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Abstract:

The paper considers patterns of interactions involving sedentary and nomadic communities of Eurasia. Scholars have shown that throughout the region’s history, these interactions constituted an indispensable attribute of the rise and operation of the great nomadic empires. The nomads’ economic dependency on certain items produced in sedentary societies prompted their rulers to establish commercial relations with these societies, impose tribute on them, or take the needed items by force. Most powerful nomadic rulers also initiated the construction of settled spots, which, rather than turning into centers of power, functioned as trading and administrative spots. Owen Lattimore described this nomadic/sedentary interaction as ‘the oasis-in-the-steppe’ pattern. He viewed it as the basic geopolitical, economic, and cultural setting that shaped the region’s operation throughout its history.

I argue that during the formative period of the rise of the Russian Empire (from the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century), its authorities capitalized on enacting the ‘oasis-in-the-steppe’ setting. To proceed with this argument, my paper investigates the settled spots of Orenburg, Ural’sk, and Verny (Almaty) established in the Kazakh Steppe in the period under consideration. Historians tend to view these and other Russian settled spots as colonial military outposts, embodying the physical presence of Russian imperial power in the Kazakh Steppe. The more so as these spots occupied the surrounding nomadic lands and stationed punitive Cossack military forces. My paper shows that these spots that later grew into cities initially emerged as trading hubs, enabling economic and other interactions between the region’s nomadic and sedentary populations. In so doing, they replaced earlier settled spots that had operated as such centers before the Russian advance in the area. In other words, to strengthen their presence in the region, Russian imperial authorities invested in entertaining ‘the oasis-in-the steppe’ mechanisms. Thus, the initial stage of the spread of Russian imperial rule in the Kazakh nomadic areas in the period under consideration presents a striking contrast with its later period that marked the outset of the era of nationalism in Russia in the 1820s.

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How to build new metallurgical factories? This question haunted eighteenth-century Russian industrialists as well as the author of this paper. The eighteenth century witnessed Russia’s transformation from a country without large-scale domestic mining to a leading exporter of iron, copper, and silver to Europe. I argue that the key to understanding the scale-up of mines and factories in eighteenth-century Russia lies not in big concepts such as Enlightenment, modernization, or Catherinian enlightened absolutism. Instead, I propose “replication” as a vantage point to examine industrial development in eighteenth-century Russia and use replication to construct an alternative narrative that supplements or challenges commonplace stories about Russian enlightenment, absolutism, and empire.

Replication rests on two primary techniques: modeling and compartmentalization. Modeling creates prototypes from which homogeneous copies are further produced. Compartmentalization divides things into parts to increase replication’s efficiency and scalability. I examine a replication process that took place in Russia’s Orenburg province in the latter half of the eighteenth century: the construction of mining infrastructure. Consequently, I focus on a specific production model for mining and its necessitated compartmentalization. This model was built upon five pillars: natural resources, labor resources, technologies, regulatory framework, and the built environment. Russian bureaucrats and industrialists had molded this mining model by the mid-eighteenth century based on their mining practices in the central Urals and Siberia. Compartmentalization in this context meant treating biological and nonbiological entities the mining industry entailed as decontextualizable objects that could be reproduced from place to place. With the establishment of Orenburg province in 1744, the Russian state and individual industrialists initiated a concerted campaign to multiply or reproduce (razmnozhat’) metallurgical factories in mineral-rich Orenburg province. I examine the endeavors to replicate factories and mines in the new province based on the established model and demonstrate how situated socio-material environments in Orenburg province challenged Russia’s mining prototype.

Building upon the Russian mining model, I illustrate how enlightenment was itself designed as an overarching teleological model that was meant to be replicated across spaces. I question the conventional wisdom on enlightenment and enlightened absolutism as epistemic machinery for epoch creation in eighteenth-century Russia and even beyond. Instead, I suggest a new approach that shifts the focus from the totalizing force of enlightenment and absolutism to the interactions among multiscalar forces of humans and nonhumans, material and non-material. I show that enlightenment was always an encounter and negotiation, and absolutism was never so absolute

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This paper focuses on the garrison system known as ‘Karun’ (Mongol. qaraγul, Chinese. 卡伦) in Kokenuur area（Qinghai）, which was set up by the Qing court in the 1750s and 1770s to resolve ethnic conflicts between Mongolian and Tibetan nomads. During the Qianlong period, the Koloks, one of the Tibetan tribes, repeatedly migrated northwards to raid the Mongol tribes. To address this issue, the Qing Dynasty established a garrison line depended on the autonomous efforts of the Mongols, who were stationed at different passes to prevent the Tibetans from invading. I argue that the establishment of the ‘Karun’ marked the end of the official policy of "supporting the Tibetans and suppressing the Mongols" (扶番抑蒙), as it gradually weakened the Mongols side and created an imbalance of power between the two sides. Consequently, the Qing court abandoned its original policy and instead focused on strong military defense against the Tibetan tribes. I also argue that this ‘Karun’ system is one of the more unique military isolation lines within the imperial map, which demarcates the nomadic borders of the Mongols and Tibetans in Kokenuur demonstrating the early Qing's policy of strictly distinguishing between the borders of ethnic groups. This paper relies primarily on the Manchu Archives in the First Historical Archives of China, which has not received much attention from previous researchers.

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Historians have hitherto failed to adequately explain the declarations of submission by khans and sultans of the Qazaq Middle Zhuz to the Romanov Empire in the mid-18th century. Scholars generally agree that these declarations imposed few practical responsibilities, but Chinggisid rulers seemingly had little reason to profess their obedience to sedentary, non-Muslim empires, especially given the limited Russian military presence in the steppe at the time. Historians usually contrast Abu’l-Khayr Khan’s submission of the Junior Zhuz to Russia in 1731 to Ablai’s “multi-vector diplomacy” between the Romanovs and Qing. According to this view, Ablai’s simultaneous submissions to both powers were meant to preserve Qazaq statehood in the face of imperial aggression. However, this view disregards the long process by which the Middle Zhuz came into Tsarist orbit, including the actions of Ablai’s predecessors.

This study instead focuses on the internal dynamics of Qazaq society to determine potential “domestic” motives for Chinggisid rulers to request Tsarist support. It relies on Russian and Chaghatay sources in published collections, primarily diplomatic correspondence of Qazaq rulers with Russian officials, as well as reports from the steppe by Russian officers. The analysis determines that foreign threats were probably not the primary factor behind declarations of submission. Economic benefits played a more important role in soliciting expressions of loyalty, since they allowed Qazaqs to grow their patronage networks and secure trade opportunities from the empire. However, an even more important factor was khans’ desire to centralize their own status within the Zhuz. Qazaq Khans used Russian titles and rituals to elevate their authority over the Qazaq population, sought imperial recognition of their sons as their successors, and even requested Tsarist troops to suppress their domestic rivals. Thus, submission was a strategy to consolidate “domestic” political power even at the cost of “foreign” domination. This finding challenges the image of Ablai as a Kazakh national hero and nuances our understanding of the political dynamics of imperial borderlands.