Allies and Adversaries: The Russian Conquest of the Kazakh Steppe
Open AccessRussia's relationship with the Kazakhs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolved from that of a pre-modern Muscovite state with several Inner-Asian nomadic neighbors, to that of a more centralized bureaucratic Russian Empire influenced by the European Enlightenment. The Kazakhs, like many Inner-Asian nomadic populations who organized themselves around controlling and taxing conquered Silk Road cities and trade routes as a means to bolster their own internal cohesion and regional power, attempted (and often failed) to claim the cities along the Syr Darya and sought alliances with Russia and other states to achieve that goal. With the ultimate loss of the Syr Darya cities to the Khanate of Kokand in the early nineteenth century, the Kazakhs' fractured khanates could no longer benefit from economic control over those cities, and Kazakh society transformed into a different kind of nomadism with different motives to ally with Russia against their common enemies. Russia's relationship with the Kazakhs transformed from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century from one where Russian settlements and traders were frequently raided and enslaved, to one where they instead entertained pretensions of "civilizing" their nomadic neighbors. Just as their alliances changed over time, the "middle ground" that briefly existed between them until the mid-nineteenth century changed as well. Ultimately, these shifting alliances led to the Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe and the Syr Darya. This Inner-Asian dynamic problematizes direct comparisons between the Russian Empire and other European empires in the nineteenth century.
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