meant the end of an age of fluidity, ecumenical exchange, fighting, and shifting of boundaries, and the division, dispersal, and extermination of the Mongols, who are now scattered from the Volga river to North China, one of the widest involuntary diasporas to occur on the continent. The outcome was the bipolar division of Central Asia between two empires, marked by a border delimited in treaty negotiations between the Chinese and the Russians. The bipolar division effectively lasted from 1760 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Outer Mongolia, despite proclaiming its independence in 1911, became a Soviet satellite under Red Army occupation in 1921.1 The division persists conceptually in the terminology generally used to describe the broad, physiographically unbounded region lying between