Four Recent Books on Xinjiang and Uyghur History

Abstract

Four Recent Books on Xinjiang and Uyghur History James A. Millward Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market by Kwangmin Kim. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. xvii + 294. $65.00 cloth, $65.00 e-book. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History by Rian Thum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 323. $41.00 cloth, $39.95 e-book. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier by David Brophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 344. $39.95 cloth, $39.95 e-book. Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State by Justin M. Jacobs. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 299. $50.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $30.00 e-book. A reader new to Xinjiang who takes on the four recent scholarly books under review here will be struck—and possibly confused—by the many terms these authors use for the people who comprise the most numerous indigenes of Xinjiang.1 For Rian Thum, they are Altishahris [End Page 515] (from Uyg. “people of the six cities”); for Kwangmin Kim, oasis Muslims; Justin Jacobs, writing of the early twentieth century, calls them “Uighurs,” while pointing out that contemporaneous Chinese documents often referred to them as chantou 纏頭 (turbaned heads).2 These authors generally avoid “East Turkestani,” a term that I once used in Beyond the Pass (I hoped at the time that my usage would be taken as a geographical designation and not a political statement).3 David Brophy describes the process itself whereby people called Kashgaris, Taranchis, Altishahris, and even “Jungharians” (Zunghars) more or less agreed to be Uyghurs.4 (See the map in fig. 1 with some of these locations.) This plethora of names arises in part from the fact that the ethnonym Uyghur was not applied to or widely adopted by the people we now call Uyghur until the first third of the twentieth century; historians have been anxious to avoid anachronism when the construction of Uyghur ethnic or national identity has itself been a major focus of scholarly attention. But more than that, the onomastic complexity reflects the multidimensional nature of Xinjiang’s history. An elephant, of course, is not an apt totem for desert Xinjiang. Still, these books evoked for me a couple of metaphorical elephants. I leave one of them to the end of this essay. As for the other, although the authors here are far from blind, the parable of the blind men and the elephant fits the subject at hand: we enjoy disparate views depending on how the authors approach the subject and with which sources and in which languages. These distinctions, moreover, go beyond a simple Chinese versus Uyghur binary or even that of Chinese versus Inner Asian sources. That such nuances are revealed is one of the strengths of [End Page 516] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Map of the Xinjiang Region. The Xinjiang region is shown in relation to the present-day borders of neighboring countries and provincial or regional territories of China. Note that the transcription of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakstan, as preferred by these countries, derive from Russian and thus are different from Kirghiz and Kazakh peoples, whose transcriptions are derived from indigenous languages. Source : James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York, Columbia University Press, 2007), p. xx, map 1. [End Page 517] this newest stage of Xinjiang and Uyghur historiography. Kim’s Borderland Capitalism draws our attention to the Turkic elites, the begs (Ch. boke 伯克), as native exponents of Qing empire in southern Xinjiang during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a past in western Turkestan and political links to Beijing, as well as economic ties east and west. Thum’s book, though set in the same geographic space and at roughly the same time as Kim’s, depicts a chronologically and geographically fuzzy world, one that purposefully ignored its contemporaneous political situation within the Qing empire and was instead delineated by hagiographies and networks of shrines, a literary-spatial system around which an Altishahri consciousness emerged in the broader context of the Islamic world. Brophy shows that it was early twentieth-century intellectual and...