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Recent monographs on the social history of Central Asia Jürgen Paulaa Institute for Oriental Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle/Saale, Germany

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To cite this Article Paul, Jürgen(2010) 'Recent monographs on the social history of Central Asia', Central Asian Survey, 29:1, 119 — 130

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REVIEW ESSAY

Recent monographs on the social history of Central Asia

Jurgen Paul∗

Institute for Oriental Studies, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle/Saale, Germany

Community matters in Xinjiang 1880–1949. Towards a historical anthropology of the

Uyghur, by Ildiko Beller-Hann, Leiden, Brill, 2008, xv + 476 pp., US$171 (hardback), ISBN

978 9004166752. Two maps, illustrations, index and glossary.

Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia. Communal commitment and political order inchange, by Paul Georg Geiss, London, Routledge, 2003, xvi + 320 pp., US$158.75 (hardback),

ISBN 978 0415311779. Maps, index and glossary.

Russian rule in Samarkand 1868–1910. A comparison with British India, by Alexander

S. Morrison, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, xxx + 364 pp., US$120 (hardback),

ISBN 978 0199547371. Three maps, illustrations, tables, index and glossary.

Russian colonial society in Tashkent, 1865–1923, by Jeff Sahadeo, Bloomington, Indiana

University Press, 2007, xii + 317 pp., US$45 (hardback), ISBN 978 0253348203. One map,

illustrations, glossary and index.

A collection of Tarkhan yarlı ¨qs from the Khanate of Khiva, by William Wood, Bloomington,Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2005, 55 pp., US$5.50 (paper-

back), ISSN 0893-1860. Nine pages of facsimile reproductions.

The books under review are all contributions to the social history of pre-colonial and colonial

Central Asia, but they cannot easily be compared. Their source basis and their approaches are

quite different, and so is their regional and partly temporal focus, from the eighteenth until

the middle of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, a number of questions emerge, subjects

about which all or most of them have something to say, among them the creation of a ‘colonial’

society, the boundaries that typically go with such a society, and also the ways borders were

crossed; landholding patterns and in general the way the colonizers tried to get something out

of the colony; and the question of how we can make progress in understanding the social

history of colonial Central Asia. The article will address these questions in turn, but will also

make comments on the individual books.

The contribution by William Wood stands out quite clearly. It is not a study so much as a

publication of a number of documents, in facsimile together with an edition and a translation

into English. The documents stem from the eighteenth century which is an additional reason

to publish them since so few sources for this period are available, and they all concern one

family of saiyids who enjoyed tarkhan status, that is, a number of fiscal and legal privileges.

Six of the documents are in Turki, the last two in Persian; this cannot be easily explained. It

is known that the Khivan chancery conducted its work in Turki.

ISSN 0263-4937 print/ISSN 1465-3354 online

# 2010 Central Asian Survey

DOI: 10.1080/02634931003768765

http://www.informaworld.com

∗Email: [email protected]

Central Asian Survey

Vol. 29, No. 1, March 2010, 119– 130



The editorial part is flawless as far as I can see, and it is good to see the announcement that

more documents out of this particular collection will be published in the hopefully not too distant

future.1 We should not forget that there is a wealth of literary as well as documentary sources for

the history of Central Asia of the period from c.1600 until Soviet times which are not yet well

known, and new sources are discovered practically every year. Thus, for quite a while, the

publication and the processing of sources will remain a major task for researchers within theregion and worldwide.

The most remarkable part of the commentary is a list of legal and fiscal terms used in the

documents. Because of the well-known particularities of Khwarazm, the parallel uses of these

terms, if any, in Bukharan and other documents are not always illuminating. Therefore,

Wood’s explanations are sometimes tentative, and it is laudable indeed that he does not hide

his doubts and incertainties. The publication in general is one of the many stones needed to

build a new understanding of the administrative structure of the Khanates in the pre-colonial

period. For this, painstaking scrutiny of the available documentary evidence is necessary: other-

wise, we will not get out of the polemics surrounding such texts as the Majmac

al-arqa m, the

eighteenth-century handbook of administrative terms2

, and will by necessity continue to relyon ‘colonial’ texts such as Semenov3 or the reports of colonial officers trying to understand

administrative routines they encountered on the ground. Some of these routines are very

nicely illustrated in Morrison’s work.

The work by Paul Georg Geiss in many ways follows an altogether different approach. Geiss

undertakes to construct an overarching theory of what he calls communal commitment and pol-

itical change. Communal commitment defines the group of people an individual feels part of and

commits himself or herself to. In fact, community is one of the big issues in social history, and

thus, analysing which social groups are active in which ways in which historical situations is

evidently a prime necessity. But serious doubts persist as to whether Geiss is able to produce

reliable results. His approach can largely be defined as structuralist: he feels bound to defineand classify, relying on what at places seems to be a pre-conceived theoretical model into

which the empirical data have to be integrated. Indigenous terms of course do not fit so

neatly into structuralist models, and therefore one of his permanent concerns is to find out,

e.g. in his discussion of Central Asian ‘tribalism’, whether the indigenous term A in fact

belongs or corresponds to category X in his system, say, a lineage, a clan, a subtribe, a tribe,

or a confederation. Therefore, it is possible for him to write down sentences such as (p. 39):

‘Ethnographers of the nineteenth century were already complaining about the inconsistencies

of groupings which complicated their work, and explained these with reference to changing

tribal coalitions and names. This is doubtless true [. . .]’ which one would like to read ironically,

but the context precludes this otherwise helpful solution. Data do not fit the theory? Tant pis for

the data.

