Cottonizing Central Asia

The last years of the Soviet Union launched a new era for Central Asian studies. The region had been the subject of some heroic work before 1990, but a great deal of the scholarship on it was hamstrung with problems of access and conceptualization. The age of perestroika allowed unprecedented access to the region, opened up the archives, and made possible interaction with local colleagues and thus redefined the possibilities of academic inquiry. Simultaneously, the end of the Cold War allowed scholars to ask new kinds of questions. The last quarter-century has seen the emergence of a substantial corpus of historical work on the region that transformed our understanding of its modern history. Yet historians have congregated in certain zones of discourse. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that perestroika was also an age of national mobilization and resulted in the creation of independent nation-states, questions of nation formation and national identity took center stage. Another locus of debate was the nature of the tsarist and (much more frequently) the Soviet states and whether or how they were imperial formations. The Stalinist 1930s early emerged as the most popular subject of inquiry. Excellent work has appeared on the formation of national and gender categories and on the conception and implementation of Soviet nationalities policies. In recent years, the fate of Islam has attracted a great deal of attention.

Work on material aspects of history has been less popular so far. This is a little surprising because state power also drastically transformed the region's economy. Central Asia's environment has been profoundly reshaped over the last century and a half, the land domesticated and the water exploited, and structures of exchange put in place that had not existed before. Cotton has always been grown in the agrarian zones of Central Asia, but after the Russian conquest, it took over as the predominant crop in the region. Irrigation networks expanded enormously. There have been a number of fine studies of cotton, irrigation, and industrialization, but it is fair to say that work on material aspects of Central Asian history has lagged behind.¹

It is a delight, therefore, to welcome the first monograph on Central Asian history that focuses on the history of cotton and irrigation after the Russian conquest.² Imperial Desert Dreams, based on Julia Obertreis's Habilitation at the University of Freiburg, is an expansive book that takes as its subject state plans for cotton and irrigation across the tsarist and the Soviet periods. The cotton belt extended through the irrigable lands of Ferghana and Transoxiana, which after the national-territorial delimitation of 1924 came to be divided among Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Obertreis focuses on the first two republics, although the impossibility of working in Turkmenistan means that Uzbekistan gets the lion's share of the narrative.

Imperial Desert Dreams is not a history of cotton per se. Obertreis is primarily interested in the dreams of political, scientific, and technical elites for transforming Central Asia, its people, and its landscape, but the book goes well beyond a history of ideas and examines the development of infrastructure and the practical consequences wrought by these imperial dreams. Obertreis supplements archival materials from Uzbekistan (a coup in itself, for access to Uzbek archives has been extremely difficult for foreign scholars in recent years) with thorough reading in technical journals as well as memoirs and biographies of the main actors in the drama. She also uses oral history sources, mainly interviews with members of the last generation of Soviet experts, but surprisingly makes no use of Russian archives. Her argument is placed in a broad, comparative framework that works both ways. It brings insights from the study of modernity and of empires to the Russian case, while placing the Russian and Soviet experience in the histories of empire and modernity. Obertreis banks heavily on James Scott's notion of "high modernism," which she seeks to tweak as she elaborates it through a...