High in the foothills of the Tian-Shan mountains in meadows of ‘thick and succulent’ grass, an agent of the Singer sewing-machine company set out his wares in a stall festooned with American and German flags.Footnote 1 In this ‘wooden shack’, above which ‘huge lettering in at least five languages informed the world that this was Singer’s Depot’, trade was booming in the summer of 1908. The agent ‘sold a great number of sewing-machines to nomads from all over Asia, mostly on credit and deferred payment terms’, with many purchasers arriving from ‘West China, Tibet and Kashgar, from the whole of Turkestan and from West Siberia’.Footnote 2 Singer’s representative was one of hundreds of merchants who gathered in this rural valley each year. This was the site of an annual trade fair which was attended by thousands of Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic pastoralists. The valley, named Karkara, nestled between spurs of the central Tian Shan mountains roughly 2,000 metres above sea level, close to what, at the turn of the twentieth century, was the Russian empire’s border with the western fringe of the Qing empire. More specifically, this was the border of Dzharkent and Przheval’sk districts in eastern Semirech’e (Zhetysu) province, an administrative region that had been created in the 1860s as the Russian empire conquered southern Central Asia.Footnote 3 The valley was a distinctive type of montane rangeland.Footnote 4 Sparsely populated by humans, it was cloaked in expansive meadows of alpine grasses, sedges, and yellow and white poppies, in and above which lived myriad communities of deer, larks, rabbits, cranes, vultures, and eagles.Footnote 5 Given Karkara’s altitude, climate, and topography, it thus came as a peculiar surprise to external visitors – often Russian and European alpinists and explorers – that, if the timing was right, they stumbled across a vast ‘tent city’ in this remote valley.Footnote 6
This ‘city’ was the Karkara trade fair. Formally founded by the imperial state in 1893, it was held annually until 1916 and rapidly became a substantial event. It spilled across 28 square kilometres of the valley floor,Footnote 7 already had 250 merchants in attendance by 1895,Footnote 8 and generated a hefty turnover, reaching over a million rubles a year by 1908.Footnote 9 A further defining characteristic, alongside size and altitude, was the fair’s ephemerality. For two months – usually June to August – each summer, the valley’s high grasslands were transformed into a ‘spacious town of metal houses and wooden booths’,Footnote 10 packed with yurts and clapboard stalls, as hundreds of thousands of humans and animals intermingled, from southern Kazakh and northern Kyrgyz pastoralists, to foreign traders, to livestock (chiefly sheep, cows, goats, horses, and camels). In this market ‘cauldron’, vast quantities of goods (animal commodities, manufactured products and live animals) flowed in and out, ‘day and night, like the wild mountain streams’.Footnote 11 But the hive of activity was fleeting. In the fair’s aftermath, with two- and four-legged participants gone, the meadows returned to the wild and, for the rest of the year, few traces of habitation remained, other than well-worn paths along which sheep and cattle were driven.
Ephemerality was amplified, seemingly, by transience and hyper-mobility, both in terms of the traders who visited from within and beyond the Russian empire, and of the pastoralists who constituted some 90 per cent of the fair’s participants and who were nomadic or semi-settled. Barter practices rendered at least some transactions unrecorded. This impermanence in time and space was amplified by cultures of documentation which produced new layers of ephemerality: although the imperial administration took credit for having founded the fair, the paucity of Russophone sources speaks to the relative indifference of imperial actors, perhaps because it was a form of trade that did not privilege urban or settler (Slavic) society.Footnote 12 What sources we do have provide some financial and administrative data but are largely silent on the market’s human dimensions. Meanwhile, Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralists left little written documentation of their own, although the fair and the valley did feature occasionally in more formalized Central Asian literary culture, most notably in Mukhtar Auezov’s celebrated 1928 novel Qily zaman, which weaves through this article.
The history of the fair thus at first sight tends towards the disembodied and fragmented, not least because we know almost nothing about those in attendance. Yet, as Anna Tsing has so eloquently argued, ‘global connections are made in fragments’: exploring material encounters in places that appear to be marginal, messy and incomplete can be a means of tracing larger-scale economic connections.Footnote 13 This is particularly true in environments that initially seem ‘difficult’, such as dense forest, marsh, or mountain. As we increasingly recognize, the mountains of Inner Asia hosted abundant flows of goods, humans, and animals that collectively formed vibrant networks of commercial exchange.Footnote 14 Indeed as our encounter with the Singer agent demonstrates (despite numerous international branches, Singer was headquartered in the United States), Karkara was a place that was interwoven with multiscalar capital circulation, something that ran counter to the narratives of outsiders to the valley who often emphasized the insularity and isolation of local life in the barrier of mountains that separated the Russian and Qing empires. This should not come as a surprise, for while pastoralist subsistence economies in the region had ‘never [been] deliberately profit-oriented or consistently aimed at meeting market demands’, herders were not self-sufficient; rather, their socio-economic world was characterized by complex trading relations and reciprocal exchange networks that spanned many hundreds of kilometres.Footnote 15 Events at Karkara therefore potentially have much to tell us about economic life in the late imperial period, given that they offer an intriguing point of access to trade circuits that stretched vast distances across political borders, to multiscalar histories of empire and economy, and, crucially, to actors who are often marginal in these discussions.