Geiss follows Krader in his assumptions about genealogically defined political and social

structures encompassing the whole steppe (and part of the settled world). He must be one of

the very last researchers to accept this approach that is patently incompatible with the findings

of both historians and anthropologists.4 I believe this has to do with the sources he uses. In order

to produce a general overview, he has opted for the nearly total neglect of all primary sources,

archival as well as narrative; he relies completely on earlier research, making extensive use of

Soviet as well as Western anthropology and history. Sometimes, his confidence in pre-

revolutionary and Soviet authors is astonishing, such as when he writes that ‘urban mahallahs

originally monopolised the crafts and were closely interwoven with single professional

guilds’ (p. 87, on the basis of Poliakov). We do not know all that much about the pre-colonialorganization of labour and residential quarters, and therefore, such statements are much too

strong.

120 J. Paul



Theoretical ambitions sometimes produce tautological or obscure statements. In a section

about tribal communal commitments, we read that ‘segmentary political order was only possible

when tribesmen’s communal commitment was more egalitarian’ (p. 106). If this is not a

tautology, what is? Likewise, on the following page, ‘cephalous tribal political order is based

on political authority relations which inform the obedience of the followers and the commitment

of the leader to give commands’; this is tautological even if one were prepared to accept thetheoretical framework which, however, there are good grounds to reject.

The book is better in places where Geiss lets his theoretical ambitions aside for a moment and

just gives an account of earlier research literature. Thus, his passages about the Kirghiz, the

khanate of Kokand, Russian administration in the steppes and its history are worth reading.

On the other hand, there are numerous factual errors and inadequacies; the pious foundations

(waqf ) are one example (p. 90), the restriction to penal law when discussing Islamic law is a

perezhitok from Soviet anthropology (p. 89), the treatment of the steppe uprising 1916 is

grossly inadequate (p. 185): Geiss prefers to see it as a last convulsion of Kazakh tribalism

instead of noting its scope and importance.5

Geiss discusses the situation in Russian Turkestan without looking beyond the borders intoXinjiang, Afghanistan, Iran or India. This is true for many other studies of the region as well, and

I note this point because the set of monographs under study makes it clear that the region

evidently did not evolve en vase clos, but was closely connected to neighbouring regions.

The remaining three monographs present thoroughly researched and solid results, based on a

mixture of sources. Whereas Beller-Hann has used narrative sources – both indigenous

historiography and external travelogues – as well as oral history, local traditions and her own

fieldwork, she did not have access to locally produced archival material in either Chinese or

Turki. (She has used the archives of the Swedish mission to Eastern Turkestan, and the illustrations

which in their majority show local townspeople at work or in the marketplace are all taken from

these archives.) Sahadeo and Morrison have both worked with a wide range of archival sources,mostly Russian, with an admixture of local languages in the case of Morrison, in addition to

narrative sources. Sahadeo and Morrison have a clear local focus, on Tashkent and Samarkand

respectively; Beller-Hann’s references are to a variety of locations in all parts of Xinjiang. She

is careful to note the provenance of all sources and repeatedly stresses the importance of local

variation. Morrison and Sahadeo treat the same period of time, whereas Beller-Hann takes her

analysis much farther into the twentieth century; this is necessary because of the later takeover

of the Communists in Xinjiang. These three books among the set of monographs presented

here are indeed contributions to the social history of colonial Central Asia, both Russian and

Chinese, with, in the case of Morrison, a systematic comparison with British India. (British

and American consular reports, travelogues of British and American visitors, and material from

British services are an important body of source material for all three authors.)

One of the questions in the social history of colonial societies is whether we are confronted

with just one society or two: the colonizing and the colonized. The division of colonial cities into

two clearly separated zones, one for the colonizers and the other one for the colonized, was noted

by Frantz Fanon, and has since been a recurring theme in colonial and post-colonial studies.6 All

three authors offer a discussion of the separation in town planning and habitat between the

‘Asiatic’ or ‘Muslim’ and the ‘European’ or ‘Chinese’ town. Morrison remarks that many

Central Asian towns were ‘doubled’ in their colonial period with a Russian or generally Euro-

pean counterpart, often separated from the ‘old’ town by a canal or the railway tracks (p. 48), but

he also notes that in many provincial towns, the number of Russians just was not high enough to

warrant a ‘European’ quarter. In Xinjiang, the Chinese garrisons were typically placed in a ‘NewTown’ which in some cases at least did not include Turki living quarters; see the example of

Yarkand in Beller-Hann (p. 91).

