In recent decades Xinjiang, portrayed as a political trouble spot, has gained broad recognition in international media, which tend to rely on clichés of insurmountable conflict, ethnic unrest, and religious radicalization. Such stereotypical reporting is seldom informed by scholarly engagement with the region, which has reached new heights with five monographs published in 2016. These two anthropological and three historical studies constitute important additions to existing scholarship. They shift attention away from conflictual representations toward a much more nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in historical processes since the early modern period, including ongoing modernization and urban transformation. Xinjiang's role as both pivot and pawn in the greater scheme of global, national, and regional contexts, both past and present, is illuminated by each one of these new books.

Kwangmin Kim's historical study, Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market, takes the Qing expansion into Xinjiang in the mid-eighteenth century as its point of departure, a process in which the Turkic-speaking Muslim begs played a decisive role. The indigenous elites’ collaboration with the Qing has been, by and large, ignored or deliberately overlooked both by contemporary Uyghur elites and by modern scholarship focusing on Uyghur ethno-nationalism, perhaps because it undermines the dominant narrative of the “Xinjiang problem,” which presents the Uyghurs as victims and the Han and the Chinese leadership (both party and government) as perpetrators.

Kim's study, based on archival materials, argues that the Muslim headmen of sedentary farming communities supported the Qing in order to serve their own economic interests and thus contributed to the capitalist transformation of the political economy of Xinjiang's oases. They did this through developing and commercializing agriculture, controlling human labor, organizing capital, and moving goods. Kim interprets these developments as part of the expansion of global commerce, in which international scholarship until relatively recently has tended to emphasize the exceptional developmental path taken by Europe. Challenging the narrative of European exceptionalism, Kim argues that Europe and China followed comparable paths of capitalist and imperialist development in their colonies and borderlands respectively. The oasis economies of Xinjiang played a pivotal role in this process.

Each of Kim's five chapters narrates the story of one or two borderland begs, focusing on their careers, their role in the local economy, and their relations to the Qing. He begins by exploring the complex process of the formation of the Qing alliance with the Muslim elite against the Zunghars, as exemplified by the exploits of Emin Khoja from Turfan in the eighteenth century. Kim argues that the Muslim begs actively sought this alliance because the Zunghars posed a threat to the economic interests of the oasis communities, whereas Qing support promised to open up Chinese markets. The begs’ commercial enterprises are scrutinized through the activities of Udui, governor of Yarkand, and his son Osman in the period of 1759–1825, which included both agricultural and mining projects. This chapter demonstrates the mutual, almost symbiotic interdependence that developed between the Muslim begs and the Qing, whereby the former took advantage of the empire's reliance on their resource management while themselves remaining entirely dependent on the Qing as protectors of the market.

A whole chapter is devoted to the careers of Jahangir and Yusuf, two saintly khojas well-known for their prominent role in the anti-Qing resistance of Xinjiang's Muslims in the early nineteenth century. Refugee communities on the slopes of the Pamir and the Tianshan comprised social groups that had fallen victim to the expanding commercialization of the oasis agriculture. Kim challenges earlier interpretations of these “Holy Wars” led by the khojas as resistance of the conquered against the conquerors in religious guise by substituting it with a novel explanation in terms of anti-capitalist sentiments. The khoja wars resulted in an increased Qing military presence in Xinjiang, which facilitated production while simultaneously giving rise to a new imperial policy aimed at the development of agricultural colonies. The latter provided new investment opportunities for the begs to whom such government land was contracted out. Simultaneously, however, it also reproduced social problems, which crystalized in increasing discontent with Qing rule and the beg regime. These processes, together with the repercussions of the Opium War, were the ultimate causes of the crisis of Qing military financing and the cessation of silver transfers from China to the borderlands. What Kim calls the “global crisis of oasis capitalism” culminated in the khoja rebellion of 1864, an event that created chaos and marked the demise of the beg system.