This article sets out to disentangle the intricate market relations present in the Karkara valley. These can be parsed in several ways: the economic ties that collectively constituted both the physical market site and the intangible financial market; the social relationships between local communities, traders, and the state that were the bedrock of transaction and exchange; and the ecological interconnections that, I argue, both underpinned and were in the process of being transformed by shifting socio-economic relations in the valley. Pastoralist communities, mountain ecosystems, and Eurasian trade were closely bound together, and only by understanding the overlapping spatial and temporal dimensions of this relationship is it possible to grasp the anatomy of rural capitalism in the valley. First, I unravel the complex local and global connections present at Karkara by tracing the spatial scales of commercial exchange. I then explore how thinking ecologically can help to more fully understand the market’s founding, location, and dynamics. Centring animals, climate, seasonality, and topography is a means (maybe the only means) of recovering a more complete history, and is a method that is particularly salient in the context of pastoral communities where the written sources that are privileged by sedentro-centric histories are scant, and where pastoralist transhumant lifeways had evolved in direct response to the challenges of local environments. In other words, pastoralist histories intrinsically demand deep engagement with ‘biological-ecological’ themes and ‘spatial and temporal dynamics’.Footnote 16 Finally, the article uncovers the frictions that were generated by the converging relationship between local herders and the imperial state at the fair site, and their dramatic resolution in 1916. Throughout, I underscore the need to re-evaluate the often-overlooked importance of pastoralist societies and seemingly remote rural places in the early twentieth-century global economy. In this sense, the Karkara valley was a small component of the ‘amalgam of socioeconomic processes and institutions, material infrastructures, and territory’ that had come to mark the interdependencies of the world economy in the first age of (modern) globalization,Footnote 17 and thus speaks to far broader histories that underscore the entwining of pastoralist labour, land, and commodities in the increasingly integrated global market economy, particularly in relation to wool and other animal fibres, dairy, and meat products.Footnote 18
Spatial scales of commerce and the ‘highways of the world’
In early 1893, Tsar Alexander III approved legislation for the formal opening of an annual ‘two-month fair on the Karkara river’, with traders to be exempt from paying customs duties.Footnote 19 This trade fair was a market in dual senses of the word. It was a physical rural market, a place where various parties gathered to sell goods and services. At the same time, it was part of an economic market-system of mutually negotiated production, value, exchange, and distribution that stretched thousands of kilometres, and which knit together innumerable people, most of whom never set foot in the valley. Karkara defied easy categorization: at times a teeming market, at others an empty meadow; a quasi-urban ‘tent city’ and a rural valley; a place of isolation and of interconnection; seasonal home to Central Asian pastoralists and a meeting place for people of myriad global backgrounds. In some ways, the fair was a type of ‘marginal hub’, a place that ‘straddle[d] the often-taken-for-granted boundary between the rural and the urban … the marginal and the central’, and which could suddenly become a site of ‘intense and often volatile sociability’.Footnote 20 It thus makes sense to employ a multiscalar lens: to consider neither simply the micro and local nor macro and global, but to move with agility between multiple space–time scales from planetary to microscopic, and, crucially, to conceive of these scales not as being nested within each other but as mutually constitutive, an approach that emphasizes local specificities and simultaneously recognizes their emplacement in larger spatial and temporal processes.Footnote 21
Despite the valley’s quiet rurality, the fair belonged to lively circuits of exchange and consumption that operated on various spatial scales. Locally, Karkara quickly became the heart of the pastoralist economy; it was not the only such fair in the province, but by some magnitude was the largest.Footnote 22 The market was overseen by the Semirech’e provincial administration ostensibly to provide a means for southern Kazakh and northern Kyrgyz communities to buy and sell goods directly, bypassing Tatar intermediaries.Footnote 23 The founding of the fair thus disrupted traditional rhythms of trade. Usually in November, Tatars had arrived in pastoralist winter camps as agents of merchants from Petropavlovsk, Akmolinsk, and urban centres in the Kazakh steppe and Siberia, alongside Central Asians from towns in Turkestan – they would stay over the winter and barter their goods (cotton prints, crockery, metalware, tea, tobacco, sugar) for livestock, hides, sheepskin, and wool, returning to their home markets in the spring with newly acquired commodities. This trade was deemed ‘harmful’ by the local administration, given that it was ‘extremely profitable for the traders and ruinous for pastoralists’.Footnote 24 With little competition, the visitors apparently inflated their prices and imposed penalties when livestock were not provided in the agreed time frame. From the imperial perspective, the fair could liberate pastoralists from the ‘cruel exploitations’Footnote 25 of commercial middlemen, and was thus a ‘more correct’Footnote 26 form of trade. In this light, the fair was a key part of the state’s drive to ‘improve’ conditions for pastoralists, which also included the founding of new credit institutions (ssudnye kassy) and legislation to restrict the sale of property to settle debts. These actions were, needless to say, rooted in negative (and misleading) depictions of vulnerable pastoralists and exploitative Tatars, who were sometimes accused of peddling opium and hashish in exchange for cattle, wool, and hides.Footnote 27