Central Asian Survey 121



Sahadeo’s book in fact is all about the separation and interaction between locals and

newcomers in colonial Tashkent. Tashkent also is a classical example, not unlike Algiers, of

a completely new ‘European’ town built next to an older ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Muslim’ one. Sahadeo’s

argument first shows how radically the separation was implemented, and how radically it was

conceptualized by the inhabitants of the Russian town. Russian Tashkent was intended to func-

tion as a showcase for European culture, and its shortcomings in cleanliness, orderliness, morals,education and so on were a constant concern of Russian Tashkenti elites because all these were

so many drawbacks in the Russian civilizing mission in Central Asia. The Russian town was not

at first a planned one, but planning started soon, and the geometric layout of the city, still dis-

cernible today, apparently follows the models of St Petersburg (with the Admirality taking

the place of the citadel as the centre) and Paris (with the grands boulevards created by Baron

de Haussmann). Visitors, however, chose Denver, Colorado, as a point of comparison instead:

a frontier town with a rather rough population, unrefined, and with few ‘cultured’ attractions.

Sahadeo then shows how the borders were crossed, and that in fact colonial society is one,

not two. The first essential reason, at least in the case of Tashkent, is water. The European town

depended for its water supply on the canal network of the ‘old’ city until the Soviet period; it wassituated downstream from the ‘old’ city, and all efforts to build an independent system failed.

Russian engineers fell short of what could be attained by local knowledge in water construction

for a very long time. One of the consequences was that the Russian administration had to

cooperate closely with the ‘native’ officials in water management, the aryq aksaqals who in a

way were responsible for the European town as well.

The second essential point is contagious diseases. During the famous cholera outbreak in

1892, Russians feared that the disease would spread through the water conduits. In fact, statistics

show that both parts of the city were affected in roughly equal ways, contrary to what the colo-

nial perception of the ‘Asiatic’ town as very filthy indeed would make one presume. Investments

in the water supply network of the rapidly growing ‘Asiatic’ city had been neglected althoughthe aryq aksaqals had constantly asked for them, but the European majority in the city duma

did not deem them necessary.

The measures taken by the Russian town administration to fight the cholera epidemic led to

serious riots in June 1892. The essential point was a double crossing of the border: the ‘native’

crowd crossed the bridge over the Anhor canal and penetrated the building where the city com-

mander had his office; the city commander Putintsev in turn had paid a visit to the Friday mosque

that morning (on the occasion of the Sacrifice holiday) and had made a speech in Turki (the

‘Sart’ language) in which he stressed Russian military superiority. The documentation

adduced by Sahadeo shows that cross-border communication in both Russian and ‘Sart’ was

possible in many cases. The 1892 cholera riots led Russians to believe that the ‘Asiatics’ had

shown their true face that day. The state of emergency declared during the riots was to last

until the Revolution.

A third point to be discussed when borders are at stake is the mixing at the lower end of

society. Beer and vodka bars, brothels and opium dens functioned in Tashkent in a specialized

area of the town, the Novaia sloboda (‘New suburb’), which was not discussed in the official

records until rather late, in 1883. There, ‘Sarts’ got acquainted with vodka, and Russians

found out about hashish and opium; Russian as well as ‘Asiatic’ prostitutes catered for the

needs of European and native customers. Joint businesses in prostitution are on record also in

Morrison’s book (pp. 28, 261), and they are relatively well documented because prostitution

was legal in the Russian Empire. However, the question of ‘mixed’ offspring was not addressed

so openly. Sahadeo remarks upon the conspicuous absence of the issue in his sources, and hetheorizes that it was the idea of separation between natives and Europeans which was at

stake here.

122 J. Paul



‘Mixed’ marriages seem to have been very rare indeed. At least they, too, are absent from the

official record in Tashkent, and Samarkand as well; Morrison apparently has not encountered

such cases. In Xinjiang, on the contrary, marriages between Chinese men (or other ‘outsiders’)

and Turki women, either temporal or permanent, were more frequent than the strict ban on such

relationships under Islamic law would predict. Beller-Hann shows that Turki women even

enjoyed certain advantages when marrying Chinese men: their husbands could not hope toretrieve them if they left because Turki institutions, above all the religious ones, would not

cooperate. Beller-Hann devotes some space to temporary marriage, an instrument to accomodate

travellers, merchants and diplomats alike. Temporary marriage is otherwise known mostly from

Shiite contexts, but apparently the Hanafite qadis and lawyers in Xinjiang accepted and promoted

it as well. Children produced in temporary marriages were often abandoned by their parents,

and the Swedish orphanage in Yarkand housed quite a few of them (Beller-Hann, p. 270).

Last but not least, the European towns could not function without the Muslim ones. Most of

the grocers and other food-producing and distributing businesses in Russian Tashkent were run

by ‘Sarts’. In Xinjiang, on the other hand, there were parallel networks for the Chinese and the

Turki population that led to the impression that both mingled in the bazaar, but everyone didtheir shopping at stalls owned by ‘co-nationals’. In Tashkent, again, the ‘Sart’ grocer became

a much-hated figure during the First World War, when food supply lines broke down: Tashkent

was supplied not only from the region, but also from European Russia via rail. The first famine

riots broke out in 1916, and they involved lower-class Russian women and ‘Sart’ bazaaris.