Inasmuch as it follows earlier scholars who pursued signs of capitalist development outside Europe, Kim's work is a continuation of a well-established historiographical tradition. But it breaks with this tradition when it questions the practice of privileging the European experience by using it as a yardstick against which non-European experiences can be measured. This is achieved by means of a more “organic” definition of the concept of capitalism, which puts the emphasis on the global interconnectedness of commercialization (p. 10). While transregional connectivities had long been in place, the emergence of the begs as local capitalist entrepreneurs was new. It stimulated local production to supply the Chinese market with jade, horses, livestock, cotton, and grain, thus facilitating the influx of New World and Chinese silver into Central Asia. This symbiotic relationship between the beg capitalists of the oases and the Qing sheds new light on the latter's expansion into Central Asia by supplementing the hitherto dominant China-centered scholarly paradigm with a focus on the borderlands.

The main sources utilized to delve into local history are primarily Manchu-, Chinese-, and Russian-language materials, augmented by Turki contract documents mostly accessed in Chinese translation, and Sayrami's famous chronicle in Turki. A brief introduction to the Chinese and Manchu sources, as for example in the case of a “local tale” narrated in the beginning of chapter 2 (p. 47), would have been helpful. This particular story is important because it serves as a prelude to Kim's argument that bringing economic prosperity is a new legitimation strategy on the part of Muslim rulers in the region. Kim speculates that before Qing rule the khans and amirs would have referred to military strength and judicial independence as ultimate justification to their rule (p. 48). A closer look at the Central Asian Islamic tradition would have suggested good governance, Chinggisid descent, Sufi connections, ancestors participating in the Islamization process of a locality, and support for Islamic patronage of the arts and learning as crucial elements constituting the repertoire at the disposal of Muslim rulers as potential sources of legitimation. Central Asian terms such as “Sart” (p. 99), “baranta” (p. 102), or “white bones” are treated at face value as they appear in the sources used, without reference to the scholarly literature exposing the complexity of such terms. Such minor omissions, however, are outweighed by Kim's skillful outlining of his main tenets (even if the frequent repetition of these is a little overdone).

Studies that privilege economic factors and rational choices over cultural, religious, and other considerations, however compelling they might appear, are generally vulnerable to suspicions of reductionism. Nonetheless, Kim's more specific claims, which present the White Mountain supporters as economic refugees, interpret the khoja rebellions in terms of an anti-capitalist movement, and see Qing expansion as an important stimulus for capitalist production and the begs’ cooperation with the Qing and the Qing military presence in the light of market protection, will no doubt stimulate future research precisely because of the major challenge they pose to accepted academic wisdom. New data combined with a focus on the entanglement of economic, religious, and cultural factors will further substantiate or refute Kim's extraordinarily bold claims. Regardless of the outcome, as it stands, Borderland Capitalism constitutes a fresh approach to a hitherto under-researched period of Xinjiang and Qing history; it will no doubt stimulate further discussion both in East Asian regional history and in economic history more generally.

Anglophone scholarship concerning modern Uyghur and Xinjiang history has long been content to reproduce the assumption that the modern, twentieth-century concept of an Uyghur ethnos or nation owed its existence to a Soviet Turkologists’ decision taken to this effect at a conference in Tashkent in 1921. In Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier, David Brophy revisits the origins of the Uyghur nation and the result is a profound study characterized by rich raw data, analytical depth, and scientific rigor. This is achieved by means of a complex analytical framework, which allows Brophy to explore sources in Russian, Chinese, and Turkic.

The scene is set by an overview of regional history and its main protagonists. According to Brophy, Uyghur nationhood had its roots simultaneously in multiple sources, ranging from local Islamic tradition to transnational pan-Turkic ideas and foreign Orientalism. The historical backdrop to the emerging discourse was provided by the process of the construction of a colonial frontier. Chinese and Russian Turkistan became increasingly clearly demarcated administrative entities inhabited by diverse populations divided by distinct senses of imperial subjecthood (political affiliation) but held together by shared linguistic, religious, and cultural orientations. Russian empire building opened up Xinjiang to influences emanating from Russian Muslims and the Ottoman Empire. Jadidist (Muslim reformist) discourse flourished in the space created by the Qing Empire's relative indifference toward religion. The sense of belonging to China's Muslim community had equal resonance among members of the two distinct diaspora communities living on Russian territory—the traders from Southern Xinjiang known as Kashgaris and the Taranchis, exiles from Xinjiang's Ili valley—in spite of the fact that for the former it was contemporary political reality while for the latter it constituted a distant memory.