The founding of the fair certainly presented pastoralists with a more competitive market to acquire imported manufactures; to exchange felt, skins, yurt frames, wool with each other; and to sell livestock and animal goods in large quantities. A newspaper article from 1896 painted a scene of herders leaving the fair with their new purchases: pieces of green and red Moroccan leather, a red wooden chest with a tin trim, a large cooking pot, a bundle of birchbark for the soles of shoes, and a chain of animals piled high with wool.Footnote 28 To give a sense of scale, in 1902, 67,181 sheep; 5,466 cows; 3,006 horses; 10,301 goats; and 19,162 puds of wool, horsehair, and other associated goods were sold.Footnote 29 While we have no precise information on the people present, many belonged to the Alban clan,Footnote 30 and at least some were from Konurburgovskia, Sarytogaiskaia, Merkinskaia, and Turaigyrskaia cantons – identified in the most thorough local demographic survey as clan communities 51, 53–66, 70–2, 77, 83 in Dzharkent district, each of which migrated to Karkara’s summer pastures each year.Footnote 31 One might also surmise that, given ongoing differentiation within and between Kazakh and Kyrgyz herding auls, wealthier households with greater surplus of animals would be able to offer the largest quantity for sale.Footnote 32 Beyond the pastoralists, small numbers of local Taranchi and Dungans (who had settled in the region from the Qing empire) and Slavic peasant settlers were also in attendance.Footnote 33 Indeed, land agents and settlers seemed very much aware of Karkara’s attractions, as literature aimed at incoming Slavic migrants highlighted ‘large fairs’ as important resources.Footnote 34 A. P. Kuplast, an influential land agent based in Vernyi (present-day Almaty), spoke at a gathering of the Southern Russian Resettlement Organization in Chernigov (Chernihiv, in present-day Ukraine) in February 1913. Discussing the conditions for settlers in eastern Semirech’e, he noted that at Karkara it was ‘possible to acquire everything necessary for agriculture, from clothing to ploughs’.Footnote 35
Given the paucity of sources, it is challenging to reconstruct direct experiences of the fair. Chudinov, a Russian observer who left one of the most detailed descriptions interpreted it in highly orientalized fashion, noting its entirely ‘un-Russian’ character given the prevalence of ‘dirt’, ‘fatalism’, and ‘Asiatic shouting’, and conversely, the absence of women, wheeled carts, or taverns.Footnote 36 Reading beyond some of these civilizational tropes, Karkara’s sensory dimensions were striking: the fair was a mass of noise, a whirl of movement, and a cloud of smells, both human and animal. In Auezov’s words, with each passing day, ‘it became ever more magnificent, noisy and crowded’.Footnote 37 Certainly, the social and the economic were closely bound together: pastoralist elders gathered together to resolve disputes, news and gossip were exchanged over tea and kumis, and dumplings were shared at the end of the day.Footnote 38 By 1907, thirty-two bakeries were registered at the fair; twenty-one dumpling makers; six teahouses; eighteen shoemakers; eleven tailors; and nine blacksmiths,Footnote 39 alongside barbers, chemists, and musicians,Footnote 40 and one imagines that these were all the more valuable given pastoralists’ highly mobile lifeways. The fair was also important as a place where herders could acquire currency. It was, apparently, common to hear that pastoralists had arrived ‘to buy money’, most usually with sheep.Footnote 41 Many transaction practices were mixed: in 1900, with the price for a two-year-old ram around 3 to 4 rubles, it was routine for a herder to receive payment partly in cash and partly in kind (usually manufactured goods).Footnote 42 Thus for a range of economic and social reasons, Karkara occupied a vitalizing role in the lives of many thousands of pastoralists in Semirech’e.Footnote 43
The valley’s significance went far beyond the local, however. As a trade fair, Karkara was part of the much wider iarmarka phenomenon: fairs across the Russian empire that varied in duration, size, and significance. Selling anything from furs and tea to pots, cows, and sewing machines, iarmarki were vital conduits between rural and urban economies, and as at Karkara, it was commonplace for the stalls of individual farmers and artisans to sit alongside those of large manufacturers. Some of the more established fairs, such as at Nizhnii Novgorod or Irbit, had existed since at least the seventeenth century, played a major role in national and international trade,Footnote 44 and were a celebrated part of Russian culture.Footnote 45 Despite their ubiquity however, iarmarki have been rather neglected in scholarship, seen at the time and since as increasingly anachronistic and in terminal decline in the nineteenth century as long-standing commercial networks across the empire were reconfigured by railways and urbanization. To some extent this was true, and was certainly the central argument of studies conducted in 1911 and 1914.Footnote 46 Yet of course, rail was a highly unevenly distributed technology. As memorably summarized by an engineer of the time, the connectivity capacity of railways in the Russian empire was much like ‘the blood vessels of a rabbit in the body of an elephant’.Footnote 47 Conversely, the commercial relations that connected iarmarki continued to form a dense mesh across thousands of kilometres in northern Eurasia, constituting a central part of the empire’s economic substructure. The extent of this network was enormous: data collected by the state’s Central Statistical Committee and the Ministry of Finance suggested that there were 16,000–18,5000 iarmarki in the empire in the 1910s, with a collective turnover of over 1,000 million rubles per year.Footnote 48 In comparison, the state’s total central government revenue in 1910 was 2,798 million rubles, while expenditure was 2,592 million rubles.Footnote 49
