The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914 by Alexander Morrison

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914 by Alexander Morrison Ian W. Campbell (bio) Alexander Morrison, The Russian Conquest of Central Asia: A Study in Imperial Expansion, 1814–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 613 pp., ill. Sources and Bibliography. Index. 978-1-107-03030-5. Thirty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, a revolution in Western studies of the Russian Empire. Increased access to local and regional archives and greater attention to the study of non-Russian languages have yielded important insights about the relationship of territories and people on the periphery to the imperial core. The study of Central Asia has especially benefited from these new opportunities. A particular strength of this recent scholarship is its extensive engagement with the historiography of other European empires, at times from a comparative perspective. As a result, recent Western scholarship on tsarist Central Asia has usually followed trends and concerns in the broader scholarship, focusing on cultural matters and questions of identity. Yet, if in the scholarship on European imperialism, political, economic, and military history came to seem passé in part because many major questions in these areas were settled or exhausted, scholars of the Russian Empire have not always been able to build their own work on such a strong empirical foundation. In these matters, Western scholars have more often than not relied on the conclusions of Soviet scholarship, empirically rich but stretched and chopped to fit ideological requirements. In this magisterial and much-anticipated book, his second, Alexander Morrison aims to create a new narrative of the tsarist conquest of Central Asia, to escape the shackles of the extant historiography by dint of deep empirical research. Eschewing overarching explanations in favor of a series of microhistories in which the particularities of environment and personality come to the fore, he succeeds admirably in his task. Morrison sets out to destroy before he builds, with an introduction that comprehensively does away with the most common explanations for the conquest: that it was the product of the "Great Game" rivalry with the British Empire; a drive to secure Central Asian cotton for Russian textile manufacturers; or the impulsive actions of ambitious "men on the spot" acting without state approval. The "Great Game" paradigm, he notes, ascribes practically no agency to Central Asian states and peoples, who become in such accounts little more than the chessboard on which European statesmen and generals made their moves; it also assumes the feasibility of movements that [End Page 312] proved to be logistically impossible and founders on the "fundamental fact … that British influence in [Central Asia] was negligible" (P. 13). The most that can be salvaged from this paradigm is a sense that Russia sought "Great Power" status equivalent to Britain's and chafed when the prospect of achieving it seemed remote. Nor do economic explanations for the conquest hold up to scrutiny; the Central Asian trade market was relatively small, and the temporary shortage of American cotton on the global market ended with the Civil War, whereas cotton was not "widely cultivated in Turkestan until the 1890s" (P. 15). The famed "men on the spot" were too dependent on a grindingly slow approval process for the basic stuff of a military campaign–ready money to purchase food, fodder, and above all camels–to act without consulting their superiors. Morrison proposes, instead, that we must change our methods and shift our chronology to understand the conquest. Following on the classic work of Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher, he attends to the "official mind" of the Russian Empire, that is, a "bundle of prejudices, assumptions, ambition and ignorance, generally with very imperfect access to information, deeply affected by rumour, often reacting wildly and erratically to the pressure of 'events'" (P. 24) that was neither uniform nor dominated by the ministries of the imperial center. He reconstructs this official mind through the dogged and masterful use of official correspondence from more than a dozen archives, while also attending carefully to the voluminous memoir literature left by officers who campaigned in Turkestan. His use of Central Asian sources originally written in Persian and Chaghatai...