Into Russian Turkistan

This is another guest post. Below is an excerpt of Noah Tucker’s “Into Russian Turkistan, 1872-1917: English Travel Literature and the Creation of the Russian Orient. To read the full paper as a PDF, click here. For a large bibliography of other 19th and early 20th century Central Asian travel literature, click here.

A missionary, a spy, adventurers, a diplomat, tourists, reporters and a man who crossed half of Eurasia and two deserts on a bicycle could hardly be expected to provide a unified view of a region where at least two complex cultures met . Their diverse accounts, however much they vary in style and form, do have a great deal in common.

While each author’s interpretations of the things he or she saw and the places they visited were intimately influenced by their own personal experiences, backgrounds, and interests, they all more or less entered the region with the same intellectual tools at their disposal, and with more or less the same set of expectations—thanks largely and usually explicitly to Dr. Joseph Wolff and the unavoidable Arminius Vambery.

All of the authors, for as little as they may have had in common in other respects, were visiting a space that, while new and foreign, had also already been discursively created for them by the contemporary media , by Arminius Vambery and subsequent visiting authors , and perhaps most importantly by the already well-established paradigm of Orientalism that Vambery so securely had already blanketed over the region. Operating within this discursive space, how then did they view Central Asia? How did they evaluate the civilizing mission, or lack thereof, that the Russians brought, the methods of conquest, their effect on Central Asian society, and the justifications for Russian rule?

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This post was written by...

Nathan Hamm – author of 2974 posts on Registan.net.

Nathan is the Founding Editor and Publisher of Registan.net, which he launched in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with private and government clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural and political factors shape risks and opportunities and how organizations can adjust their strategic and operational plans to account for these variables. Nathan is currently seeking research, analysis, and consulting opportunities. He can be contacted via Twitter or email.

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