Knowledge and the Ends of Empire

Reviews / Votes

Campbell makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of Russian imperial rule of the Kazakh Steppe.... This fascinating study weaves through the complexities of gathering, disseminating, and leveraging the empire's growing bureaucratic and scholarly knowledge base of the steppe to more effectively develop and exploit the territory. Joining a group of excellent works from the last decade focused on late-imperial Russian colonial rule in Central Asia, such as Alexander Morrison's Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India (2005) and Jeff Sahadeo's Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (CH, Mar'08, 45-3949), Campbell's meticulously researched work highlights how this era of at-times cooperative acquisition of knowledge devolved into a one-sided colonial enterprise that led to chaos for the Kazakh Steppe at the end of Romanov rule.

(Choice) Makes a strong intervention into work on the Russian Empire.... On the whole, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire is a well-written study.... Campbell skillfully brings insights from the literature on empire to bear on the Kazak steppe. His decision to address the relationships of knowledge and power as expressed in assessments of nomadic pastoralism, land norms, and economic practices yields an important and original view.

(The Russian Review) Campbell assembles wonderfully rich biographies of many leading Kazakh figures.... the fascinating details that Campbell offers on many of these figures, such as their noble origins or claims to belong to sacred lineages, raise questions as to how the composition of this group of intermediaries, as Campbell defines it, changed over the course of the... period that Campbell covers in his study and how, in turn, Russian imperial rule altered Kazakh political culture. Like all good books, Campbell's study uncovers new questions for other researchers to take up.

(Canadian American Slavic Studies) This is an impressively researched and argued study of the construction of knowledge by an imperial power with the ultimate aim of subjugating and transforming an outlying region with an environment, population, way of life, economy and culture that was quite different to the empire's heartland. His book merits wide readership and will facilitate the growing assimilation of such studies of Russian Empire and Soviet Union into global environmental histories.

(Environment and History) Knowledge and the Ends of Empire does succeed in adding to the picture. Any fresh engagement with the Qazaq colonial period is valuable, but perhaps more thought-provoking is the book's joust with the hoary question of the empire's col- lapse.

(Slavic Review) The book contributes unquestionably to the academic literature on Russian colonialism. It is a must-read for specialists and graduate students focusing on Russian eastward colonial expansion in general, and Central Eurasia in particular. Most certainly, the book yields an exceptionally compelling account on the role of the Kazak intermediaries in shaping imperial policies.

(Acta Via Serica)