Tracing Commodities, Capitalists, and Nomads Across the Russo-Persian Border: On the Uses of Space in and beyond the Central Asian Archives 

By Ruslana Bovhyria

This article was first published on The Decentered Archive and was republished with the author’s kind permission.

I. The Contingent Archive 

In the spring break of 2024, a freshly baked history graduate and barely a year into my doctoral studies, I landed in Uzbekistan full of anticipation what the local repositories of knowledge would treat me to. I was in the earliest days of researching a book about empire and nomads in the southeastern Caspian watershed. The space, perched on the imperial edges of Russia and Iran and stitched together by alluvial rivers, mountain ridges, and dozens of transient communities, presented a rich geography in which to think comparatively about mobility, extraction, and materiality.

My early explorations at the Central State Archive of Uzbekistan (TsGAUz, in Russian) in Tashkent transformed the way I thought about my research. TsGAUz, which opened to the international public not so long ago, harbors millions of storage units, some dating back over a millennium. In this capacity, it belongs to one of the chief research facilities in Central Asia offering a compelling environment to study the region from the early medieval to the late Soviet period. Transparency is not what post-Soviet archives are known for and the TsGAUz is no exception. Until recently, many pre-1917 documents – especially from central colonial bodies like the Governor-General’s office – were classified or restricted. As of around 2021-2024, a number of these have been made available. For instance, documents from Fond I-1, Office of the Governor-General of Turkestan (1868-1917), were declassified. Other pre-1917 fonds have been declassified in small units. Yet, scholars working on a specific set of issues related, for instance, to the 1916 uprising, border regions, and territorial delimitations may encounter numerous difficulties along the way. For the period with which my project is concerned, roughly the 1870s to 1917, the principal materials dealing with Yomuts – Turkmen nomads who settled in northern Persia and served as a vital crossroads for illicit traffic in weapons and other commodities – is found in the repository of the Governor-General’s office set up by imperial decree in 1867. Fond I-1 is certainly the most extensive storage unit and lots of the folders that I worked through were petitions and reports. They reveal how policies were discussed and adapted on the provincial level, yet remain silent on legal repertoires in areas of partial, contested or shared sovereignty. 

For historians, the navigability of the fond lies in the clear understanding of its hierarchical verticality. Many documents map how orders or policies traveled from the central Governor-General’s office to oblast governors, then to uezd chiefs or district officials. Conversely, local reports, petitions, and data flowed directly up to the center. The vertical administrative chain is one the fond’s organizing principles and looking for cross-agency communication is usually constrained by inconsistent filing. Further caveats may arise on the micro-level of inquiry, since not all uezdy are equally well represented; for some localities there are better preserved documents than others. The archival coverage may be even thinner and intermittent for remote districts.  

An illustrative example can be found in the documents revealing the transboundary water distribution in the Atek Province of the Transcaspian Oblast. Following the Tehran Convention (1881), which set out to demarcate the border between Russia and Iran, manifold conflicts over disputed command of water erupted between Russian and Qajar subjects in the Tejen River valley. Moreover, two distinct yet overlapping aspects of the river action caught the attention of imperial authorities: one was recession, which usually happened in the dry season, the other was a shift in the river course, which usually took place in the rainy season. If one year it led to accretion on one side of the border, the next year the river came back to its original course. The problem was made worse by the inability of villages to access receded water for crop cultivation. Hoping to forestall such conflicts, the treaty contained clauses regulating the usage of canals, albeit only in the easternmost section, on the junction with the Firuze River. It stipulated that wherever “the source of the river Firuze watering the soil of the Transcaspian Province lay within the Persian territory”,¹ the Iranian government should under no pretense sanction settlements along the course of the streams from their commencement to the point where they leave the Qajar territory.  

Nevertheless, the ruling had little effect on the ground, as soon thereafter new Persian settlements mushroomed in the Tejen valley. Tsarist sources allude to the fact that the commission appointed local mirabs and tasked them with inspecting Persian aryks as well as adjudicating disputes arising from the uneven distribution of water. Although it is plausible to contend that the enthusiasm of Iranian authorities to cooperate with Russian-appointed officials may have been limited, the scarce evidence of their litigations can be either indicative of a very minimal use of power or the inconsistent character of record-keeping. Both possibilities obstruct a more nuanced understanding: of the material axis of interaction, on the one side, manifested in infrastructures such as canals, dams or watermills, which influenced how water was accessed, controlled, and distributed across the Tejent watershed; and of the political configurations created by the flow of water, on the other. In that case, a great deal depends on classified materials. Obtaining permission to access such files has been notoriously difficult, yet not impossible. Many of the documents may not yet be fully catalogued in a way that allows them to be easily located. Hence, spending too little time in the archive carries the risk of overlooking alternative venues through which knowledge trickled down into the imperial record. 

