Paper short abstract:

It is commonly assumed that, under Tsarist rule, regulations prevented the establishment of textile factories to process Turkestani cotton on place. By studying in detail the case of a proposed spinning plant in Samarkand, this paper debunks this idea and points at gaps in the extant historiography.

Paper long abstract:

A commonplace statement in historiography and scholarly discourse is that the Russian imperial State prevented industrial development in Turkestan, allegedly by prohibiting the establishment of cotton textile (spinning and weaving) factories. This essay debunks this idea and makes the case for a reappraisal of economic development in pre-revolutionary Central Asia. Through an unbiased approach to a corpus of archival sources in Tashkent and Saint Petersburg, I reconstruct the story of the Bukharan Jewish entrepreneur, Pinkhas Abramov, who wanted to set up the first cotton spindling and weaving factory in Samarkand. I show that he failed to do so because of the advent of World War I and, later, the Bolshevik revolution, not because of any law that condemned Turkestan to the role of purveyor of raw or ginned cotton. I also can also show how this ‘myth’ is ultimately premised on a ‘selective’ reading of a single archival file, who contributed to its success, and what obstacles exist toward a more balanced interpretation of events. Finally, I use this paper as a case study to point at peculiarities of capitalism in Turkestan, as well as a point of departure to consider how our knowledge of it can grow, taking into account recent restrictions to access to the Russian archives.