Thus while in general terms iarmarka trade was in decline by the early twentieth century, its financial footprint nevertheless remained gigantic. Looking more closely, while the number of extremely large fairs (the top 1 per cent, with a turnover of over 100,000 rubles) was shrinking, the number of small, short-duration fairs was actually increasing, testament, perhaps, to their ‘continued relevance’.Footnote 50 This potentially echoes Skinner’s suggestion that the introduction of railways and modern industrialization in late imperial China in fact boosted the number of rural markets, in the short term at least.Footnote 51 Moreover, any incremental displacement of iarmarki as key centres of commerce masked the fact that, as Gohstand argued in 1983 (before the imperial turn in Russian history), ‘dependence on this form of trade continued … in some of the remoter regions’, particularly in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus,Footnote 52 in other words in less-urbanized areas where the railway network was not as extensive as in ‘European Russia’ (which included territory in present-day Ukraine and Poland). In fact, the thousands of iarmarki east of the Urals continued to exert a ‘huge influence on the world market’,Footnote 53 as people and things moved between Eurasia, China, Europe, India, and beyond. We have yet to fully understand these intricate networks that were simultaneously local and global, although Tatiana Shcheglova has illuminated the dependence of Russian industrial enterprises on the flow of raw materials from fairs in northern Kazakhstan in the period 1850–1900.Footnote 54 Likewise, we know comparatively little about how these markets functioned as interfaces between everyday people and imperial structures of power and economy. They have become in-between, side-lined spaces. And in this sense, although iarmarki might seem old-fashioned, they potentially offer new ways to think about the complexities of economic life in the period and about actors who are often marginal in our discussions (because they lived in remote rural places or did not fit neatly into conventional histories of state-sponsored economic growth and industrialization). In sum, if we look at iarmarki without the blinkers of ‘modernization’ discourses and within an expanded empire-wide frame, they remain of vital significance.
Returning to Central Asia, what is remarkable is that, despite its incongruous location, Karkara ranked in the top 50 of the 18,500 fairs in the entire empire in terms of annual turnover (around 1 million rubles in 1908). Of course it operated at a different scale than the vast turnovers of Nizhnii (160–200 million) or Irbit (25 million),Footnote 55 but it might well have been the most impressive of all, given its very recent founding and its remote mountainous setting. As well as being a motor of the local economy, Karkara was also a point of exchange in polycentric regional and empire-wide trade circuits, facilitated in part by ever-nearing rail connections (the Tashkent–Orenburg line, which connected Central Asia to the Trans-Siberian mainline, opened in 1906). Traders from across Central Asia, particularly Andizhan and the Fergana valley, arrived to sell cotton, sugar, and metalware and to buy livestock. In 1897, traders from Tashkent and Vernyi returned home with 64,546 sheep (valued for their meat and fat rather than their wool) and 4,444 horses.Footnote 56 Flocks of live animals, sheepskins, hides, wool, and horsehair were also moved by merchants hundreds of kilometres north to be sold on at fairs in Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk provinces, at Irbit and thence via rail at fairs across the empire.Footnote 57 For instance, in the same year, goods sent from Karkara to Semipalatinsk alone included 141 camel hides, 20,819 pieces of lambskin, 490 of goatskin, 1,621 of sheepskin, and 145 puds of horsehair, all for further sale.Footnote 58
To look to a still-larger scale, iarmarki were simultaneously implicated in myriad cross-border trade flows as well as within complex internal networks.Footnote 59 Like earlier predecessors at Kiakhta and Lake Yamysh further north,Footnote 60 Karkara was very much a frontier fair, intimately linked to global markets via its location ‘at the meeting of nine roads from all corners of the earth’, which (eventually) connected lowlands and uplands across Central Asia, India, and China via, amongst others, the Bedel, Torugart, San-tash, Erkech-tam, and Dzungarian Gate mountain passes.Footnote 61 According to one eyewitness at the fair, ‘flags of many nations fluttered in the wind’; there was tea from China, furs from Tibet, brightly coloured scarves from India, rugs from Kashgar, and much more, including the Singer sewing-machine company’s stall.Footnote 62 The flow of people and goods across the Russo-Qing border was particularly lively given Karkara’s proximity to this political boundary, and many goods bought or sold at the fair transited via customs points in Dzharkent and Khorgos, connecting Karkara to long-standing trade flows in the Tarim basin and Dzungarian regions (formalized into Xinjiang province by the Qing empire in 1884), including markets in Aqsu, Kashgar, the Ili valley, and Ghulja (Yinning).Footnote 63 The internal iarmarka network thus existed simultaneously with other region-spanning economic systems.