Meanwhile, the potential of cartographic and digital tools is still largely untapped. Recent studies have shown the benefits of using GIS and paleoenvironmental databases in offsetting the silence of archival records on the mid-19th century climate shifts in the Amu-Darya Basin, while some highlighted the utility of cadastral registers in studying power relations within rural societies, even though the density of coverage may vary from region to region.² For instance, statistics on water and land governance in the Transcaspian Oblast, which had been incorporated into the Turkestan Governor-Generalship much later and up until 1890 remained in the hands of the Military Administration, is not equally coherent as for the Ferghana Valley, which commanded greater bureaucratic attention due to state-orchestrated resettlement and cotton growth campaigns.  

Between 1865 and 1884, the Russian Empire incorporated more than five million new subjects from the conquered khanates of Central Asia. They encompassed a predominantly Muslim population of diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Ruling over such a heterogeneous group of people with overlapping legal cultures, complex systems of land holding, and contested loyalties presented to colonial authorities a formidable challenge. Among its many functions, the construction of a common-sense reality – that is, ways in which consensus about the ordering of life in colonial society was created – cuts long and deep in the very foundations of the colonial archive.  Ann Stoler foregrounds this notion in the emotional economy of the imperial project arguing that archives are not just repositories of facts, but are intrinsically shaped by anxieties, sentiments, and desires of those who compiled and mediated them. Challenges to imperial authority often took unexpected forms that proved difficult to contain, exposing internal contradictions that lay at the heart of imperial principles. At the same time, the consternations over purported assaults on the warped logic of empire reveal the perceived fragility of that very order. These anxieties point to the spaces of contestation that emerged within the rigid hierarchies of colonial rule.³ Archival materials from the borderlands often tell us how imperial policies emanating from Petersburg largely fell on deaf ears in the provincial chancelleries. Such resistance was profoundly reinforced by personal linkages between colonial administration and indigenous interlocutors. Instead of complying with the spirit of law, provincial officials occasionally chose to turn a blind eye on imperial policies which threatened to undermine their status quo. Navigating the TsGAUz is, in a similar vein, to map the multiple imaginaries that made, for instance, fluvial crop agriculture benign in one place and politically charged in another. This is not to suggest that all borderlands of empire were to some extent a matter of personalized rule. It is rather to draw attention to the quality of the archive that goes beyond the institutional logics of accumulation and represents something that emerges from a compilation of lettered governance and written traces of those who produced knowledge and by virtue thereof political actions.  

II. Agency vs. Structure in and Beyond the Archive

Research in the TsGAUz demands careful linguistic preparation. Kilometers of imperial space called up hundreds of scribes, clerks, and translators that were made necessary by the proliferation of documents that passed through the official ranks. Their material force appeared in piles of routinized petitions, deputations, and court testimonies making sure that concerns of the colonial subjects were understood, which in turn rendered the state legible. The TsGAUz is a vivid testimony to such multilingual mediations. Even for those working primarily with Russian sources, honing mastery of local languages is indispensable in overcoming colonial singularities encapsulated in the hierarchical logic of documentation. In the archive, the opposite leads to disinterest, to overlooking things, or not looking at all.  

Amid an affluence of new scholarship on Muslim artistic and political culture in the regions of the former Russian Empire, historians of colonial state-building should also consider the significance of the so-called ‘Islamic archives’. In recent years, conversations on what constitutes an ‘archive’ have waded into interesting fields of inquiry grappling with epistemological baggage derived from Eurocentric regimes of documentation. In addressing this question several scholars proposed employing the term cultures of documentation to highlight multitudes of textual practices and record-keeping activities in the pre-industrial Islamic world.⁴ Similarly, the scattered nature of records in former Islamic polities of Central Asia invites stronger scrutiny of archives as subjects of historical research.  

