Book chapters

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Browsing Book chapters by Subject "Central Asia (History)"

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    Amlākdārs, Khwājas and Mulk land in the Zarafshan Valley after the Russian Conquest
    (2013) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    This paper is a revision and correction of Chapter 3 of my 2008 monograph ('Russian Rule in Samarkand') in which I made a number of errors and misjudgements. The most glaring of these was to confuse a Bukharan tax official (the amlakdar) with the owner of 'mulk' (a category of landed property which usually carried some form of tax exemption). I have disentangled these, added some further evidence, and reconsidered the evidence which I put forward in my book. I argue that Russian attempts to implement at what is sometimes called 'land reform' in the Zarafshan Valley in the 1860s and 1870s are better understood as a fiscal measure, rather than anything to do with property rights. The Russians found the Bukharan land tax system impossible to understand, and so proceeded to dismantle it, abolishing the annual assessment of the quantity and value of the harvest (which had been the responsibility of the amlakdar) and also refusing to recognise claims made by religious elites in the region that they were entitled to tax breaks on their mulk property. However, the system the Russians put in place instead placed enormous power in the hands of village oligarchies, ensuring that at the lower levels the Russians had little control over how the tax burden was allocated, and almost certainly collected far less than their Bukharan predecessors. The Russians also failed in their attempt to have the region's land declared the patrimony of the state. The paradoxical result was that, at least in the Zarafshan Valley (and quite possibly in other sedentary regions of Central Asia) the advent of the colonial regime meant a reduced tax burden, less state oversight, and security of property at least equal to what had existed before.
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    The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: too soon to talk of Echoes?
    (2015) Morrison, Alexander Stephen
    This paper is a rather general 'thought piece' in which I have unwisely allowed myself to speculate on some of the contemporary resonances of the Russian Imperial and Soviet past. I have not updated it since 2012, and in the nature of these things parts of it already look dated. As Sir Walter Raleigh put it when justifying the decision to write his 'History of the World' only about Antiquity 'Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.' My father discovered this twenty-four years ago when writing a biography of Boris Yeltsin, and I owe the quotation to him. n.b. the published version of this paper also includes an egregious factual error on the second page - the Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia and Qing China of course dates to 1689, not 1657.