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Abstract

This paper examines the response of the Kazakhs to imperial agronomic reforms in the Kazakh Steppe in the early twentieth century. The paper argues that the selective participation of Kazakhs in imperial economic projects constituted not passive indifference but a deliberate strategy of negotiation, a form of everyday resistance enacted through engagement with the empire on local terms.

Seeking to rationalize livestock production and integrate the steppe into the imperial economy, Russian authorities undertook a series of successive yet largely unsuccessful measures. Initially, the administration promoted the breeding of fine-wool sheep oriented toward wool export. However, the harsh natural conditions of the steppe proved incompatible with this type of animal husbandry, and even the feathergrass posed a physical threat to the animals. Following this, regional agronomic organizations established a network of stud stations to improve other local livestock, yet this initiative likewise found little resonance among ordinary Kazakhs, petitions came predominantly from wealthy livestock owners. Further attempts to engage the local Kazakhs through demonstration feedings and livestock exhibitions with money prizes met with a similarly limited response.

The paper concludes that such selectivity reflects not inertia but deliberate agency. Kazakhs rationally assessed imperial instruments and engaged with them only to the extent that doing so did not conflict with the logic of traditional nomadic pastoralism. Imperial agronomic policy in the steppe thus functioned not as a coherent modernization project but as a contested field of negotiation, in which the local population actively defined the terms of its own participation.