But the question of what constitutes an ‘archive’ goes in several directions. Much of the classical literature dedicated to understanding the nuts and bolts of how empires regulated access to water in Central Asia is centered around the intertwined triangle of issues related to power, multiple judicial frameworks, and the expansion of hydraulic engineering. As Beatrice Penati has pointed out, bridging all these strings of research together has proved to be productive in enhancing our knowledge about racial and ethnic cleavages running through imperial policies.⁵ Within this context, Paolo Sartori’s seminal work deserves special appreciation for the pioneering advance in demonstrating how a plethora of overlapping judicial traditions played out in both facilitating and delimiting the process of incorporation.⁶ Yet, historians have only recently started paying closer attention to the internal workings of legal pluralism in matters of water and land usage. For the discipline of imperial studies, a major contribution of these authors was their ability to show that engaging with environmental and legal aspects in contexts privileging more than just a cultural prism bears merit of rectifying the prevailing neglect of unaddressed connections between imperial expansion and capitalist transformation in the peripheries.  

One way of overcoming this shortcoming was strongly advocated by Bathsheba Demuth. In her trailblazing history of the Bering Strait, Demuth reinforces the language of legal hybridity and materiality in a way that compounds rather than deflects the salience of animal agency along concomitant historical ruptures. By reassessing the ecologies of Beringia in terms of energy, she traces how American and Bolshevik visions of the future have tried to translate the fat-enriched bodies of humpback whales, walruses, and reindeers into economic value critical to fueling capitalists and communist revolutions.⁷ Beatrice Penati similarly calls for more attention to the actual “flow of material resources”.⁸ One possible way to better comprehend the hierarchies in the possession and distribution of resources would be to take geography more seriously.  

For a historian of Central Asia, the intellectual project of finding agency in nature is laced with multiple constraints. The uneasiness which lies within the field of environmental studies, especially when crossing paths with conventional linear histories, continues to produce friction along the way. Thinking along the binary of agency vs. structure invoked by new materialists, – which suggests that “agency is less something possessed by autonomous individuals, human or otherwise, and more a co-creation, a thing made in emergent circumstances and relationships,”⁹ – requires, above all, reading against archival spatial logics. Also, the urge to environmentally frame the inquiry won’t always yield the anticipated results. Nineteenth century documents don’t speak the language of temporality, change, or ecological degradation. Interpreting them in modern environmental terms involves reading across institutional metrics while remaining attuned to the historical actors’ own environmental vocabularies and values they ascribed to specific objects – be it a flood, a dzhut, or a camel transporting sturgeons to the local market. 

III. Mapping out the Atrek Watershed 

Once known as the Khorasan, the region I explore in my book – now largely forgotten beyond its own borders – sits at the foot of the Elbrus mountain range and stretches from the Atrek to Gurgen River. In the nineteenth century, the rivers of Khorasan straddled territories of three adjoining states –Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan – and carried their waters through a country bifurcated by borders, climates, and law systems reinforcing a boundary which was both fixed and fluid. English and Russian accounts romanticized Khorasan as a land rich in resources. In the historical documents this place went by many names – Persian, Turkic, Russian and even Kurdish. Yet to the peoples who lived there the political projections – blind to the particulars of the environment – made little sense. The environment of Khorasan was political in its own way. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concession-backed Lionozov Company initiated an intensive fishing venture in the southern Caspian river deltas. With the acquiescence of the Iranian government, the company was allowed to purchase land and dispense justice among nomadic tribes. Lacking technical expertise, Lionozov Company recruited Russian skilled workers from across the sea, while procuring indigenous laborers from the Yomut settlements to meet the demands of physical work in the tropical environment. Extraction and co-optation became, in fact, twin objectives of the monopoly – a strategy aimed at reshaping native loyalties.  

One of the striking facts about Khorasan is how little the state pervaded this country. In the absence of a centralized power, the company constituted a fusion of corporate mercantilism and an ad-hoc-bureaucracy seeking to align the particular fluvial environment of the watershed with the political borders of Iran. There was also a religious logic at work, as the company’s geographic expanse straddled the confessional divide between Turkmen Sunni and Persian Shiite settlements. Triggered by rival imperial dynamics, by the turn of the twentieth century, Russia and Iran speeded up the process by which this landscape was to be permanently fixed. As both empires embarked on the idea of introducing new proprietary titles upon fisheries, oil, and land, both the work of nature and the nature of work fundamentally shifted. By focusing on Yomut practices of petitioning and claims-making in relation to disputes over land, water, and natural resources and using Russian and Turkic language sources alike, I trace how in Khorasan Qajar and Tsarist rulers built a distinct normative space through selective adaptations of custom, sharīʿa, and imperial law.  