Sahadeo also gives details about the complicated situation during the steppe revolt in the

summer of 1916, when Russian women (again) cooperated with ‘Sart’ merchants on the

emerging black market.7

For a number of reasons, therefore, the strict separation of the European town in Tashkent

(and also in other places in Russian Turkestan) could not and did not work. Quite a number

of locals settled in the Russian part of the town, and the number of mosques in the Europeanquarters was higher than that of churches: there were 16 mosques in 1913, but only 15 churches

and two synagogues. The relatively small number of churches is, of course, also due to the ban

on missionary activities. The ‘Sart’ population in European Tashkent was already as high as 20%

in 1870.

In summary, Sahadeo gives a vivid and reliable account of European–‘Sart’ interaction in

colonial Tashkent, focusing on the social side; the purely administrative and political history

is less well served, and for good reason. His book therefore is a groundbreaking study in this

field. The history of the ‘common people’, of the Russians in the first place, but also of the

‘Sarts’ as far as it emerges from the Russian archival documents, had not been written before.

The accounts of the cholera riots in 1892 and of the famine riots in 1916 are central to the

book. Sahadeo also keeps track of the Russian perceptions of the ‘Sart’, typically as treacherous,

greedy and cruel.

Morrison’s book in a way is a very useful complement to Sahadeo’s study on Tashkent. His

focus is much more on the administrative side of colonial Turkestan as exemplified in the Samar-

kand region. Samarkand is well chosen. It is a provincial town, and it was a centre of the seden-

tary economy of the Bukharan Emirate; the policies concerning nomads thus need not be

discussed in this context. All this makes the focus on administrative practices, uses and

abuses very clear. Morrison, as Sahadeo, makes much use of Russian archival material, with

the report of the Pahlen commission as a mine of information for all the shortcomings of

Russian colonial rule. It is perhaps this Pahlen-informed perspective that makes him come to

the conclusion that ‘[t]o the historian looking back over fifty years of Russian rule in Turkestan,the administration appears a complete shambles’ (p. 287), as contrasted with British India which

was a ‘resounding success’ (ibid .). His arguments for this possibly slightly over-stated assertion




are that the British were able to turn a profit from their colony. Not only could it produce the

means to pay for its administration, but it also paid for a very large army that the Empire

could use in its manifold wars. Indeed, India was the very heart of British imperial power. It

is open to discussion whether the comparison is a bit overstretched here: was Russian Turkestan

ever meant to be for the Tsarist Empire what India was for Britain? If it was, did the Russians

ever stand a fair chance of attaining such a goal in view of the very different natural andecological conditions of both regions?

The most important differences between the administrations of British India and Russian

Turkestan, respectively, probably were the ways in which the imperial powers treated the

urban and rural elites they found in place. The British decided to work through them, the

Russians undermined their position and abolished them altogether. This meant that the Russians

had to create a group of intermediaries themselves; direct rule, of course, was out of the question

in both India and Turkestan. This group of intermediaries consisted essentially of the village and

quarter elders, and thus people of very local outlooks. The ‘traditional’ system, at least in the

Bukharan emirate, relied on regional powerholders called amla kda r who all lost their power

basis under Russian rule. Together with the (mostly Tatar) interpreters these newly created inter-mediaries formed what Russian intellectuals came to think of as a ‘living wall’ that the colonial

administrators could not transcend or even look behind. In every respect, they had to rely on

information provided by these intermediaries. It is therefore a central question whom the

Russians wanted as intermediaries; unlike the Britains in India, they had a subject population

of Muslims which had a long record of accomodation to and cooperation with Russian rule:

Tatars and Bashkirs from the Volga region, Siberia or the Crimea. There were Tatar and

Bashkir officers serving in the imperial army, and the administration of Turkestan continued

to be staffed by officers. But the Russian leadership saw to it that only a few Tatars and Bashkirs

ever saw service in Turkestan; the quota of Muslim officers in Turkestan was lower than in the

Russian army at large. It is also important to understand, and Morrison stresses this frequently,how seriously understaffed, badly trained, and underpaid the Russian administration in Turke-

stan was. Since the colony was unable to produce the financial means its administration

needed, the money had to come from various central ministries, the Ministry of War in the

first place. Conflicts between the colony and the capital were the consequence as well as conflicts

between various institutions in the centre.

The Qing bureaucracy left the local elites in place even in the late period, after the Ya cqub

Beg period. The Turki ba g families were integrated into the Chinese system of ranks and titles

and had to adapt to Chinese ways up to a point. Chinese high-ranking administrators had very

little knowledge about what happened ‘on the ground’. Beller-Hann does not discuss the

problem whether Xinjiang ever was ‘profitable’ for the Qing Empire by any of the criteria

Morrison uses in his comparison of Russian Turkestan and British India; it is a pity that Morrison

could not use her data in his study. It would be interesting to see whether the Chinese got more

out of their colony than did the Russians. They invested much less, their administration was

much more centralized and left more room for local elites; it was civilian rather than military.

Conditions for agriculture were roughly comparable to those prevailing in Russian Turkestan.

However, the logistic problems surrounding the exportation of agricultural products were

even more demanding than in the Russian case; Urumqi was not even linked to the Chinese

railroad network until 1962.

