In Borderland Capitalism, Professor Kwangmin Kim (University of Colorado, Boulder) argues that the expansion of Qing China in Central Asia was part of a single world process of capitalist expansion. His research covers the area of Altishahr, present-day southern Xinjiang or eastern Turkistan, from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ In this period, an alliance between profit-oriented local beg headmen and the Manchu Qing court dominated the region from the mid-eighteenth century up to the great insurrection that temporarily threw off Qing control in 1864. Kim's sources are primarily Qing-era Chinese and Manchu archival documents along with gazetteers and collections of statecraft documents compiled by Qing officials who served in the region. Although a few Uyghur (East Turkic) language chronicles and documents are used, the primary source base is thus that of the imperial state, not the local Turkic-Muslim community.

Kim uses Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism, emphasizing the expansion of profit-oriented production for the market, without regard to labor forms (10, 48). Although he emphasizes a market in free labor (70, 71), much of his focus is on the institution of yanqi, a form of labor traditionally classified as “feudal.”Footnote ² The yanqi were “oasis farming households required to pay certain dues to the begs to which they were assigned” (7). In return for this personal service to the begs, or native officials serving the Qing regime in Turkestan, yanqi were exempt from the public tax and corvee duties expected of free subjects (7). Their legal status thus corresponds closely to the khamjilga or personal subjects of the nobility found in the Mongol areas of the Qing Empire. As Kim shows, however, this seemingly pre-capitalist labor force was used for agricultural expansion that had distinctly capitalist features. He speaks of capitalism as an “interconnected system of expansionist, transformative commercial enterprise that re/organized local economy and society in order to make maximum profit from the emerging global trade” (10).

Two other important concepts retooled by Kim include “developmentalist state” and “mercantilism.” The first he uses to designate states that were “proactively involved in the development of the regional economy” (35), including both the Zunghar and the Qing empires (37, 61). “Mercantilism” he uses somewhat loosely, sometimes (64) to mean more or less the same as “developmentalist state,” but elsewhere as policies according indigenous merchants a “monopoly of resources and labor” (193) in order “to promote merchant traffic into their domains, and to better manage and exploit it” (88, cf. 133).

With these conceptual tools Kim makes the following case in Chapter 2, the core of the book: the Qing regime in Xinjiang was based on an alliance of the local Altishahri begs with the Qing, in which the begs were given the resources to organize and profit from vastly increased local agricultural and mining production. The Qing court both shared in the profits and was also assured of funds to support the garrisons and officials necessary to maintain its rule. Over the course of Qing rule, Kim concludes that there was a vast increase in agricultural production in the Altishahr region, as well as the development of a flourishing local market.Footnote ³

In Chapter 1, Kim argues that this Qing-beg alliance that emerged after 1759 was built on the thwarted demand for silver that had developed in the capital-poor Altishahri society during the sixteenth century. With such capital, accessed from Ming China through trade conducted under the aegis of the tribute system, Sufi leaders could mobilize their entourages to open up new land in under-populated Altishahr. The fall of the Ming and the seventeenth century crisis interrupted this flow of silver. Into the breach stepped the Zunghars who pursued their own developmentalist agenda through the “systematic forced mobilization of human labor,” deporting Altishahri farmers to the Junggar Basin in northern Xinjiang. While some begs participated in this system, those in the eastern oases of Hami (Qumul) and Turfan turned instead to the Qing who promised a more “mercantilist” state (in Kim's sense), one that supplied Altishahr's need for silver as capital, but left labor, land, and water in the hands of the local beg elite.

Chapter 3 shows how this agricultural development was not without its costs, however. As the begs increased their labor force by transferring households to the yanqi status, which was exempt from public duties, the burden on the remaining public tax payers increased. Such dispossessed public taxpayers, along with laborers on beg estates, fled to the neighboring mountains. There they formed, Kim argues, the main support of the “White Mountain” faction of the Naqshbandi Sufi lineage, which with the help of the Ferghana valley city of Khoqand, led the Jahāngīr Khwāja rebellion of 1826–29. Kim argues that this movement was fundamentally a revolution of the rural dispossessed against the urban exploiters, both Altishahri and foreign, rather than a religious or nationalist movement. Chapters 4 and 5 show how this continuing opposition, together with the troubles of the Qing dynasty in its heartland, led to increasingly desperate expedients by the begs and Qing officials to maintain their agricultural expansion, until its final collapse in the massive 1864 rebellion.

In assessing this complex and richly documented account, the following points may be noted. First, despite Kim's attempts to establish the contrary, the data he presents shows clearly that by far the largest transfers of land and labor were handled by the Qing state through direct administrative means (70–74). In other words, his capitalism, like Braudel's, eschewed, rather than embraced, Smithian-style markets. Moreover, although even his Braudelian definition of capitalism demands that expanding production be conducted for world markets, the produce from the new plantations was, except for jade, sold either locally to customers in Altishahr or to the Qing military in Xinjiang (59). Altishahr development thus seem to be an almost pure product of Qing military supply needs, unconnected to broader world market developments.

Second, the picture Kim paints of direct Qing support for the multiplication of agricultural production is well in line with established Qing practice. What is unusual, however, and what Kim highlights for the first time, is the degree to which this replication in Xinjiang used partially unfree labor, and the mixing of official prerogatives with sanctioned profits. These features were part of a distinct Qing frontier style, visible in Mongolia and in the banner military, in which the divisions of public and private roles that obtained in the Han Chinese heartland were deliberately blurred.

Third, while the broad picture of rapid agricultural development under the Qing-beg partnership and its concomitant social stresses cannot be denied, Kim has a strong tendency to overdraw his evidence. Statements that are first advanced as plausible, but quite hypothetical, extrapolations from the evidence are repeated later on as seemingly firm conclusions.

Finally, Kim argues that the capitalism of the Qing dynasty in Xinjiang was unprecedented in linking trade to production along the Silk Road (11). Yet Erich Zürcher has proposed that the occupation of the Tarim Basin under the Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) resulted in a rather similar increase in agricultural production, population, and reorganization of rural settlements.Footnote ⁴ Can we really say, with Kim, that “the post-sixteenth-century oasis economy [was] radically different from the earlier one” (11)? Would it be possible to retain Kim's insights while decoupling the idea of profit-driven agricultural development from a necessary linkage to the “modern”? This is a key question for future research.