On a trip to western Mongolia in 2016, I tracked down the last remaining Uyghurs in the town of Khovd, migrants from neighboring Xinjiang (today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). To my surprise, one old man told me that his forebears were not from more proximate parts but in fact hailed from the deep south of Xinjiang—from the oasis of Khotan, to be precise. In the Republican period (1912–1949) his family had been drawn to the Altay Mountains in Xinjiang's north to dig for gold, and from there, political instability had driven them into Mongolia. It was a small—but, to my mind, telling—example of the significant social impact that resource exploitation has had on the social history of northwest China.

The importance of natural resources has long featured in discussions of China's approach to Xinjiang, but the topic has never been made the focus of a historical study until now. Judd Kinzley's Natural Resources and the New Frontier leads us from the first experiments in resource extraction in the late Qing dynasty until the present day. Organized both by chronology and by shifting state interest in specific resources, it begins with oil and gold, then turns to the internationally marketable commodities of furs, hides, and wool before focusing in the second half on industrial minerals. The theme entails a move from much of contemporary scholarship's geographic focus on the predominantly Uyghur Tarim Basin in the south to the resource-rich, less populous north. The book's protagonists are primarily Chinese officials, with lesser roles assigned to foreign specialists who were invited to participate in the search for exploitable resources. Most important among these were the Russians (and Soviets post-1917), though Kinzley also discusses the short-lived Sino-British Xinjiang Oil Company in the 1920s. As a historian of the Uyghurs, I might quibble with Kinzley's neglect of the local Muslim point of view. In point of fact, Muslim entrepreneurs in centers such as Kashgar and Ili were active collaborators in ventures to hire foreign specialists and exploit the local resource wealth, though the identity of these individuals and the nature of their activities are often obscured in the Chinese-language sources on which this book rests.

Natural Resources and the New Frontier documents the hopes that have periodically been pinned on the wealth beneath Xinjiang's soil, but it also highlights the province's frequent failure to live up to these hopes. Beijing's rule in Xinjiang, as many scholars have pointed out, has never paid for itself and cannot easily be subsumed into a paradigm of resource-driven imperial expansion. Nonetheless, the question of natural resources and accompanying issues of foreign collaboration and infrastructure building have been at the heart of much of Xinjiang's turbulent politics, and Kinzley's perspective adds much to our understanding of this wider story. A key theme here is the difficulty that successive Chinese administrations faced in balancing security concerns with development needs. This became particularly acute from the 1930s onward, as Soviet interest in Xinjiang grew. While Soviet geological expertise and capital were crucial to the first substantial breakthroughs in resource exploitation, such as the oil town of Dushanzi, at the same time Soviet-sponsored enterprises threatened the state's imperative to bind Xinjiang to the Chinese interior. The result, as Kinzley describes, was “an often schizophrenic policy that swung wildly between requests for Soviet support and often aggressive attempts to minimize the Soviet presence in the region” (p. 129). Moscow's involvement intensified as World War II approached, with Xinjiang offering sites at safe remove from German and Japanese threats. Kinzley dismisses the theory—favored by the CIA at the time and by some Russian writers today (for example, V. G. Obukhov, Uran dlia Berii. Vostochnyi Turkestan v Atomnom proekte Kremlia [2010])—that the Soviets were primarily interested in uranium, arguing instead for the importance of minerals such as beryllium and tungsten. Whatever the case, Kinzley is no doubt right to say that securing the resources of Xinjiang's north was an important factor behind Soviet support for an uprising that created the second Eastern Turkistan Republic in 1944.

Despite the stop-and-start nature of prerevolutionary development, the Republican period laid a foundation on which the Chinese Communist Party was able to build post-1949. Kinzley offers a significant corrective to the standard narrative of Xinjiang in the early People's Republic of China (PRC) when he argues that reviving and supporting legacy industrial centers such as Dushanzi and Koktokay was a more significant policy priority for the party than state-led agricultural development via the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (known in Chinese as the bingtuan). These outposts of industrialization “served as the main nodes of Chinese power and institutional authority” in the early years of Communist rule, while the bingtuan farms were small and neglected by comparison (p. 152). Moving toward the 1960s, Kinzley charts a huge expansion of surveying and extraction during the Great Leap Forward, before investments declined and Beijing's attention shifted to the country's northeast and the oil fields of Daqing.

Through these various state-led initiatives, Kinzley emphasizes the path dependency of Xinjiang's development: the sedimentary “layers” of previous initiatives provide the starting point for the next, making this background essential to grasping the shape of Xinjiang's political economy today. Oil towns such as Shihezi continue to play an unmistakable political role, fostering a relatively privileged, predominantly Han Chinese constituency for party rule in an otherwise still economically backward region. Local ethnic groups have suffered something of a resource curse, as “the infrastructure developed to produce, process, and transport resources in the twentieth century in Xinjiang has played a critical role in promoting and exacerbating inequalities” (p. 181). The issues at play here are thus very much alive in the politics of contemporary Xinjiang, and Kinzley's book will interest not only scholars of the resource industry, but anyone looking for a materially grounded analysis of Chinese rule on its Inner Asian periphery.