Morrison gives very illuminating examples for the communication trap in which the

Russians were caught. The Russians were unable to understand the irrigation system, so vital

for the settled regions of Turkestan, and Samarkand province in particular. They asked forexact measures the traditional water officials were unable to provide. The ‘traditional’ system

of water management rested on ‘traditional’ knowledge, not exact measurements, but a personal

124 J. Paul



experience acquired over long years. Also, the heavily localized system of water allocation

meant that a situation explored and understood in a given local setting could prove to be very

different in another location. Attempts at working with Russian (or European) staff in water

management produced very undesirable results.

A number of social relationships such as irrigation, the legal system and landholding were

documented in local languages only few Russians were able to read, or not documented atall; knowledge was transmitted orally. Translators and interpreters were part of the ‘living

wall’; the results they gave could hardly be controlled. (Translations of court proceedings

may have been more reliable than Morrison seems to think as the results of recent research

show). Interpreters are also one of the powerful groups Ildiko Beller-Hann writes about. In

Xinjiang, no previously bilingual group (such as the Tatars of the Russian Empire) was

available, and persons knowledgeable in both Turki and Chinese were few and far between.

Chinese administrators seem to have disdained learning any foreign languages, let alone such

barbarian ones as Turki, and therefore, translation was an indigenous business. It is not quite

clear from the book how many administrators were Han, Manchu or Mongol; but the period

when mostly Manchus and Mongols were in charge in the Outlying Districts ended in Xinjiangin 1884 when Xinjiang was created as an administrative unit and integrated into the provincial

system of ‘China proper’. Translators were known to misuse their position to their own profit,

something Morrison also mentions; but in Xinjiang, misuse probably was more widespread

since fewer translators were available. In Russian Turkistan, locals could have petitions trans-

lated for a trifling sum, something not noted for Xinjiang. Beller-Hann does not say how

Chinese administrators felt about the gap between them and the locals. She has another

perspective and does not follow the internal Chinese debate or the gaze on Xinjiang from

Beijing – Chinese archival materials are absent from her sources – but I guess it is improbable

that something like the Russian complaint about the ‘living wall’ was ever voiced in China.

Morrison’s work is probably the best account of the Russian administration in the settledparts of Turkestan; it is at least the best I have read so far, because he discusses the general

lines of the Russian strategy in some detail. The comparative perspective also helps to

explain many specifics of the Russian situation.

Morrison and Beller-Hann put an end to the isolationist way of doing research on Russian

Central Asia: Morrison in that he explicitly pursues a comparatist agenda, and Beller-Hann

because she provides us with a consistent picture of what happened literally next door. It is

easy to imagine that many people in Russian Turkestan and the protectorates must have been

aware of the situation in both Xinjiang and British India (and also Afghanistan, of course),

and I think that this is true not only for Russian administrators, but for Turkestani intellectuals

including ulama as well.

In summary, Morrison’s study shows how far you can get using Russian documents. The

account of administrative practices and achievements is convincing, and scholars in the field

will be quoting Morrison for quite a long time. The administrative characters from governor

to pristav – the local man – are well drawn, and the reader gets a vivid and memorable

impression of what Russian administration in Samarkand looked like. In some fields, such as

land-holding patterns and rural taxation, the book also shows the limits of the Russian documen-

tation: our understanding of the matter cannot be better than that of the Russians if we do not use

the indigenous sources.

The next section is a kind of excursus about landholding patterns. Landholding patterns and

forms of taxation are a big issue in the colonial world where wealth is mostly derived from agri-

culture (and livestock raising), and it is crucial for the colonial power to understand landholdingand the ways agricultural production can be taxed. Morrison devotes much of his chapter 3 to

this question; it takes up less space in Beller-Hann, but is still important, and Geiss also treats




it on a number of pages. Morrison works from Russian reports, colonial archives and Soviet

research; Beller-Hann gives the state of the art in Chinese as well as in Turki literature,

adding results from oral history and her own fieldwork; Geiss relies on pre-Revolutionary and

Soviet research. It becomes evident that it is next to impossible to understand pre-colonial land-

holding from the paper trail left by the colonizers: we have to look at the documentation in native

languages instead. Otherwise, we will be trying to understand how much of the landholding pat-terns the colonizers understood, and this is difficult as long as we do not yet understand landhold-

ing patterns well ourselves.

Morrison is quite conscious of this, and in places he just gives an account of what a given

Russian (colonial or, later, Soviet) author had to say, and indeed he retraces some of the con-

fusion which still prevails in the field: ‘the Russians seem to have found the Amlakdari

system as inconsistent and confusing as later historians have done’ (p. 104).

Soviet historians have developed a complex theoretical apparatus to deal with landholding

and taxation. The best example for this is Davidovich’s study, which Morrison also quotes.8

This study uses a relatively large number of Persian documents concerning landholding –

sales as well as allocations – and draws on a number of previous works, among them thoseby O.D. Chekhovich, the other great senior female researcher in the field. Davidovich relies

less on Islamic legal thinking and the corresponding handbooks9 than on the documentary evi-

dence available to her. Her article thus is an early example for the analysis of legal practice.