Within the constricted ontologies of the archive spatial imagining and thinking might be as important as knowing what happened. The history of Khorasan unfolds in various spatial registers, which, like transparent maps, can be read individually or stacked as a collective whole. One map might show webs of extraction and production that connected commercial fisheries and oil mining sites to global exchange markets. Another might show the migration of pastoralists, fish contractors, and smugglers who entered the capitalist orbit of Lionozov but also travelled other pathways, on terms that had little to do with the modernizing dreams of empires. The seasonal movement of sturgeons and nomads might constitute a third map and so forth. On a larger scale, Imperial Russia and Qajar Iran saw something more than just a land perched on the extreme edges of earth: they saw a landscape of extraction that flowed across national borders. Finding the Atrek watershed involved looking for its component parts scattered across various political entities, judicial systems, and foregrounded in overlapping entanglements between fish, law, and human. To some degree, in reconstructing the region that haunted everyday life yet did not exist in administrative terms, I came to see the depth of political and environmental transformations I was trying to unearth and the inadequacy of historical metrics one is tempted to apply in gauging those tectonic changes. 

Judicial court acts can at times provide unique glimpses into how empires produced environmental knowledge about peoples they governed. Khorasan was a remote frontier, where authority was often contested and the boundaries between imperial and tribal sovereignty fluid. Each dispute over a grazing pasture, fishery, or access to water can be read as a microhistory of empire-building. Far from presenting a picture of absolute control, these records often reveal the fragility of imperial governance. At the other end of the spectrum, indigenous litigants did not passively accept imperial law and often mobilized their own understanding of justice. Studying these documents as testimonies of sedimentary legalities can be a helpful tool in reconstructing the social world of nomadic peoples in ways that move beyond stereotypes of rebels and show them as legal subjects navigating shifting regimes of power.  

For environmental historians there is arguably room for rediscovery of social hierarchies within the system of resource distribution, especially by analyzing how cases were argued and who brought them forward. Another thing would be to look at the material dimension of judicial acts. Pastoralist economies were highly sensitive to ecological rhythms being disrupted through imperial interventions. For instance, studying how complaints about diminishing stocks or the deteriorating pasture quality were framed, justified, and even recorded allows historians to study law as a crucible of cultural, ecological, and political projections. Beside Russian archival sources, Persian documents such as firmans were particularly useful in uncovering how environmental contingencies could rise to the attention of Qajar rulers. On one such occasion in the early 1820s, the shah’s army successfully put a Yomut rebellion to rest by predicting an oscillation in the Atrek river action. Meanwhile, moving away from the positivist tradition of record mining with its tendency to prioritize official documents over literary sources as representing an “unmediated view a reality”¹⁰ to alternative genres of writing bears merit of tracing environmental ruptures across longer time spans.  

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About the Author:

Ruslana Bovhyria is a historian specializing in Russian and Soviet Central Asia. Her research focuses on colonial water management, resource extraction, and environmental issues. At the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, she is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Property Frontier of Empires. Lionozov Enterprise, Colonial Labour, and the Making of a Central Asian Borderland, 1818-1927. 

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References:

1. The New Russo-Persian Frontier East of the Caspian Sea, in: Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, 4/4, 1881: 216. ↩︎
2. Alisher Khaliyarov, Henry Misa, A climate for the Khans: Reinterpreting the economic history of the Khivan Khanate with paleoenvironmental evidence, in: Central Asian Survey, 2025: 1-20. ↩︎
3. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton 2009: 6. ↩︎
4. James Pickett, Paolo Sartori, From the Archetypical Archive to Cultures of Documentation, in: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 62, 2019: 774-798. ↩︎
5. Beatrice Penati, A Field Upstream is Better Than a Mirab Brother, in: Nicholas Breyfogle, Philip C. Brown (ed.), Hydraulic Societies. Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History, Oregon 2023: 69-95. ↩︎
6. Paolo Sartori, Visions of Justice. Sharia and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia. Leiden 2016. ↩︎
7. Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast. Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton & Co 2019. ↩︎
8. Penati (2023): 83. ↩︎
9. Bathsheba Demuth, On the Agency of Environmental History, in: Journal of Social History. 57/3, 2024: 398-403. ↩︎
10. Peckett, Sartori (2019): 778. ↩︎

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Citation:
Ruslana Bovhyria, Tracing Commodities, Capitalists, and Nomads Across the Russo-Persian Border: On the Uses of Space in and beyond the Central Asian Archives in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. 08.09.26 from https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=68217

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