Before 1991, linguistic challenges and lack of access made the conquest of Central Asia one of Russian imperialism's least understood dimensions. Alexander Morrison's The Russian Conquest of Central Asia epitomizes how the Central Asian field has changed. Morrison has worked in archives throughout the region and with multiple local languages. The result is an authoritative military and diplomatic history of Russian expansion to the south and east.
Morrison rejects existing interpretations of the empire's expansion in Central Asia. He convincingly dismisses the notion that Russian expansion resulted from its rivalry with Britain or was driven by the desire to develop cotton production. He also limits the importance of the disobedient “men on the spot” to a few specific moments in the conquest. Rather, he argues, the conquest of Central Asia began with a “Napoleonic generation” of imperial officers and officials who were overwhelmingly concerned with the Russian empire's status as a Great Power whose dignity Central Asian leaders could not be allowed to insult.
Rather than seeking to create “another easily disprovable grand theory,” however, Morrison
describes his book as a series of “microhistories” structured in part chronologically and in part geographically (50). Each of eight core chapters addresses a major campaign that advanced the empire's southern frontier from the Ural and Irtysh Rivers in the 1820s almost 1,800 miles south by 1914. Morrison's chapters address the failed conquest of Khiva in 1839–41 and the vain effort to make the Syr-Darya line a frontier. He vividly establishes the great logistical challenges expansion involved. When the tsar's forces overcame such challenges and took Aq Masjid in 1853, they found that creating stable frontier fortresses along the Syr-Darya was nearly impossible in an area with so little water and agricultural land.
The challenges of constructing a fortified line near the Syr-Darya, in fact, accelerated Russian interest in conquering Semirechie and Tashkent, which the next two chapters examine. Morrison stresses environmental factors that enabled Russian colonial settlement in Semirechie, and highlights plans formulated in St. Petersburg to find a “natural frontier” in Central Asia using what contemporaries considered “objective criteria.” This search culminated in the seizure of Tashkent in 1865. The conquest of Bukhara (1866–68) depended more on “men on the spot” than previous conquests, mostly because the telegraph did not yet connect Tashkent with St. Petersburg and because local markets and water supplies reduced logistical challenges. The conquest of Khiva (1873) was an extremely elaborate and expensive affair driven by “questions of prestige and security” (316).
The conquest of the Khoqand Khanate (1875–76) that followed was characterized by particularly lopsided victories and the unprovoked targeting of unarmed men, women, and children in “pacification” campaigns. General Mikhail Skobolev commented that, in Central Asia, “the duration of peace was in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict on the enemy” (409). The initial defeat of imperial forces in Transcaspia (1879–85) was followed by a particularly violent seizure of Gök-Tepe to restore Russian “prestige.” By contrast, the annexation of Merv and delineation of a border with Britain, Afghanistan, and Persia—states with similar notions of sovereignty—was much more straightforward. Relatively easy collaboration between the British and Russian Empires also characterized the exploration and annexation of the Pamirs (1881–1905).
Morrison states his goal as reinvigorating military and diplomatic history. He certainly does. Morrison's “microhistory” approach captures well the texture of imperialism in Central Asia and how the region's environment helped shape the empire's expansion. He conveys the experience of fighting in the tsar's army, including the soldiers’ diets and the challenges of desert campaigns fought with supplies carried entirely by camels. Although Morrison acknowledges that most of his sources are in Russian, his substantial work in Central Asian languages makes him sensitive to natives’ experiences of conquest and how Russian military power aggravated fissures in local societies. His careful attention to military technology helps him to explain, for instance, how Russians’ use of rifled guns and better artillery allowed vastly outnumbered Russian forces to inflict many more casualties than they suffered themselves.
Throughout the book and especially in the conclusion, Morrison succinctly compares Russian conquest with nineteenth-century imperialisms around the world. His command of the material makes one wish he had ventured to produce a grand theory to rival those he debunks, since he seems particularly qualified to attempt such an explanation. This large-scale but finely textured study is too hefty to assign in any but the most specialized undergraduate courses. Nonetheless, Morrison's research and synthesis of recent scholarship on Central Asia make his book a major achievement, one that will long stand as a definitive study of its subject.
