The imperial history of Central Asia has been a focus of historians for a while now, including environmental histories of cotton and water management. On Arid Ground contributes to this body and adds an entirely new dimension to it as it explores the environmental imprint of Russian colonization beyond the already well-known histories of cotton and water. Jennifer Keating's aim is to “explore Turkestan's environments in a holistic sense” by looking beyond a single commodity and focusing instead on “assemblages of ecological relations” (27). By leaving aside the “obsessive mania of contemporary Russian sources” (157) that focused too much on cotton, she wants the reader to see the diversity in the ways in which nature in arid ecologies was commodified, including the rich and complex interchanges that reveal hidden global histories. In this sense, this dense and well-written book is not only about the impact of colonization on the Central Asian environment, but also on broader patterns of imperial relations, trade, and markets.

The book follows a thematic approach and begins in 1881 with the construction of the Central Asian railway, through which the political ecology of the region began to evolve. According to Keating, it left a significant environmental footprint through the construction process itself, but also in its function as a catalyst for the growth of agriculture, industry, and settlement in the region. In her second chapter, Keating tells the story of how Russians tried to “improve” the land through irrigation and forestation. These reclamation activities, Keating convincingly argues, were a successful way to reinforce imperial rule as it strengthened Russian presence. The third chapter focuses on the arrival of peasant settlers that were lured into Central Asia with images of abundance, but that in the end adapted only very poorly to the new local landscapes.

The heart of the book, however, lies in Chaps. 4 and 5, where Keating explores how Russians commodified nature. She argues that Turkestan did not only develop as a commodity frontier because of the mobilizing capacity of the state, but also due to the global demand for certain, especially rare goods—a focus that challenges the dominance of cotton. While the exploitation of oil, coal, and gold were disappointing, Turkestan offered not only sheep wool, which was shipped to Russia and abroad, but also alfalfa, a high-protein feed in high global demand. Moreover, satonin an anthelmic drug used to treat parasitical infections and likewise in high demand, but either exhausted or destroyed elsewhere in the world, grew freely in Turkestan. Together with alfalfa, the plant turned the region into a hub of global livestock farming as they were also shipped in large quantities to North and South America. In the last chapter, Keating links the environmental exploitation and the reform of land use rights to the 1916 Semirechye revolt, during which Russian troops killed approximately 200,000 Kyrgyz and Kazakhs. She shows how the environment became a target and a weapon used by both colonizers and colonized.

Keating very convincingly relates an environmental history that looks beyond the “cotton-mania” and thereby reveals a range of entanglements between the social and more-than-human world. In so doing, Keating emphasizes one of her central arguments according to which Russia was no particularist empire, but that it was precisely in Central Asia where Russian imperialism most clearly resembled the practices of other empires in environmental terms: through the exploitation and the trade of commodified nature, as well as the final resistance of the local population.

There are however, two points that are worth raising. During her exploration of the commodities produced in Turkestan, Keating continuously emphasized that cotton was more significant, but that the history of other resources reveals the entanglements of people, places and commodities. Although she wants to question that a commodity is only conferred by the amount of capital it generates (158), one still wonders what the actual significance was of some of the resources such as coal or oil, considering that their exploitation was not very successful. The second remark pertains to the style. Since the book is very rich in information, spans across a large territory and long time-span and is still compressed to only 218 pages, the book loses at times on details of more specifics on individuals or events. One only wished for it to go even deeper into the environmental histories of Central Asia.

Apart from that, On Arid Ground is a fascinating study on the entangled relationship between empire and the environment and the commodification of nature. It is recommended for historians of empire, environmental historians, and political ecologists alike.