The demise of the Qing Empire and the proclamation of the Chinese Republic resulted in what Brophy terms a racial turn in the discourses of Xinjiang's Muslims. Muslims in China now became classified as one of the nation's five races, alongside the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, and the Tibetans. Western concepts of race transmitted via the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire and of Russia—one promoting pan-Turkism, the other narrower ideals of nationalism—both found resonance among the Muslims of Xinjiang.

The Russian civil war had devastating consequences for the Taranchis and put pressure on the Kashgari diaspora living in Russian Turkistan. Due to their diverging histories and different structural positions, the two communities continued to cultivate a sense of difference that eventually exerted considerable influence upon modern Uyghur nationalist discourse, catalyzed of course by the Soviet national delimitation. Differences in political subjecthood (the Kashgaris were Chinese subjects while the Taranchis were Russian/Soviet subjects) and economy (the former were traders and seasonal laborers, the latter farmers) could be overcome by developing a unified communal identity around the concept of “Uyghur,” which would fit the Soviet ideal of nationality and allow members of the community to benefit from Soviet resource allocations.

Old communal boundaries doggedly persisted, however, which explains why in the early Soviet period political affiliation (subjecthood) rather than ethnicity played a decisive role in delineating communities. This is exemplified by the initial inclusion of the Dungans (later Hui, i.e., Chinese Muslims) in the conceptual category of Uyghur, before it was narrowed to exclude them. As a result of increasing Soviet influence, by 1935 Xinjiang's communities were forced into the straitjacket of nationalities. In contrast to Soviet practice, however, Taranchis were still defined as a separate group. In the 1940s, northwest Xinjiang came under Soviet political influence and Uyghur ethnonationalism dominated, while the Chinese nationalists controlling the rest of the region supported pan-Turkic ideologies. These ideological and political contestations came to an end after 1949 when the Chinese Communists imposed Stalin's approach to nationalities and solidified the Uyghur ethnic category as we know it today. Brophy concludes that the complex processes involved in the construction of the modern Uyghur nationality are insufficient to explain ongoing conflict in Xinjiang (p. 265).

Brophy's transnational narrative situates the discursive emergence of the Uyghur nation(ality) at the intersection of Chinese, Russian/Soviet, and Islamic/Ottoman imperial and local (i.e. subnational) histories. He contributes to the New Qing History but also critiques it by pointing out that a Qing-centered history, though an improvement over China-centered historiography, is still too limited to do justice to Xinjiang as a multiple imperial periphery. Brophy acknowledges circumspectly that his study does not deal with grassroots responses to nationalist agitation (p. 265). Rather, he briefly takes issue with earlier studies that have sought proto-ethnic forms of identification in the pre-socialist period, since he can convincingly demonstrate that the ethnic associations of the concept of Uyghur were a secondary, later development preceded by communal identities primarily rooted in religion and subjecthood.

Contrary to accepted academic wisdom, which locates the origins of the modern Uyghur nation primarily in the classificatory activities of socialist states, Brophy opens up complex vistas of transnational (primarily Ottoman and Russian Muslim intellectual) ideas. He draws on an impressive spectrum of archival and published sources (including Japanese, Mongolian, and Persian as well as Chinese, Russian, and Turkic). The wealth of sources and the ensuing overabundance of detail are both virtue and hindrance; while they enhance Uyghur Nation’s credibility and amply support the work's main arguments, the surfeit of information sometimes impedes readability, in spite of Brophy's clear prose style. Some readers might prefer to sacrifice some of the minutiae to enable more engagement with existing scholarship on the subject, such as Ondřej Klimeš’s recent study of Uyghur nationalist discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, many of whose claims Brophy's book implicitly argues against.Footnote ¹ But such minor points aside, it is fair to conclude that Brophy's analysis of how a diffuse “Uyghurist” discourse became broad enough to accommodate narrowly delineated nationalist programs with supra-national, pan-Turkist visions is a monumental achievement, setting new standards with its impressive scholarship.

