Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power

Abstract

Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power Ian W. Campbell (bio) Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand—not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration … as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that [End Page 345] involves … [parties] of different economic capability and that may not be regarded as especially desirable by some of the parties involved.”3 That very inequality, the tenuousness of the arrangements into which colonial administrators entered with local power brokers, forced the latter into a set of what Michael Khodarkovsky has called “bitter choices,” seeding the potential for resistance even in ostensibly collaborative ventures.4 The Russian Empire, like any other, depended on the support of local elites to implement and articulate its visions—indeed, often to secure the cooperation (or at least quiescence) of the population of its colonies. When it failed to offer sufficient incentives to cooperate, or its ambitions went beyond what colonial subjects could bear, its ambitions were jeopardized. The weakness of tsarist rule in Central Asia and its consequent dependence on local power structures and customs stood at variance with the self-image of the men who made the empire and fundamentally constrained the projects they might undertake; this was the case both in the Turkestan Governor-Generalship and the vassal states of Bukhara and Khiva.5 It was one thing to “project imperialist notions of modernity, civilization, and progress” onto the Central Asian landscape, but to put these notions into practice was quite another.6 Tsarist and other European observers found much to criticize about Central Asian water management and hoped by introducing new technologies and techniques of irrigation to both foster the economic development of the colony and legitimate their own rule. Canal systems and dams looked “primitive” and “incorrect”; methods of surveying and water measurement appeared to be frustratingly imprecise; the whole enterprise required a backbreaking amount of physical labor.7 But as a matter of pragmatism, particularly in the first decades after the conquest of Central Asia, they had little choice but to devolve authority to native administrators and acquiesce to customs, practices, and technologies that they disliked. [End Page 346] Local authorities were important for water management because of both who they were and what they knew. Attempts by the first governor-general of Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, to assert Russian bureaucratic control over the region’s water resources were short-lived. Statutory law in Turkestan conformed, for the most part, not to this abortive measure but to the general direction of Kaufman’s viceregal rule, intervening only hesitantly to avoid provoking disturbances in the...