Davidovich makes a number of essential distinctions that would possibly be useful in the

debate. First, she distinguishes between tax and rent. Both are paid or delivered up by the pea-

sants: tax to the state or ruler, rent to the landlord. Second, she distinguishes between several

forms of landholding. State land is called mamlaka, and according to her, the state (or the

ruler) took around 30% of the produce in tax/rent (the two coincide in the case of state land).

Other landholdings were classified according to the taxes they owed: cushrı land saw a reparti-

tion of the revenue between the landlord who took 20% of the produce as rent and the state (orthe ruler) who got 10% of the produce as tax; in the case of khara jı land, the proportions were

reverted. Khara jı land was typically called milk (Morrison’s mulk ) in her documents. The

tax-free category milk-i hurr-i kha lis is created in a complicated deal between landlords

(‘owners’) of milk land and the ruler. As a result, the ruler forfeited his right to his part of the

revenue against a part of the land itself which was divided up in the same proportion as the

earlier revenue was; one third was created milk-i hurr-i kha lis whereas the remaining two

thirds became mamlaka. It is useful to remember that some documents concerning this type

of deal are extant and that they are the basis for Davidovich’s article. milk-i hurr-i kha lis there-

fore does not come about by tax-exemption (which would be revocable), but is permanent, and if

any category in landholding in pre-colonial Central Asia comes close to ‘private property’ in an

understanding based on Roman law, this is it. On the other hand, Davidovich prefers to style

‘ordinary’ milk (or mulk ) land as a kind of co-dominion between the ruler and the landlord.

There is no mention of amla k in this article, and the author does not treat the mechanisms of

tax/rent-extraction in this particular text. This is her own construction; she does not produce evi-

dence in Central Asian Muslim legal thinking about such a thing. Therefore, it could be said that

she is overextending her evidence on this particular point. It would make more sense to me to

start with the simple observation that plots of land were a commodity in Central Asia very

early on, and that in all the centuries of the Islamic period there seems to have been a brisk

trade in real estate. If you can sell, bequeathe, rent out, or donate something, what is this

object, if not your property? The second very simple statement in the question of landed property

in Central Asia should perhaps be that we have to separate this question very clearly anddefinitely from the question of tax liability. Therefore, a good argument could be made for

the ‘ordinary’ mulk being property as well as the mulk-i hurr-i khalis.

126 J. Paul



Morrison in turn does not discuss the relationship between the earlier mamlaka and nine-

teenth-century amla k . He assumes, however, that amla k is state land. Amla kda rı therefore

must be a kind of conditional landholding, revocable on principle, but not in practice. In

Xinjiang, such a form of landholding seems to have existed alongside private property in a

narrower sense (Beller-Hann, pp. 118, 130). Beller-Hann states that private landowners were

called zimindar (from Persian zamı nda r , ‘landowner’) or mu lkdar (Arabic-Persian, mulkda r )(p. 130). She does not discuss mamlaka as a term, either.

Ildiko Beller-Hann’s book does not belong to social history proper, but makes it clear that it

is a contribution to ‘historical anthropology’. The difference between the two fields is none too

clear (at least not to me); one major distinction seems to be that anthropologists (even ‘historical

anthropologists’) are unwilling to restrict their sources to written ones, and perhaps social

historians could learn something from anthropologists in this respect. The book under study

draws on written as well as oral sources and other fieldwork methods. This approach is possible

in Xinjiang where the floating gap has not yet reached beyond the critical threshold of 1949;

there still are living memories of what local people call ‘traditional’ society which means

society before the Communist Party took over. In the former Soviet republics, this evidentlyis not the case, and oral history of the Soviet period is beset with considerable source-critical

problems.10

This situation means that many facets of communal life come into the author’s field of vision

which would not have had if she used only written sources, in particular lifecycle rituals and

other festivities, healing and so forth. Taken together, the written as well as the oral sources

concur in underlining the importance of community. Beller-Hann sets out from the statement

that ‘Uighur culture’ as a distinct and ‘given’ object of study simply does not exist. One of

the most fascinating features in her book is the way she describes the creation as well as the

crossing of boundaries (as e.g. in the case of ‘mixed marriages’). Another fascinating point

for me was the demonstration that healing ceremonies in fact did not only involve the patientand his immediate family on the one hand and the healer on the other, but the entire neighbour-

hood; moreover, healing was based on community and producing and re-enacting community.

The basic unit of community in Xinjiang seems to have been the mosque community (which

is still important). It is open to question whether the Eastern mosque community is largely coter-

minous with the Western mahalla. Research about pious endowments in Khiva has yielded the

result that mosque communities were central in that part of Central Asia as well 11 and a close

scrutiny of the extant documentation for such endowments, most of them fairly recent and

rather small, probably will allow conclusions in that direction for more regions (such as

Bukhara); their role in the colonial administration – as, for instance, the basic unit in elections

– still has to be ascertained. In Xinjiang, the importance of the mosque community is such that

Beller-Hann thinks that rules for veiling, such as those prescribed for women in the presence of

men who are not close relatives (nama hra m, Persian na -mahram), in fact apply outside the

mosque community.