At this point it is appropriate to turn to Justin Jacobs's study of the republican period, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State, which I have reviewed elsewhere in more detail.Footnote ² Jacobs compares and contrasts the strategies employed by the power-holders of three consecutive Chinese political formations (late imperial, republican, and early socialist) to deal with the diversity of China's western borderlands. He pays equal attention to what Han officials actually did in practice, rather than engaging exclusively with their abstract political discourses. Explicitly taking his cue from the New Qing History and building on the insights of recent scholarship on other Eurasian continental empires, Jacobs convincingly demonstrates the ways in which modern China resembled (but also differed from) its imperial predecessor.

Jacobs coins the term “national empire” to characterize modern China, thus avoiding the heavily laden concepts of imperialism and colonialism. In a highly readable narrative that privileges the perspective of Han officials serving in Xinjiang, he describes officials’ pragmatic adjustments to new realities in the face of the threats emanating from both Han and non-Han nationalisms, as well as from Soviet political designs. Although it makes some use of both Russian and Chinese archival sources, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State is characterized by a heavy reliance on published Chinese sources. This does not diminish its value as a new political history of Xinjiang's Han-dominated governance in the first half of the twentieth century, which simultaneously doubles as a narrative of the emergence of modern China.

Shifting the focus from past to present, I now turn to two new ethnographic studies. Building on well-known anthropological theories, Madlen Kobi investigates contemporary urbanization processes in Constructing, Creating and Contesting Cityscapes: A Socio-Anthropological Approach to Urban Transformation in Southern Xinjiang, People's Republic of China, a study that is innovative in at least two respects. While existing academic treatments of the subject focus mainly on eastern China, this is a pioneering exploration of the transformation of urban space in Xinjiang, a region which, compared to the coastal areas, has experienced large-scale urbanization only recently. In addition, her approach privileges a grassroots, bottom-up perspective, which also represents a certain deviation from the bulk of the literature.

Although she acknowledges the inspiration of Henri Lefebvre, space analysis is only one aspect among many others deployed by Kobi to make sense of urban transformation. Her methods were constrained by the difficulties faced by all foreign researchers when trying to collect empirical data in Xinjiang. Relying on informal interviews conducted in Chinese in rapidly urbanizing districts of southern Xinjiang, namely Aksu and Kashgar, Kobi participated in mundane group activities ranging from shopping to cab rides and visiting sporting and cultural events. Writing her field diary from memory at the end of the day, she supplemented her empirical data with materials gleaned from published documents (to the extent that these were available). In her overview of the political economy of Xinjiang's rapid urbanization, Kobi pays special attention to institutional decision-making processes on the one hand and the connections between ethnic discontent and infrastructural development on the other. She then explores ongoing transformations of the urban morphology in Aksu through combining statistical data with narratives told to her by residents from all walks of life. Making use of theories of segregation and ethnic identity, she analyzes public spaces ranging from squares to “food spaces,” the bazaar, and the mosque, all of which serve as sites for performing ethnic identity. Urban residential communities include traditional neighborhood centers around the mosque; the socialist work unit (danwei), which combines workplace and residence; and the more recent development of administrative and commercialized communities, which, befitting the rapidly expanding socialist market economy, provide opportunities for both residence and real estate investment.

The geographical focus shifts in chapter 6 from Aksu to Kashgar. Kobi discusses the infamous redevelopment of the Old Town that some years ago aroused international indignation and criticism. The ensuing reconstruction of new, “ethnic style” housing is skillfully described through the narratives of local residents, highlighting intersecting but divergent representations of both the gains and the human costs of this particular instance of urban development.

Conceptualizing her subject matter in terms of “capitalist urbanization,” Kobi situates her work in the broader context of national processes, which she perceives as an inevitable outcome of political and economic interests represented and acted out by a multiplicity of institutions and state officials. She pays close attention to the effects of internal migration and the needs of the emerging middle classes in post-reform China. Land-grabbing may be detrimental for traditional livelihoods, but simultaneously it provides new financial opportunities for some villagers in the form of urban residence and compensation. These ambivalent developments, together with the reconstruction of traditional old towns as protected heritage sites, do not benefit all Uyghur residents equally; on the contrary, they contribute to the widening gap between middle-class and lower-class Uyghurs.

