6 research outputs found
Hierarchies of trade in Yiwu and Dushanbe: the case of an Uzbek merchant family from Tajikistan
This article focuses on the trading trajectory of an Uzbek family of merchants from Tajikistan. This family runs businesses in both Tajikistanâs capital, Dushanbe, and Chinaâs famous international trading city: Yiwu. The analysis is centred on the accounts placed by Tajikistanâs Uzbek merchants about their historically sustained experience, often across several generations, in trading activities. These merchantsâ claims of belonging to a âhistoricalâ trading community rather than being ânewcomersâ to long-distance commerce are articulated in relation to notions of âhierarchies of tradeâ as they evolve in a twofold relational model linking Yiwuâs Changchun neighbourhood and Dushanbe. I suggest that the forms of conviviality enacted in Yiwuâs Changchun neighbourhood need to be understood in terms of the historical, multinational and transregional contacts that have occurred within the spaces of the former Soviet Union, as well as along the China-Russia and China-Central Asian borders. Equally, the hierarchies of trade of Uzbek merchants from Tajikistan in Yiwuâs Changchun neighbourhood cut-across markers of identity that juxtapose the roles of Tajik and Uzbek communities in Tajikistanâs contemporary politics and economics
Peasant settlers and the âcivilizing missionâ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917
This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the âpoor whiteâ) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ânativeâ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916