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This paper traces the evolution of copper pricing in the Russian Empire to demonstrate that price has historically carried multiple meanings and functions, shaped by contextual social relations and cultural understanding of “economic” activity and “profits”. I argue that even as market imperatives gained prominence in late imperial Russia amid its deeper integration into the global economy, copper pricing remained embedded in a moral economy inherited from the state-led copper industry of the eighteenth century. This moral economy operated on two key principles. The first, which I term the baseline principle, held that fair pricing should safeguard the least cost-efficient producers, even at the expense of more efficient ones. The second, the balance principle, maintained that prices should achieve a balance between private enrichment and state prosperity, thereby contributing to the “common good.” These principles oriented concrete material production toward direct state and social needs, defining copper mines and factories not as compartmentalized, abstract profit-making vehicles but as a united material force supporting a holistic socioeconomic organism. While seemingly at odds with market logic, in late imperial Russia this moral economy blended with Russia’s growing market economy and underpinned various forms of “market” pricing, most notably a “monopolistic” pricing mechanism codified on the eve of World War I. Even as late imperial Russia became market-dominated, it hardly became market-organized. Ultimately, Russia’s 200 years of copper pricing testify to the tenacity of various metrics for evaluating economic performance—community preservation or state well-being—and reveal that free market pricing aimed at private profit-maximization was an “unnatural” social experiment that clashed with historically “normal” social practices. Moreover, in late imperial Russia, the confluence of moral economic principles favoring holistic over compartmentalized economic thinking and novel economic mechanisms facilitating both top-down and intersectoral coordination indicates that state-led socialist economic planning in the Soviet era that followed did not arise in a vacuum.

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In the mid-to-late 19th century, as the Russian Empire expanded into Southern Central Asia, agriculture gradually became a crucial component of governance in the “new frontier.” Western scholarship often emphasizes the Empire’s attempts to transform Southern Central Asian agriculture through Western technology, citing engineering failures and ecological damage as evidence of its inefficient and unsustainable rule. This paper argues that the agricultural reforms carried out by the Russian Empire in Southern Central Asia were not aimed at establishing a “civilizational order.” They served as a core instrument of frontier governance, intended to consolidate rule, increase fiscal revenue, promote colonization and integrate Southern Central Asia from an “outer frontier” into an “inner frontier.”

The primary sources for this study consist of Russian Imperial local government reports, agricultural surveys, water conservancy project archives and related legal documents. The analysis proceeds along three dimensions: institutional construction, water conservancy and cotton industrialization. First, at the institutional level, the Empire did not forcibly impose land privatization but instead incorporated local land and water-rights customs through legislation, creating a form of “governance continuity.” Second, in water conservancy practice, early attempts to directly transplant Western models largely ended in failure. It was through the efforts of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, who integrated local irrigation knowledge and effectively employed local labor, that the water system was improved and irrigated land expanded. Third, in the cotton industry, the Empire transitioned from market-driven to state-led development. Through tariff protection, variety improvement, technology promotion and the establishment of a research network, local government effectively promoted the scaling and institutionalization of cotton cultivation in Southern Central Asia. Although factors such as high production costs and limited administrative capacity prevented the realization of “cotton self-sufficiency,” this process successfully integrated Southern Central Asia into the empire-wide cotton supply chain and market system.

This paper contends that the Russian Empire’s agricultural governance in Southern Central Asia was a pragmatic process unfolding within the tensions among imperial rationality, local knowledge and market forces. Despite issues such as inefficiency, knowledge gaps and limited social integration, the reforms—through adjustments to land institutions, improvements in water conservancy and the development of the cotton industry—largely achieved the goals of consolidating rule, promoting colonization, and fostering economic integration. The completion of the Orenburg–Tashkent railway further strengthened the region’s ties to the Russian heartland, marking Southern Central Asia’s transition from a frontier to an “inner frontier.”

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The rearing of silkworms and the added-value chain underpinning silk fabrics are attested in Central Asia since antiquity, but how this sector adapted when the region entered the ‘age of steam’ is unclear. Central Asia’s sericulture figures marginally in Giovanni Federico’s landmark account of the silk industry in the 19th-early 20th centuries. True, this was a very small, and declining, share of the global silk trade. However, when seen from colonial Central Asia itself, the importance of this sector is striking.

First, according to contemporary sources, up to 80 percent of Turkestan’s cocoons were exported to European markets, especially Milan and Marseille. The pebrine epidemic and the consequent search for ‘pure’ silkworms had pushed Italian merchants to procure cocoons from the region already during the Russian advance, as Zanier documented. The advent of drying technology, though, greatly expanded the potential for trade in cocoons. At the turn of the century, Corsican entrepreneur Joachim Aloisi became, by mandate of the Tsarist colonial authorities, the ‘official’ purveyor of ‘pasteurized’ silkworm grains, guaranteed against pebrine and flacherie. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs and scientific personnel (e.g. physicians) opened ‘grain stations’ in several Turkestani cities, employing local women. Aloisi’s biography, the impact of new science and technology (dryers, microscopes) on previous silk-rearing practices, and the economy of cocoons exports remain opaque, and form another part of my research.

Second, Central Asia’s raw silk (undyed skeins) had become a key export from the region into north-west India in the first half of the 19th century. For Jagjeet Lally, such silk replaced imports from Bengal, until Chinese silk became widely available after 1842. Silk-reeling in Central Asia itself through the whole 19th century, nonetheless, remains unexplored.

In this paper I present the preliminary results of my quest to cast new light on the development of sericulture and silk reeling in the colonial period, particularly in the light of the global connections outlined above.