This timely, well-written, and important account fully delivers what it sets out to do; it is nicely produced and illustrated with a number of useful maps, tables, and photographs. Small irritants include Kobi's orthography of Kashgar as Kaxgar, a few imprecise details in the summary of pre-socialist history (pp. 28–31), and a few of what Kobi calls “methodological digressions.” The unevenness of the ethnography is no doubt due in part to fieldwork constraints. For example, a whole subsection is devoted to mosques as Uyghur spaces, but this is not supported by ethnographic data.

Tom Cliff's ethnographic study, Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang, is located in Korla, capital of the Bayingguoleng Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in Southern Xinjiang. Described by Cliff as a “‘palimpsest’ of post-Han settlement in Xinjiang” (p. 4) and with 70 percent of its total population Han, thanks to its hydrocarbon resources, Korla presents a laboratory in which to investigate Han immigration patterns into Xinjiang's urban centers. The value of such a study cannot be emphasized enough, since Han presence in Xinjiang, though always invoked as one of the main causes of Uyghur discontent, has hardly been investigated hitherto. Cliff's theoretical scaffolding includes the concepts of empire, colonialism, center-periphery relations, and the “new imperialism,” which combines domination and exploitation with development. Due to the ethnic division of space and the limited interaction even when space is shared, the otherwise absent Uyghur make their presence felt, justifying extreme security measures and making Xinjiang different from the rest of China. Oil and water constitute important resources in Xinjiang, enabling and sustaining Han immigration, but Cliff's title also stands as an apt metaphor for the very different experiences of the Han and Uyghur living in Xinjiang.

Han experiences are transmitted through words and evocative images. The latter are intended to be more than mere illustration; the images open up alternative vantage points for the reader to access the experiences of the protagonists. Data collection was carried out over the course of two years between 2007 and 2010. The representation of Han internal diversity is organized around categories of identity that circulate in everyday conversation, doing ample justice to the emic perspective favored by anthropologists.

The focus is primarily on the experiences of long-term Han residents employed in the oil industry and people with past or current connections to the bingtuan (the Production and Construction Corps). The quintessential protagonist is the constructor, while the main casualties of the demolition and rebuilding of urban villages in Korla have been Uyghurs. The constructor's central role in the development and the social transformation of Xinjiang looms large in the discourse of recent migrants. In a metaphorical sense, all Han in Xinjiang are constructors. However, the concept is used by Han with a longer history of residing in Xinjiang in a different sense in order to draw boundaries between themselves and the recent arrivals. Such discourses of difference are deployed by people with bingtuan connections who claim for themselves archetypal constructor status by insinuating that they have made a decisive contribution to nation-building and fulfilled a civilizing mission on China's restive periphery.

In addition to the quasi-military bingtuan, the other major organization that has transformed Korla from a primarily agricultural settlement into Xinjiang's second city has been the Tarim Oilfield Company, which increasingly displaced the bingtuan in the 2000s as the primary agent of change. Shared structural features aside, the two are also intimately connected through individual biographies: Mr. Jia, for example, was a bingtuan child who has become a high-ranking employee of the oil company. The theme of social mobility is expanded in chapter 3, where Cliff looks at the status and hierarchies of employees in the oil company and emphasizes continuities between the traditional danwei and the contemporary oil compound in terms of the wide range of benefits and services they provide for their permanent employees, and the relatively low social mobility. Both here and in the bingtuan, marriage choices are constrained by socioeconomic status. Characterized by deep-seated paternalism and a general acceptance of existing hierarchies, the oil compound is portrayed as a site of transition, where individual and institutional aspirations get entangled with the state's wish to perpetuate economic and social stability.

The two patterns that emerge in the life-histories of veteran employees of the Tarim Oilfield Company are summed up as legends of hardship and sacrifice and legends of potential. Cliff distinguishes the narrative strategies of the older generation from those of persons born after 1970; the former put the emphasis on the constraints imposed upon them by social structure, but the latter tend to foreground personal agency in line with the increased individualism characteristic of the new discursive environment in which they grew up. Similar themes are pursued in later chapters relating the experiences of non-oil-company Korla residents (all of whom were brought up in the bingtuan), where Cliff demonstrates the importance of guanxi for strengthening group cohesion and contributing to the normalization of Han cultural, political, and economic hegemony.

