Wormwood, nomads’ rights, and capitalism: the birth of a chemical industry in Russian Turkestan (1870s-1914).

Penati, Beatrice ORCID: 0000-0002-3655-342X (2023) Wormwood, nomads’ rights, and capitalism: the birth of a chemical industry in Russian Turkestan (1870s-1914). Modern Asian Studies, 57 (4). pp. 1135-1197.

Text
ASS-22-125.R2_Proof_hi.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript
Download (480kB) | Preview

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x23000057

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>A variety of wormwood, <jats:italic>Artemisia cina</jats:italic>, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian Turkestan. Santonin, a drug derived from it, was in high demand. Flowers harvested by Kazakhs were handed over to intermediaries to be processed in Europe, but from the 1880s entrepreneurs from different parts of the Russian empire established their own chemical plants in Chimkent and Tashkent. They pressured the Russian imperial government to restrict the rights of the Kazakhs on land where <jats:italic>Artemisia cina</jats:italic> grew, and grant them the exclusive right to exploit this resource. These entrepreneurs used conservationist arguments and advocated a ‘cultured’ approach to the management of natural resources located on supposedly ‘State land’. These attempts collided with the usage rights of the Kazakhs, as defined by Turkestan’s governing Statute. By shifting the argument to the political, rather than legal, level, the industrialists eventually gained a monopoly to the exclusion of local entrepreneurs and even assumed State-like functions. This article reconstructs this controversy and allows a glimpse into the evolving claims to natural resources in the ‘periphery’ by both Tsarist colonial power and the Kazakhs themselves. The article also explores the features of autochthonous and Russian entrepreneurship and situates Turkestan in a web of trade connections to the global pharmaceutical industry.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Turkestan, kazakhs, wormwood, capitalism, common-pool resources
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	31 Jan 2023 08:27
Last Modified:	13 Jul 2023 00:47
DOI:	10.1017/S0026749X23000057
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3167969