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Turkestan Cotton in Imperial Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2019

John Whitman
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Extract

Cotton cultivation may have come to Turkestan before the time of Christ. There is some evidence that it was brought from Persia to the valleys of the Amu Daria and the Syr Daria with Alexander of Macedon. Chinese travelers of the seventh century noted the cotton garments of the natives, while Arabs later reported the cultivation and processing of cotton and wool, both of which were stimulated by the opportunities for exchange with the steppe nomads after contact with these peoples had been made in the ninth and tenth centuries. These same nomads, however, blocked trade relations between Turkestan and the Slavs. At the same time, Indian and Egyptian cotton monopolized the markets to the south, and the development of maritime routes forestalled the entry of Turkestan cotton into Oriental markets. Production was, therefore, limited to domestic requirements and those of immediate neighbors down to the eighteenth century when trade relations, albeit at a low level, were established with Russia on a fairly regular basis.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 1956 , pp. 191 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1956

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References

1 Juferev, V., Khlopkovodstvo v Turkestane (Leningrad, 1925), p. 79.Google Scholar One desjatina was judged the minimum holding, in the cotton regions, which would support a family without outside earnings, while 5-6 desjatinas was a sizeable holding requiring the use of hired labor. These figures refer to the total land unit, not merely cropland, and therefore include buildings, yard, etc.

2 Schuyler, E., Turkistan (New York, 1876), I, 302.Google Scholar 3Juferev, pp. 20-22.

4 Wd.,p.8i.

5 Rozhkova, M., Ekonomicheskaja politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva na Srednem Vostoke vo vtoroj chetverti XIX veka i russkaja burzhuazija (Moscow-Leningrad, 1949), p. 305.Google Scholar In earlier years, imports of cotton yarn from Turkestan had been of some importance, considerably exceeding those of fiber, but the rise of the Russian textile industry had by this time eliminated the need for foreign yarn.

6 Schuyler, p. 296.

7 And, it should be noted, statistics covering the Russian period are much less reliable for Khiva and Bukhara than for those areas which were directly occupied.

8 Juferev, p. 17.

9 Lyashchenko reports that the price of Turkestan cotton in the Nizhnij Novgorod and Moscow markets rose from 4-5 rubles per pud in 1861 to 20-23 rubles in 1864 (P. I., Lyashchenko, History of the National Economy of Russia [New York, 1949], p. 610)Google Scholar, but he certainly errs in saying that “with the aid of Turkestan cotton the Russian processing industry passed through the critical years with comparative ease.“.

10 Juferev, p. 143.

11 Masal'skij, V., Khlopkovoe delo v Srednej Azii i ego budushchee (St. Petersburg, 1892), p. 10.Google Scholar.

12 Drabkina, E., Nacional'nyj i kolonial'nyj vopros v Tsarskoj Rossii (Moscow, 1930). p. 122.Google Scholar.

13 Curtis, W., Turkestan: The Heart of Asia (London, 1911), pp. 68–9.Google Scholar.

14 Juferev, p. 43.

115 Schuyler, pp. 298-99. Actually, mil'k land was originally granted by the sovereign in return for services in perpetual, heritable, alienable use; over the centuries it came to constitute private property. See, Bartol'd, V., Istorija kulturnoj zhizni Turkestana (Leningrad, 1927), p. 195.Google Scholar.

16 Drabkina, p. 122, and Schuyler, pp. 300-3.

17 Drabkina, p. 123. According to Bartol'd, pp. 195-6, by 1900 church establishments had lost all their lands except those which they directly worked.

18 Bakhrushin, S., Nepomnin, V., and Shishkin, V., eds., Istorija narodov Uzbekistana (Tashkent, 1947), II, 258–59.Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 259.

20 Juferev, pp. 52-54.

21 Ibid., pp. 63-64.

22 Ibid, and Bakhrushin et al., p. 277. Bartol'd mentions interest charges of 100-200 percent (p. 187). The first state bank in Turkestan appeared in 1889 and by 1912 there were 7; the number of private banks grew from 1 in 1898 to 40 in 1912; Bakhrushin et al., p. 277.

23 Bartol'd, p. 187.

24 Drabkina, p. 125.

25 Juferev, p. 140.

26 Ibid., p. 86.

27 Ibid., p. 130.

28 Ibid., pp. 76-77.

29 Ibid., p. 115.

30 The discussion which follows is based primarily on Bartol'd, the dean of modern Russian scholarship on Central Asia. In addition, I have drawn upon the work of one of his students, V. Juferev, published by the Commission for the Study of the National Productive Forces of the USSR, an institution attached to the Academy of Sciences, and dating from the tsarist period, which continued to produce good scholarship in the 1920's.

31 Bartol'd, pp. 186-89. T h e phrase “agricultural proletariat” in this context is not a Soviet invention, appearing rather in an official government report. The quotation is from the 1911 government report. 32 Volkov, E. Z., Dinamika narodonaselenija SSSR xa vosem'desjat let (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930), p. 40.Google Scholar.

33 Bakhrushin et at., p. 275.

34 Bartol'd, p. 121.

35 Exclusive of Khiva and Bukhara, where sown area and harvest were estimated at 140,000 desjatinas and 4.5 million puds. Juferev, pp. 136, 138-39.

36 Ibid., p. 115.

37 Volkov, pp. 40, 198-99, and 208.

38 Juferev, p. 115.

39 Ibid., p. 139.

40 Ibid., p. 112.

41 Ibid., p. 108.