Extending these trans-imperial encounters, international geographers and glaciologists also visited the fair as they ascended into the Tian Shan mountains. The Hungarian explorer György Almásy did so in 1900, while the German geographer and alpinist Gottfried Merzbacher stopped in 1902 to purchase packhorses, saddles, and to hire Kyrgyz horsemen ‘familiar with the mountain routes’.Footnote 64 Following in Merzbacher’s footsteps, a group of soil scientists and botanists (including V. V. Sapozhnikov from Tomsk University) took part in a major expedition in 1912 under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration (which oversaw state-sponsored internal migration in the Russian empire), and used Karkara as an assembly point. They returned to the fair several times to purchase fresh supplies, horses, and animal trophies, notably the prized antlers of the Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus).Footnote 65
Thus, while Merzbacher suggested during his 1902 trip that the fair was ‘completely withdrawn from the highways of the world, walled in by mountain chains glittering in glacier snow’,Footnote 66 in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This was a place at the very edge of empire where local, regional, and global intersected and sustained each other, with circuits of mobility and exchange stretching far into the Russian empire but also beyond its bounds. Via its imbrication into the iarmarka network, the valley was an important component of the imperial economy, yet at the same time, regional and trans-imperial trade here was exceptionally strong. All routes did not lead back to the imperial centre. Instead, locally engaged actors were agents in the multiscalar process of global accumulation: the pastoralist who sold 100 sheep augmented his own economic life and simultaneously became woven into flows of capital and the livelihoods of merchants and consumers on trans-imperial and global scales. In other words, these local, regional, imperial, and global networks were not separate, distinct scales, but were constitutive of each other.Footnote 67 And as the in-demand Singer sewing machines remind us, these interdependent networks were more multidirectional than simply facilitating pastoralists’ supply of raw and semi-processed animal materials to distant manufacturing markets. Externally produced goods and technologies were bought and used locally, and thus exemplify some of the ‘mutual interactions’ that characterized modern globalization.Footnote 68 This brings back into focus people such as pastoralists who are sometimes marginalized from economic history, often because they were not engaged in ‘modern’ practices. As has been identified in the Ottoman empire in the same period, we see very clearly here how herders were important players in local economies and in world-spanning trade flows.Footnote 69 Pastoralist lifeways were indivisibly a part of modern market economies and the development of capitalism in the period.Footnote 70
Ecological interdependencies and temporal rhythms
Merzbacher’s mistaken claims were likely heavily influenced by his physical surroundings: dwarfed by mountains and unable to spot any permanent settlements, he converted his own bodily isolation into a narrative of economic disconnection. Yet precisely the environmental markers that led him to these conclusions were the key factors in explaining why the valley occupied such an important role in the lives of myriad communities far and wide. Economic life here had deep ecological interconnection, much as was suggested by Auezov, who, describing the ‘richness of the meadows’ and the ‘wonder’ of the summer pasture, captured the valley as a place shared by animals and humans.Footnote 71 In fact, when the latter prove hard to trace, following animal tracks can usefully open up human histories. Therefore, in order to more fully understand the dynamics of the fair, we need to take into account some rather different ‘highways’, not of the world, but of the planet: the ecological hierarchies that were invisible to Merzbacher and which were inseparable from the human scales discussed above. This necessitates consideration of a range of ecological units from micro-organisms to animal populations and ecosystems, which collectively bring into view the alternative temporal patterns within which the fair sat, from deep time to seasonal rhythms.
Central to the life cycle of the fair were animal species and populations: without four-legged participants, Karkara would quite simply not have existed. This is unsurprising, given the close interdependencies between pastoralists and their flocks, which supplied wool, milk, meat, fuel, transport, as well as a direct and indirect form of currency. Contemporary surveys suggested that the average flock composition in Semirech’e was roughly 72% sheep, 10% horses, 9% cattle, 8% goats, and 1% camels, although these figures varied significantly from place to place, depending on environmental conditions and the degree of sedentary agriculture undertaken.Footnote 72 Particularly important were fat-tailed sheep, valued for their adaption to extreme and arid conditions.Footnote 73 They had evolved over millennia to store fat that could be converted into energy during severe winter weather and summer drought, and had been domesticated to travel over further distances than other sheep. These animal populations were the baseline of economic transaction at the fair and represented millennia of compressed evolutionary time. Situated at the heart of pastoralists’ adaptive strategies, they were a ‘form of fluid wealth’ – the bedrock of traditional custom that could, when needed, be ‘converted into multiple forms of capital, savings and credit’.Footnote 74 The individual sheep was also central: in the valley’s mixed currency–barter economy, a sheep was often a key unit of value, meaning that economic practice was commonly scaled to animal bodies.Footnote 75
Moving down the ecological scale to the microscopic, a second group of populations were also pivotal: viruses, the most numerous type of biological entity. Alongside foot-and-mouth disease, the most significant in the valley was cattle plague. Also known as rinderpest, this highly infectious RNA virus could decimate herds across the world.Footnote 76 Rinderpest was identified in multiple locations in Semirech’e in the 1890s. State officials and veterinarians suggested that it originated in China, spread via cross-border cattle theft and commercial exchange.Footnote 77 Long-distance caravan routes that took animals to and from Karkara, the fair itself as an enormous gathering of animals, and pastoralists’ spatial scales of transhumance which often crossed political borders were thus all likely vectors of transmission. While herds could be severely affected by rinderpest, pastoralist strategies to maintain large groups of animals to some extent mitigated against complete loss, as did their complex customary repertoires of movement and disease diagnosis.Footnote 78 Yet as we shall see in the final section, these traditions began to be significantly altered by state regulation; the microscopic had a disproportionately large role to play in shaping activities in the valley.
