Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

These wars ended, but the Great Game – proxy conflicts between the British and Russian empires – continued in Central Asia. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian troops invaded Turkestan. Some hoped to find metals there, but cotton proved to be a far more valuable resource. While the government in St Petersburg wished to resist English influence there, manufacturers were concerned that the Uzbek Khans could also introduce protectionist duties on raw cotton. At first unstable, the quality of Bokhara cotton gradually improved; deliveries were expensive but, taking all wars and crises into account, more reliable than those from across the ocean. Almost as in the American South, Central Asian cotton was king. After the annexation of Turkestan, cotton imports increased tenfold, giving work to millions of local peasants, thousands of workers in central Russia, and a great number of coachmen, barge haulers and dockers who were employed in the transportation of cotton across half of Eurasia. Carried from Fergana on camels, cotton bales were delivered to the Caspian Sea and from there were transported up the Volga. By 1865 cotton and textiles made up 15 per cent of the trade turnover of the major Russian fair in Nizhny Novgorod. The railway from Samarkand to the Caspian Sea was completed in 1888, but even then the journey to central Russia took six weeks. 38 In contrast to the British Empire, no oceans separated the places where cotton was produced and where it was processed – only vast unpopulated steppes and tracts of marshland. But, in this case too, textiles were manufactured thousands of kilometres from where the cotton was grown. Alexander Hamilton wrote that the nature of cotton made it suitable for mechanical processing; he might have added with even greater surprise that nature created cotton for long-distance transportation.

The Russian authorities made Turkestan a textbook example of mercantilism in action: they encouraged the production of raw cotton, prevented it from being processed locally, held back local consumption, and kept the means of transportation in their hands. In the greater part of Turkestan the Russian authorities established indirect rule, which suited the traditional ways of Uzbek peasants. By the end of the century, however, a new threat emerged. The peasants of central Russia began a mass migration into Central Asia, making a beeline for the oases where cotton was grown. Fearing overpopulation and ethnic conflicts, St Petersburg put a brake on this migration. The governor-general of Turkestan was Konstantin Kaufmann, an experienced colonial administrator who had brutally suppressed rebellions in Poland and Fergana. Against expectations, he defended the local population from the Russian colonists by limiting their land purchases. Kaufmann saw that the transfer of the cotton fields to Russian ownership would be a bloody and very expensive enterprise. A civil war in Turkestan would have raised the price of cotton more than the Civil War in America. This protection of the local population against the influx of colonists was a rare instance in colonial history. All the same, Russian banks gradually deprived many Uzbek peasants of their land; by 1914, a quarter of the cotton-producing farms were left landless because of debts. Peasant uprisings in this distant periphery of the empire pre-dated the revolution in the capital.

In Russia the price of textiles rose, as did the price of bread, outstripping everything else. In 1900 the government again raised the tariff on imported cotton products, and domestic prices became higher than international ones; all the same, Russian capitals and port cities increased the import of expensive European textiles. The growth of cotton from Central Asia and the booming textile industry round Moscow depended on internal consumption in Russian villages. While coastal and industrial cities were booming, the standard of living in villages stagnated. One of many explanations for this effect is beet sugar: cheap and available across the country, it raised consumption among the peasants but failed to connect local households to distant trade and world affairs. Huge, barely populated expanses depressed trade. The division of labour was contingent on seasonal work and migration. Having made it to the town, peasants quickly mastered new skills; but they refused to use them when they returned to their villages. Theirs was the world described by Chayanov in his model of the moral economy – a world which didn’t need growth. 39 In the eighteenth century, the state used both stick and carrot in its treatment of the peasants. The twentieth-century state kept only the stick.