Xinjiang is a landscape of oasis towns, and ‘oasis identities’ seem to have prevailed over

larger ‘ethnic’ ones until quite recent times. But Beller-Hann again warns against static concepts

of identity and stresses the relational qualities of identification, multiple identities and

belonging. Oasis towns were composed of various groups, and gender, genealogy, professional

and religious affiliations, among others, were defining criteria for differing communities.

Community therefore is far from equality. There were tremendous social differences within

the communities, but the well-to-do had certain obligations. Even in the case of corvee labour

the peasants who have to work for their lords are not simply tenants. A vocabulary of neighbour-hood is used so that a kind of commensality between the landlord and his peasants/tenants still

seems possible.




Beller-Hann offers a detailed discussion of various forms of social dependency. Slavery is

one of them, and again, the economic aspect is only one among many. Well-fed and well-

clad slaves add to their master’s prestige, and therefore, as in many cases in the Muslim

world, Western readers and researchers have to control the ‘Uncle Tom’ way of thinking

about slavery. Most slaves were employed as domestic servants, but some also had to till

their masters’ fields. Slaves originated not only from non-Muslim groups. Cases of familiesselling children into slavery are on record as well as cases of men selling themselves when

caught in debt. Other groups of dependents were serfs and day-labourers (medikar , from

Persian mardika r , p. 136). Serfs must have lived in Xinjiang into the middle of the twentieth

century; the evidence for this is that it was necessary to ban sales of serfs together with the

land they were bonded to.

Xinjiang – and colonial Central Asia in general – is a privileged field for the study of legal

pluralism. The Qing did nothing to remove sharı ca courts, neither did the Russians; the British

Indian experience with ‘Anglo-Muhammadan Law’ was not repeated in either region. None of

the books under study devotes particular attention to the systems of litigation and adjudication: a

major field of study remains there. Some of the differences between Russian and Chinese Turke-stan may be due to differences in the respective imperial legal systems. Russian imperial law did

not recognize slavery, of course. Pre-colonial legal systems in Bukhara and Kokand did not

allow Muslims to sell and acquire other Muslims (that is, Sunni Muslims) as slaves. Thus,

even if it is well known that many things can be made possible by legal fictions and tricks,

no cases of bonded serfdom or selling children into slavery are on record for these regions, as

far as I know. Another interesting point for a trans-regional comparison would be the question

of temporary marriage which was apparently widespread in Xinjiang but has yet to be studied for

Russian Turkestan or the khanates.

In summary, this book stands out among a group of recent publications on the history of

Xinjiang.12

It is the only one to the best of my knowledge to give an outline of what theauthor calls ‘historical anthropology’, that is, a history of everyday life. Ildiko Beller-Hann

demonstrates the potential this field holds on the crossroads between social anthropology and

social history by her mastery of the methods of both fields. The book thus is a major achieve-

ment. Beller-Hann acknowledges the limits of her study quite clearly in her conclusion: ‘The

insider and outsider sources used still need to be augmented by the view from ‘above’, i.e.

sources generated by the colonizers, not to mention a wider range of indigenous documents

(such as marriage, divorce, inheritance documents, court records) than I was able to access.

This study is thus only a first step towards a comprehensive historical anthropology of the

region in the period specified’ (p. 429). That is true – even though I would say that to call

this weighty study a ‘first step’ certainly is a topos of modesty.

The social history of the colonial period is becoming an established field in Central Asian

studies. It is, however and of course, patent that much remains to be done. First, the pre-colonial

period, that is, the period from roughly 1750 to the Russian conquest, still is seriously understu-

died, and we are still at the beginning of making sources accessible and known. This is most

evident in the case of the three khanates, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand. In these cases at least,

it is known that such sources exist in abundance; much less is known about the situation in

Xinjiang and, for that matter, in Afghanistan. Second, the archival sources produced by the

chanceries of the khanates and emirates as well as the court records and what else remains of

private documents, need to be taken into account much more systematically whenever possible.

This is particularly true for administrative history where progress depends directly on the feli-

citous use of chancery documents, but also for landholding and legal pluralism where courtrecords must be an essential basis of future research. Archival sources in the ‘colonial’ languages

(Russian, Chinese, English) need to be complementd by sources in the local languages (Persian/

128 J. Paul



Tajik and Turki). It is in particular the documentation in the local languages that has not yet been

exploited. Third, the barrier between historical anthropology (which is in the process of estab-

lishing itself as a scholarly discipline in Central Asian Studies) and social history needs to be

questioned. Oral history can be a useful tool in the hands of the social historian as well as the

social anthropologist. Interdisciplinary cooperation is thus a necessity. This might be shown

in the case of social groups such as the ‘sacred lineages’ present in many parts of CentralAsia.13 Fourth, a comparative perspective is useful: Central Asia, and in particular the khanates

and Russian Turkestan as well as the early Soviet policies in that area, should no longer be con-

sidered in isolation; as is well known, the political boundaries became hard to cross only in the

1930s. Comparisons should include Afghanistan (and possibly Iran) as well as British India,

especially for the pre-colonial period. For all these research questions, it can be stated with cer-

tainty that there will be no lack of sources.