There were also other complex ecosystem relationships which come into view when considering the interplay between communities of organisms and abiotic non-living elements in the vicinity. Animal populations were dependent on fodder and water, themselves the products of deeper hydrological and geological time. The valley was an ancient lake floor, strewn with fossils, and carpeted with ‘luscious, emerald-green grass’ and flowers.Footnote 79 Through this rangeland ran the Karkara river, which swelled with snow and glacial meltwater in the spring, before tumbling down into the Ili river system.Footnote 80 Altitude, the mountain chernozem soil, and geology therefore provided the conditions in which much-needed pasture (the famed zhailau/zhailoo/jailoo) for flocks could flourish, while annual melting cycles created plentiful drinking water. Collectively, these factors made the valley an ecological niche that was an irresistible destination for pastoralists as they moved between spring, summer, and winter pastures. These mobilities were firmly driven by animal needs: summertime saw relocation to higher mountain elevations, where Karkara’s lush zhailau had in fact drawn local communities on well-established vertical transhumance routes long before the region had become part of the Russian empire. Indeed, one of the reasons that pastoralists were reluctant to attend urban markets (particularly those founded by the state since the 1860s) was that there was not sufficient pastureland nearby on which to graze their animals.Footnote 81 So, the shoulder-deep grasses of Karkara were absolutely fundamental to the fair’s existence; fodder and water mattered. Here, herders and their flocks traced non-human rhythms of time, mimicking the movements of black cranes who for millennia had also stopped in the valley on their summer migrations (one translation of ‘Karkara’ in fact is ‘black crane’). Thanks to its altitude, water, and food resources, the valley was a key point on what is now called the ‘Central Asian Flyway’, a network of avian migration routes across ‘30 countries of North, Central and South Asia and Trans-Caucasus’.Footnote 82 Taking these related elements together, we find overlaid temporal scales of ecological dependency and movement, ranging from the seasonal, to the annual, the millennial, and the geological, that knitted together animal and human populations in the valley.
Not only had the valley had been a well-established destination for herders, but it also seems that traders too had regularly arrived to make sales there to pastoralists. The scant evidence does not indicate something as formalized as a ‘fair’, but that the valley had been a site for goods exchange in previous centuries; there was a lengthy tradition of multiscalar trade activity in this place.Footnote 83 More broadly, merchants from the Qing empire, Siberia, the Khanate of Khoqand (and its predecessors), and Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralists had exchanged cattle, furs, tea, and textiles over the mountain passes of this region for centuries.Footnote 84 Still more strikingly, the valley had been a notable conduit for trade in a deeper past: archaeological modelling has suggested that highland networks of the ancient overland Silk Road mapped directly onto ‘long-established mobility patterns of nomadic herders in the mountains of inner Asia’, including through Karkara, that were rooted in access to fodder and water resources.Footnote 85 This casts new light on the state’s ‘founding’ of the fair in 1893: although superficially defined by its ephemerality, the fair in terms of its timing and location owed a huge amount to long-standing, ecologically embedded rhythms of mobility and exchange. There is a clear argument therefore to recontextualize the valley from being a place ‘walled in’ by mountains, to being a central part of the ‘Inner Asian mountain corridor’ that for millennia had been a high-altitude hub for both people and animals.Footnote 86
The seasonal changes in weather and temperature that brought pastoralists to the valley also had the potential to threaten entwined animal and human lifeways. Sheep and cows, in particular, were vulnerable to extreme weather, given that herders grazed their animals outside all year round and did not stockpile fodder as much as settled communities. Especially hazardous were winter snowstorms and ice crusts that prevented animals from grazing. Severe episodes, which happened often in six-to-twelve-year cycles, were known as dzhut/zhūt/jut: a mass die-off caused by herd starvation.Footnote 87 Although large flocks and alterations to transhumance routes were to some extent an adaptation to severe climate fluctuations, there could be profound socio-economic consequences, as in the winter of 1902–3, when 1.1 million animals, mostly sheep, died in Semirech’e, representing 20 per cent of total pastoralist livestock.Footnote 88 Such events could push up prices and decrease the volume of trade, and this relationship between weather and revenue is corroborated by other fairs in the northern steppes.Footnote 89 In this sense, ice provided the meltwater that nourished animal populations and at times could decimate them. Animals, economy, and climate existed in symbiosis.
