Colonization put an end to the stateless ‘free ride’ in Central Asia in the nineteenth century. Urban and oasis dwellers mostly accepted the establishment of the Russian administration, while rural, tribal segments of Central Asian society showed fierce resistance.5 One might argue that rural resistance was Islamic in nature: it was local jihad by tribes for whom Islam has always been intertwined with tribal networks.
Others argue that these tribal elements would have resisted any form of government — native or foreign. Both arguments — culturalist and constructivist — are valid. The establishment of effective state control
5 For example, the uprising in Ferghana led by Madali, or Ishani Dukchi in 1898.
in the vast Central Asian territories was a prerequisite for the new European-dominated world order, which required the formation of nation states with clearly-defined and rigid borders in order to protect national sovereignty and reinforce national symbols and values. In the early twentieth century this Westphalian6 legal and political framework for modern inter-state relations did not apply to Muslim-populated territories, as colonizers did not see a ‘basis on which principles of national self-determination can [be] buil[t]’7 in those territories.
For the first time in history, Central Asian Muslims were subject to the jurisdiction of non-Muslims, who imposed a secular vision that contradicted a Muslim sense of being in the world. This governance undermined the customary way of life, erecting political borders and putting restrictions on migration.
At the same time, the establishment of Russian rule in the region launched the consolidation of disparate tribal, local, and ethnic identities into larger identity groups that later formed the backbone of modern nation states. Most Central Asians became citizens of the Russian Empire. Because they were non-Slavs and non-Christians, the Tsarist government discriminated against them by labelling them as unorthodox (inorodets). They shared this status with other minority peoples in the Russian Empire, such as the Kalmyks (the indigenous peoples of Siberia), Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples. This status limited their access to educational institutions, military or state service, and places of residence. However, the Tsarist regime attempted to win over the tribal and patrimonial leaders or local aristocracy by granting them special privileges. This gradual incorporation of ungoverned tribes into proto-national units played an important role in nation-building in Central Asia.
Dividing Central Asia into three spheres was an afterthought of colonial expansion and it just happened to succeed. Because these areas were primarily buffer zones, there was no direct collision between Great Britain, Russia, and China in Central Asia during their two centuries of rivalry. In other words, the participants of the Great Game in Central Asia played peacefully and according to the rules they established by
6 The Westphalian system of sovereign states was established in 1648 as part of the Peace of Westphalia.
7 India Office Library (IOL)/P&S/11/142.
themselves and for themselves. Conflicts rarely amounted to anything more than short-term military expeditions.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast strategic buffer zone between the empires encompassing Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Afghanistan, and Central Asia was formed. Russian Central Asia (Turkestan, Bukhara, Semirechie, Khiva, Turkmenia) proved too rich in human and natural resources for the Tsarist colonial regime to develop fully. Moscow was unable to transform the culture of large populations with their own historically established identities. As a result, the incorporation of Central Asia into the Russian Empire was weak, both politically and economically. Russian cultural influence in Central Asia was not as pronounced as it was in the Caucasus, where close cultural ties between the colony- and parent-state had begun to take shape by the nineteenth century. In Central Asia, Russians limited themselves mainly to the establishment of structural means of control in the region, such as building railways and other infrastructure projects.
Only a small group of the local elite (mainly Kazakhs, Russia’s closest neighbors) adopted the Russian culture. Major urban centres remained divided into two unrelated parts: Russian-dominated centres and native
‘old cities’.
These artificial boundaries served colonial powers by preventing ethnic and religious unity and the mobilization of peoples with common interests. Some argue that the main Muslim response to colonialism in Central Asia was a military one: a call to clash with the enemy, the West (see for example Alimova 2000:167, Ziyoev 1998). Others argue that there was an internal crisis in Islamic society that was only exacerbated by the encounter with colonial Europe (see Ayni 1987, Fitrat 1988). The colonization of Muslim states was not therefore a treacherous Christian incursion, but a rational response by the emerging empires to weakening neighbors and former adversaries. According to this view, the main reasons for colonization were situation- and network-dependent; they did not stem from ideology or deep-seated animosity between religions.
However, this is not to say that the concept of a ‘clash of civilizations’
(Huntington 2000) is not applicable to interrelationships between the empires in Central Asia. The Russians and British invaded these territories with a Eurocentric project of ‘modernization’. According to this simplistic model, the southern borders of Central Asia were considered
the frontier between a capitalist Russia, as the eastern stronghold of the Christian West, against a feudal Muslim world. This confrontation had its roots in the West’s historical memory of the nomads of Central Asia as aggressive ‘barbarians’ bent on the destruction of urban civilization and the image of the ‘fanatic Muslim’ as an enemy.8 The imagined threat of what was later called ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ was created and fanned by the empires that took part in the Great Game. In light of this
‘clash of civilizations’, Russia appeared to be the defender of the West from the ‘wild’ East, even though in other contexts Russia itself was often condemned as a bulwark of ‘eastern’ autocracy and despotism.
The inhabitants of the region paid the price for peace between the empires. Imperial policies resulted in the fragmentation of historic, political, national, and social relationships that accelerated the decline of Central Asia. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century, the region became politically and economically dependent on the West, and the seeds were planted for future conflicts, social shocks, and population movements that would create complex socio-spatial dynamics to transcend these externally imposed boundaries.