Notes

1. Recent publications of Central Asian rulers’ documents include: A. Urunbaev, S. Gulomov, andG. Dzhuraeva, Katalog sredneaziatskikh zhalovannykh gramot iz fonda Instituta Vostokovedeniiaim. Abu Reikhana Beruni Akademii Nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan, Orientwissenschaftliche Hefte, 23(Halle: Orientwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Martin-Luther-Universitat, 2007). Even if the pace of publications is not very great as yet and the output still is not extraordinarily wide, an annotatedbibliography of published documents, including documents published in the Soviet academicsystem, is clearly a desideratum. See B. Fragner, Repertorium persischer Herrscherurkunden (publi-

zierte Original-Urkunden bis 1848) (Freiburg/Br.: Schwarz, 1980). Court documents and private docu-ments are another matter.

2. A.B. Vil’danova (ed.), Madzhma al-arkam (‘predpisaniia fiska’). Priemy dokomentatsii v Bukhare XVIII v. (Moskva: Nauka, 1981). See also Yu. Bregel, The administration of Bukhara under the Manghı ts and some Tashkent manuscripts. Papers on Inner Asia 34 (Bloomington: RIFIAS, 2000).

3. Besides a first appreciation of the text later edited by Vil’danova (see preceding note), Semenov alsopublished an outline of Bukharan administration (based on his personal experience): Ocherk poze-mel’no-podatnogo i nalogovogo ustroistva b. Bukharskogo khanstva (Tashkent: Trudy SAGU, 1929).

4. A recent and scathing critique of this approach is David Sneath, The headless state. Aristocratic orders,kinship society, and misrepresentations of nomadic Inner Asia (New York: Columbia University Press,2007). Sneath’s comments on Geiss are on the whole convincing. The argument is directed againststructuralist thinking in general.

5. For a more balanced treatment of the 1916 uprising, see now J. Happel, Nomadische Lebenswelten und zarische Politik. Der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916 . PhD thesis (Basel: Basel University, 2009), andalso N. Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera: colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzionestatale in Asia centrale, 1905–1936 (Roma: Viella, 2009).

6. F. Fanon, Les damne s de la terre. Reprint (Paris: La Decouverte/Poche, 2006 [first published 1961]).The central example of course is Algiers, and it is interesting to note that Morrison states that thecolony Russian Turkestan most resembled possibly was French Algeria.

7. For the politics of famine, see, besides Pianciola quoted above, also M. Buttino, La rivoluzione capo-volta. L’Asia centrale tra il crollo del’impero zarista e la formazione del’URSS (Naples: L’Ancora delMediterraneo, 2003). Also extant in Russian translation: Revolutsiia naoborot. Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu

padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moskva: Zven’ya, 2007).8. Not in the bibliography, but quoted on p. 99 n. 48. E.A. Davidovich, ‘Feodal’nyi zemel’nyi milk v

Srednei Azii XV-XVIII vv.: Sushchnost’ i transformatsii’, in: B.G. Gafurov,Formy feodal’noi sobst-vennosti i vladeniia na Blizhem i Srednem Vostoke. Bartol’dovskie chteniia 1975 g. (Moscow: Nauka,1979), pp. 39–62. This article can be understood as the summa of Soviet scholarship on the question.

9. The standard study in this field is Baber Johansen, The Islamic law on land tax and rent: the peasants’

loss of property rights as interpreted in the Hanafite legal literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods (London: Croom Helm, 1988). Johansen starts much earlier than the thirteenth century,giving an outline also of the pre-Mongol Central Asian authors. The later medieval and earlymodern Central Asian legal literature in the field has yet to be studied in the light of Johansen’s results.




10. For a recent study of Soviet history where good use is made of oral history methods, see M. Kamp, Thenew woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, modernity, and unveiling under communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

11. F. Schwarz, ‘Bargeldstiftungen im Chanat von Chiva, 1840-1922’, Der Islam, 80 (2003), pp 79–93.12. For a general overview, see now J. Millward, Eurasian crossroads: a history of Xinjiang (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2007), with a focus on political history, but economic history is also wellserved. For earlier periods in the relationship between what was to become Russian Turkestan andXinjiang, see L. Newby, The Empire and the khanate: a political history of Qing relations withKhoqand c. 1760– 1860 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

13. For these, a broad documentary basis is available. The relevant body of texts presents enormous source-critical problems, and moreover, the texts have to be linked to oral narratives and present-day situationsin a meaningful way. Preconceived ideas about the significance of genealogy in both sedentary and“nomadic” contexts must be discarded. See A. Muminov and M. Abuseitova (eds), Genealogicheskiegramoty i sakral’nye semeistva XIX-XXI vekov: nasab-nama i gruppy khodzhei svyazannykh s sakral’-nym skazaniem ob Iskhak-Babe (Almaty: Daik Press, 2008). For the source-critical problems, see theintroduction by Devin DeWeese to the quoted volume. More recent publications in this field include:K. Kehl-Bodrogi, ‘Religion is not so strong here’: Muslim religious life in Khorezm after socialism(Munster: Lit, 2008).

130 J. Paul

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