With all of this in mind, the multiple spatially defined economic scales of human activity at Karkara were clearly inseparable from simultaneous interactions between and within various ecological scales. In other words, economic questions cannot be fully understood without exploring ecological entanglements: the ‘local’, ‘imperial’, and ‘global’ were embedded in, and to some extent produced by, interweaving ecosystem elements that stretched from deep time and millennial evolution to annual ice melt and seasonal weather changes, and from RNA viruses to complex interdependencies between animal and plant populations. These ecological scales brought the fair into being. In parallel to Karkara’s material infrastructures – roads, enclosures, yurts, barracks, and pens – these ecological–temporal scales were the architectures that shaped the valley’s economic dynamism. Drawing out still further, this provides tantalizing glimpses therefore of how multiple environmental temporalities were intrinsic to the human rhythms of capital exchange, both at Karkara and potentially elsewhere too.
Capital flows and sociopolitical frictions
Exploring a history-in-fragments of Karkara is a means of recovering the vibrant economic lives of this borderland’s pastoralist communities on multiple spatial and temporal scales, and of reframing this region as fundamentally defined by flows of people, animals, and goods across difficult landscapes and political borders. Yet as Tsing and others have so powerfully argued, these flows of capital were impossible without – and in fact both generated and were produced by – related frictions: specifically, the sociopolitical frictions created by ‘encounters across difference’.Footnote 90 This was particularly the case for marginal hubs, as they were very often ‘places in which encounters with difference [were] a pervasive feature of everyday life’ by virtue of their bringing together of people from very different backgrounds and with often conflicting intentions.Footnote 91 Such entanglements were an ‘essential component needed to keep trade networks moving’, but also had the capacity to be something of a ‘double-edge sword’ if left unchecked, and this, I argue, is precisely what happened at Karkara.Footnote 92
As noted above, pastoralists and traders had been meeting in the valley likely for centuries. With few extant sources, one can only surmise that these exchanges must have generated attendant frictions: disputes within the communities who formed the bedrock of the market economy, issues of common communication with non-locals, and contested ideas about value and profit. Indeed, while he celebrated Karkara’s abundance, Auezov captured a darker side to events, lambasting the ‘fat-bellied, tight-fisted’ merchants who arrived in the valley on the lookout for ‘easy profits’.Footnote 93 The formal founding of the trading site as a iarmarka in the 1890s however introduced into the valley a wholly new economic actor: the imperial state. Auezov identified this very strikingly in his novel. Not only did the fair signify ‘rich pickings’ for some traders, but it also became riddled with institutional corruption. Local provincial officialdom, ‘the force that rules and governs’, bore the brunt of Auezov’s ire as he lampooned the fair’s resident policeman (nicknamed ‘Grizzled Grey Mane’) as a corpulent, lazy, and arrogant man, ‘covered in weapons’, and always on the take.Footnote 94 Indeed, on the evidence discussed below, it seems that the state’s interventions in the valley from the 1890s provoked a fresh set of sociopolitical frictions as imperial officials – both Russian colonial army officers who staffed the provincial administration in Semirech’e, and also veterinarians, tax inspectors, and statisticians – introduced external forces which cut across many pre-existing practices of exchange in the valley. In turn, the dramatic resolution of these frictions in 1916 speaks to the manifold ways in which the economic, environmental, and political were interconnected.
From 1893 onwards, economic activities at Karkara were subject to increasing state regulation. Given the geographically remote location of the valley within the political administration of Central Asia, this was more piecemeal than systematic, but the interventions are nevertheless revealing about the shifting nature of market activities, and the tensions between the modes of operation deemed legitimate and important by the state and what we might call the ecological scales of pastoralism. For instance, officials sought to embed the fair – and those who attended it – in centralized economic structures, levying charges on traders for the use of stalls and the rent of scales and measures,Footnote 95 and stationing policemen armed with revolvers to ‘keep order’.Footnote 96 By 1915, the Semirech’e provincial administration was charging a fee per head of cattle sold, as well as imposing costs on those who pastured their animals at the fair for more than three days.Footnote 97 This likely served a triple function: to monetize the transnational trade network for the benefit of the imperial treasury; to weaken pre-existing economic relationships between pastoralist clans and Tatar intermediaries; and to more closely tether herders to the currency-based economy. This broader shift ‘from “sword” to “money”’ was already gradually underway in some southern Kazakh and northern Kyrgyz communities.Footnote 98 At Karkara, requiring charges in rubles would thus necessitate greater contact with other fixed forms of retail such as shops and agricultural depots to spend and acquire this money. In other words, the state’s increasing infiltration of the fair was potentially one step towards sedentarizing herding communities, a key facet of the Resettlement Administration’s quest to release land in the region for Slavic settlement.Footnote 99