At the end of Oil and Water, Cliff turns to analyze the large-scale violence that erupted in Urumqi in July 2009 and its aftermath. He criticizes the dominant view that Xinjiang has an Uyghur problem and puts forward the idea that Xinjiang in fact has a Han problem. Predicated on a partnership of mutual dependence between the Han population of Xinjiang on the one hand and the party and the government on the other, Cliff argues that the key to Xinjiang's stability lies in the hands of the Han mainstream. The narrative of a Uyghur threat to this stability needs to be maintained in order to perpetuate the idea of a permanent state of emergency in Xinjiang, which justifies extraordinary securitization policies and further economic investment from the center. This in turn mitigates growing socioeconomic inequalities within the Han and contributes to strengthening ethnic solidarity among them. This argument runs against accepted wisdom according to which the center's (or core's) ultimate aim is the integration of an ethnically defined periphery. Cliff demonstrates instead that the legacy of imperial logic makes this integration not only impossible but also undesirable, since full integration would jeopardize the very raison d’être of the center.

Faithful to the well-established traditions of their discipline, Kobi and Cliff rely on ethnographic methods augmented by the use of available published materials, while the historians discussed earlier depend on a range of archival sources. Both disciplines are constrained by accessibility issues, and the anthropologist is particularly vulnerable to political fluctuations. Kim, Brophy, and Jacobs all make a case for replacing a China-centered framework with a focus on Xinjiang. Extraordinary linguistic expertise in the case of Brophy and the analytical skills of all three authors enable them to do justice to many (if not all) the complexities of historical processes. Where Kim and Jacobs interpret the nature of Chinese (imperial and republican) control of Xinjiang and the ways in which subjecthood was manipulated, Brophy's exploration of the emergence of Uyghur nationalism situates the process at the intersection of empires. Where Brophy attributes agency to the headmen of trading colonies, the aqasaqal, the Jadids, and numerous other local actors on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, Kim emphasizes the proactive role of the beg-managers in exploiting the economic advantages offered by Qing protection. Jacobs's exploration of Han ethnopolitical engineering from the perspective of Han officials can also be read as a study of agency, complementing Brophy's work on Uyghur nationalism. In a way, all three historians challenge dominant scholarly paradigms. Jacobs does so by conceptualizing the modern Chinese state as a “national empire” in which strategies of control over Xinjiang were consistently informed by power holders’ perceptions of ethnic diversity. Brophy's study replaces the paradigmatic view of the creation of the modern Uyghur nation with a more nuanced history that emphasizes local forces operating across political borders. He converges with the anthropologist Cliff in asserting that these processes of identity formation among Uyghurs do not provide a satisfactory explanation for ongoing conflict in Xinjiang. Kim makes the most direct connections to global economic history, challenging endemic Eurocentrism and claiming a proactive role for the borderlands and their entrepreneurs in the making of Eurasian commercial and capitalist history.

Like the historians, Kobi and Cliff both touch upon important facets of Chinese domination. But while the historians urge moving away from the China-centered framework of earlier scholarship, these two anthropologists in some ways do the opposite by bringing a Chinese perspective into their study of Xinjiang. Socioeconomic factors, development, and modernization are important points of reference in both studies, as are the threads that connect Xinjiang to the rest of China, both structurally and through personal links. Both ethnographers are to some extent biased toward the affluent middle classes, though these elites clearly differ from the elite agency dominating the historical studies. The focus on capitalist urbanization in Kobi's study and on entrepreneurs in that of Cliff hark back to Kim's perception of the begs, just as Cliff's understanding of the extension of guanxi to certain “willing Uyghurs” reminds us of the begs’ economically motivated collaboration with the Qing.

In sum, 2016 was a bumper year for Xinjiang-related monographs. Very different in topics, approaches, and execution, all five works can be credited with originality in their choice of subject matter, all introduce new perspectives to challenge existing assumptions, all favor an actor-centered approach by foregrounding flesh and blood individuals (data permitting), and all have relevance to political and identity discourses and the distribution of power in contemporary Xinjiang. All make important contributions to ongoing discussions within their respective disciplines and beyond; the 2016 crop sets new academic standards and is likely to shape research on this region in both national and transnational contexts for many years to come.