1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910792869203321

Autore

Campbell Ian W. <1984->

Titolo

Knowledge and the ends of empire : Kazak intermediaries and Russian rule on the steppe, 1731/1917 / / Ian W. Campbell

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, New York ; ; London, [England] : , : Cornell University Press, , 2017

©2017

ISBN

9781501707902 (ebook)

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (273 pages) : illustrations, maps, photographs

Disciplina

958.45/07

Soggetti

HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union

Kazakhstan History

Kazakhstan Relations Russia

Russia Relations Kazakhstan

Russia History 1689-1801

Russia History 1801-1917

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note to the Reader -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Information Revolution and Administrative Reform, ca. 1845-1868 -- 3. An Imperial Biography: Ibrai Altynsarin as Ethnographer and Educator, 1841-1889 -- 4. The Key to the World's Treasures: "Russian Science," Local Knowledge, and the Civilizing Mission on the Siberian Steppe -- 5. Norming the Steppe: Statistical Knowledge and Tsarist Resettlement, 1896-1917 -- 6. A Double Failure: Epistemology and the Crisis of a Settler Colonial Empire -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In Knowledge and the Ends of Empire, Ian W. Campbell investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Hoping to better govern the region, tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about an unfamiliar environment and population. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their landscape to the tsarist state. Because tsarist



officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able to be part of these debates, at times influencing the policies that were pursued.Drawing on archival materials from Russia and Kazakhstan and a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals in Russian and Kazak, Campbell tells a story that highlights the contingencies of and opportunities for cooperation with imperial rule. Kazak intermediaries were at first able to put forward their own idiosyncratic views on whether the steppe was to be Muslim or secular, whether it should be a center of stock-raising or of agriculture, and the extent to which local institutions needed to give way to imperial institutions. It was when the tsarist state was most confident in its knowledge of the steppe that it committed its gravest errors by alienating Kazak intermediaries and placing unbearable stresses on pastoral nomads. From the 1890s on, when the dominant visions in St. Petersburg were of large-scale peasant colonization of the steppe and its transformation into a hearth of sedentary agriculture, the same local knowledge that Kazaks had used to negotiate tsarist rule was transformed into a language of resistance.