The Sovereign's Brigands: Reflections on Forms of Governance in Central Asian History

Since the appearance of Eric Hobsbawm's Bandits,¹ many have reflected on the ways in which practices of rebellion and illegality are integral to a texture of social resistance. Bandits are "lonely heroes," as Rebecca Gould puts it,² but they nevertheless belong to communities of resistance, either practiced or imagined. What the Sardinian bandito, the Chechen abrek, or the Albanian outlaws, for that matter, have in common is their inscription into narratives of deviant behavior, which have been deployed to cement communal identification.³ Furthermore, they share a set of practices of transgression, which variously exemplify the denial of the sovereign's authority.

But can bandits be at once resistant and acquiescent? And, consequently, can banditry be regarded as integral to an ideology of sovereignty? The essays in this collection draw on the historiography of postcolonial studies to cast new ways of apprehending the semantic ambiguity of the idiom of power. By anatomizing the language of sovereignty derived from colonialism and statist nationalism, the editors of this special section advocate for a graded geography of political thought. They also gesture at the capaciousness of the historiographies of Asia to include various, particular, but no less historically significant manifestations of statehood. I would argue further that, by taking a more capacious view of records produced and preserved by the Uzbek khanates (roughly from the 1750s to the 1860s), an engagement with Central Asian history allows us to inscribe banditry into the complex, at times puzzling, texture of pre-Westphalian forms of sovereignty, and, in so doing, help us expand and fine-tune our analytical bag age when addressing forms of fragmented rule.

How should we discern manifestations of sovereignty, which we may understand as specific to Central Asia? There existed, of course, a broad set of cultural practices (and attending systems of signification) in the history of this region that, despite their variations over time, we may nevertheless broadly characterize as entangled with steppe traditions of governance and reflecting strategies of legitimization derived from the prestige of the Chinggisid lineage. Ritualized practices of enthronement (the elevation of a khan on a white felt carpet),⁴ the prominence of customary law in dispensing justice,⁵ the production and distribution of revenues through the appanage system,⁶ as well as the notion of shared sovereignty⁷ are but a few examples to illustrate the resilience of said cultural practices and the exceptional reach of those systems of meaning in Central Eurasia.

In a recent intervention on the subject, however, James Pickett has urged historians to approach the topic of sovereignty in Central Asian history by enlarging the palette of interpretive possibilities. Pickett's test case is the khanate of Shahrisabz, whose history was obfuscated in Central Asian indigenous sources by the neighboring expansionist emirate of Bukhara.⁸ Pickett's main point is that native sources can be as biased as colonial renderings of local history and can thus mislead our efforts of recovering local, less vocal, forms of sovereignty. To intercept even the finest mumbles lost in the cacophony of indigenous hegemonic narratives, Pickett suggests, one has to read local sources too against the grain.⁹

Within the limits of this reflection piece, I would like to pursue further the line of inquiry pioneered by Pickett and take it to the extreme consequences. I thus set out to look at "raids" to open up useful parallels and comparisons with early-modern manifestations of sovereignty in South Asia, an area in which scholars have done a lot to rethink the sociopolitical significance of banditry.¹⁰

In doing so, I hope to be able to offer a new, though tentative, reading of "raids," which were ubiquitous in the modern history of Khorezm, an oasis traversed by the Amu Darya located today between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. From the second half of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century Khorezm was ruled by the Qonghrat dynasty and the principality in question is known as the Khanate of Khiva.¹¹ For our reflections on local forms of sovereignty, raids are of particular significance because social...