Turkestan’s Place in the Russian Empire

Abstract

This article examines Turkestan’s position in the tsarist empire to argue that it was a distinctly colonial territory, directly comparable to the overseas colonies of other contemporary empires and less like other older parts of the Russian empire. This article locates Turkestan’s coloniality not in formal structures, but in its immense distance — moral, political and legal — from the metropolis and the imperial authorities’ use of Islam as a marker of immutable difference.