If the Qing dynasty was an empire, then what motivated its expansion? Focusing on one piece of the empire's Inner Asian frontier – the Muslim society of Xinjiang – Kwangmin Kim's Borderland Capitalism offers an original and provocative response to this question. He sets his story against the backdrop of growing interconnectivity in early modern Eurasia. Sensing new commercial opportunities, local elites in the Tarim Basin – the begs – sought out a reliable destination for their produce, and a strong patron to help them tamp down class conflict. The Qing offered them both. It was the begs, therefore, who invited the Manchus in, and it was the begs who strove to hold the empire intact amid the turbulence of the 19th century. Kim thus turns Lenin's theory of imperialism on his head: it was not the needs of the metropole, but the oasis capitalism of the periphery, that drove the Qing westwards. In arguing this he seeks a non-Eurocentric account not just of Chinese history, but of the history of capitalism itself.

In his revisionist narrative of Qing Xinjiang, Kim applies a world history lens to tell the story of a capitalist transformation and the response it provoked. This is offered as a critique of earlier scholars who depicted the Tarim Basin as “stagnant,” or “traditional.” By providing the begs with land, labour (in the form of slave households), and a trade route to China, the Qing catalyzed a “radical reorganization” (p. 188) of local society. This brought with it something akin to an “enclosure” movement (though Kim avoids this term), which created extreme disparities of wealth in the Tarim Basin, and deprived many peasants of their livelihood. So disruptive was this transition that it led to the emergence of runaway communities in the mountains – vagrants who rallied to Sufi holy men, the exiled Naqshbandi Khojas. In a significant departure from existing accounts, Kim holds that the Khoja incursions that shook Qing rule in the 19th century were not driven by Qing misrule, the obligation of jihad, or the ambitions of the khanate of Kokand, but by hostility to the beg-led capitalist transformation of Kashgaria.

Kim's effort to situate Qing Xinjiang in wider dynamics of political economy is welcome, and his emphasis on economic motivations for collaboration is more persuasive than accounts that privilege cultural or ideological factors. The book contains much original analysis of the twists and turns of Qing policy, and the manoeuvrings of the begs who sought to balance the needs of administration with a series of get-rich-quick schemes. Kim has mined the Chinese record for data on the origins and activities of these officials, and made selective use of the Manchu-language archive, as well as Russian accounts.

Unfortunately, much of the nuance of these individual case studies is lost when set within the book's rigid framing. Kim is too quick to turn valid contributing factors into all-purpose hermeneutic devices. To give one example, participation in tribute trade with China was no doubt desirable for many political actors in Inner Asia, and some of these actors were Sufis. Yet in Kim's hands, China's economic enticements seem to lie behind almost all of Xinjiang's recent past: the migration of Transoxanian Sufis into the Tarim Basin in the 16th century; their relationship with the khans of Yarkand; Sufi proselytizing in China in the 17th century; rebellions in Gansu during the Ming–Qing transition; the Naqshbandi Afaq Khoja's alliance with the Junghars – all of these are explained in terms of the pull of China. Carrying forward this Sino-centric paradigm of Sufi enterprise, Kim insists that the Qing begs were Sufi in origin and drew on religious authority in mediating relations with the Qing. Evidence for this is weak at best, relying on vague and self-interested claims of heredity, and questionable interpretations of nomenclature such as “Khoja” and “khalifa” (which do not provide conclusive evidence of Sufi networks).

Something similar can be said for Kim's efforts to depict Xinjiang's politics in terms of a new mode of production and its discontents. While he is right to reject the notion of Islam's a priori incompatibility with the Qing, Kim's portrayal of each and every episode of resistance as the act of landless anti-capitalists is equally one-sided. The effects of the capitalist transformation were felt so immediately, we read, that an uprising in 1760 (i.e. only a few months into the Qing occupation), which was led by two Junghar-appointed oasis governors, was a response to the “beg clients’ agrarian development under the Qing protection.” Influenced by Scott's portrait of the Zomia highlands, Kim treats mountain communities by definition as an anti-state force. A Kirghiz brigand, for example, is said to have been motivated by his desire “to counter the capitalist transformation by acts of robbery” (p. 103). Even a prince of Shughnan, Shah Wanji (Sha-guan-ji), is erroneously described as the leader of a refugee community.

Obviously, the key question raised by the book is whether a “capitalist transformation” actually took place in Qing Xinjiang. Like many who have sought a non-Eurocentric account of capitalism's origins, Kim's definition of the term is decidedly minimalist. The claim that the begs were capitalist rests on three facts: they invested in increasing the production of marketable commodities; they accumulated land at the expense of the commons; and they employed a floating workforce of wage labour and/or slaves. Note that this only describes the sphere of beg enterprise: the relative weight of these relations of production in the totality of the Tarim Basin's political economy is not discussed. But even if we grant that this is a capitalist system, Kim has not done enough to satisfy his own criterion, that beg enterprise was geared towards producing commodities for empire-wide, let alone global, trade. Despite the title's reference to an “eastern market,” jade is the only product that is described going east in significant quantities. Instead, as Kim says, “the China market came to Central Asia” (p. 38) in the form of Qing military provisioning. To be sure, state spending might well stimulate an economy, even encourage structural transformations, but the image we get here is not exactly one of boomtown. All along, the Xinjiang economy depended heavily on imperial subsidies, and when the silver dried up, it was headed for a crisis.

The difference between Kim's and alternative accounts is thus not so much the facts of the political economy, but the positive gloss that he puts on them. In exploiting landless peasants, the begs were entrepreneurial (not feudal!). The Qing court was a solicitous patron, whose discourse of legitimacy emphasized economic prosperity to a degree previously unknown in Xinjiang (p. 48). While much of the book dwells on opposition to the begs, by the dynasty's end Xinjiang Muslims had evidently come to realize that collaboration with the Qing was the only possible route to prosperity and security (p. 183).

Although I am unable to follow Kim on all of his interpretative leaps, he has nevertheless raised a series of genuine questions here, concerning the transformative impacts of global trade and Qing rule on Xinjiang Muslim society. His book contains a wealth of data, and no shortage of plausible and suggestive propositions, but the evidence presented is simply not enough to substantiate the book's most ambitious interventions.