This gradual reordering of economic affairs also extended to the thorny question of rinderpest. While cattle theft and seasonal mobilities across internal and external administrative borders were long-standing features of pastoralist life, from the state’s perspective the ‘irrational’ straying and movement of cattle, compounded by pastoralists’ inclinations to ‘hide’ poorly cattle from the authorities, needed to be regulated in order to contain the threat of plague infecting herds across the region.Footnote 100 This was deemed to be of great urgency, both to ensure economic stability in Semirech’e, and to guard against contagion within the increasingly integrated empire-wide food chain.Footnote 101 The latter drew particular attention, given sustained interest in the increased flow of Central Asian cattle to the meat markets of metropolitan Russia as a potential solution to the ‘meat question’ that plagued economists, industrialists, and veterinarians across the empire at this time.Footnote 102 The state’s efforts to control chains of epizootic infection were thus simultaneously biological, economic, and political. From 1900, the Veterinary Administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs began to reshape the spatial scales of animal movement in Semirech’e, creating inspection points on major roads and a new veterinary protection line on the border with China, which instituted quarantines for live animals and the disinfection of animal products and, in doing so, acted as a check on cross-border seasonal migration routes.Footnote 103 By 1910, this surveillance network had grown to seventeen inspection points in the province, including one at the fair itself, locating it as a key site of regulation. In purpose-built pens and slaughterhouses at Karkara, animals and their microorganisms were inspected and if necessary destroyed.Footnote 104 This surveillance was extensive. During the two-month fair in 1914, officials at Karkara inspected over 3,000 cattle and 181,978 sheep and goats, testament to the significant volume of animals moving through the valley and the industrious work of state veterinarians.Footnote 105
These activities form an intriguing segment of a wider history of disease control that spilled over the imperial border, and importantly, indicate that the economic was resolutely political. Via the creation of inspection points and sanitary lines, the state’s new surveillance infrastructure shows how disease circuits – and the microscopic virus at their heart – played a role in the political construction of the porous Russo-Qing border.Footnote 106 We also glimpse how, away from the civilian structures of governance in European Russia, rural sites such as the fair could be co-opted as quasi-zemstvo centres of regulation. Zemstvos (elected local representative assemblies that had been introduced during Alexander II’s Great Reforms) were the main base from which state veterinarians usually operated as they imposed inspection, quarantine, and vaccination measures; yet, of course, these did not exist in Central Asia.Footnote 107 Furthermore, it transpires that, mimicking the veterinarians, all manner of provincial officials relocated from Semirech’e’s towns and villages to Karkara for two months a year. The local justice of the peace and the commandant of the locality of Narynkol’-Charyn both set up their offices in purpose-built barracks there, alongside policemen, a customs inspector, and members of the excise inspectorate.Footnote 108 This transfer underscores the importance of the fair as a place where the administration could reinforce imperial power (valuable in remote rural borderland areas and particularly in eastern Semirech’e where the Russo-Qing border had been reshaped by the 1881 Treaty of St Petersburg). Given that this was a comparatively rare moment when large numbers of herders gathered in a single location, the fair was a key venue where biis (elders who represented an aul) met, which likely led state officials to see this as a key opportunity to gather information on local communities (and perhaps vice versa). Karkara thus became a site where political sovereignty was performed; this paralleled in some ways the efforts of British imperial officials to found trade fairs in the same period in the eastern Himalayan foothills in order to ‘make further [political as well as economic] advances into the mountains’.Footnote 109
Collectively, these actions speak to some of the frictions generated by provincial officials’ use of Karkara as a site for economic and political regulation. We already know that the state had intervened in local economic activities when it established the fair to disrupt Tatar intermediaries. By introducing currency charges for market use, it also made inroads into eroding the barter economy. This had entwined economic and social implications, given that ‘barter exchange and monetized exchange enact radically different forms of social relations’, not least because barter tended to operate on complex structures of trust, mutual interest, and locally (rather than externally) agreed measurements of value.Footnote 110 Via its surveillance network, animated by the needs of distant commodity markets across the empire, the state also began to unsettle and even curtail pastoralists’ long-standing seasonal mobilities. Regulating the movement of sheep and cattle was a way of (re)arranging political relationships through the formation of new socio-ecological patterns, and, as Mazanik has argued more broadly, marked a step change in manipulating human–animal relationships.Footnote 111 Furthermore, given that animals embodied multiple forms of value for herders beyond the economic (for instance, playing a role in gift giving and labour organization), their regulation potentially had wider consequences for social dynamics within pastoralist communities. Control, limitation, and external standardization characterized various types of state activity in the valley. A profound dissonance thus existed between the state’s border-framed conceptions of movement and pastoralists’ own spatial scales of transhumance in Semirech’e, which demanded seasonal vertical and horizontal migration over sometimes hundreds of kilometres, both within and across imperial borders.Footnote 112 Folded into this were differing ideas about the relationship between animals, humans, and centralized political power: officials were in part motivated by the desire to integrate herders into empire-wide financial and food systems, whereas pastoralists’ long-distance trade circuits cut in multiple political and territorial directions.
Frictions over land-use practices also emerged as Karkara was implicated in the 1910s in the ongoing resettlement of Slavic farming families from west of the Urals. With the prized shorelines of Lake Issyk-Kul increasingly crowded with migrant farmers, the Semirech’e branch of the Resettlement Administration, headed by the statistician S. N. Veletskii, created land plots for incoming migrants in more ecologically marginal places,Footnote 113 including by 1912 in the Karkara valley.Footnote 114 This came despite questions over its suitability for farming given the altitude and climate. V. P. Mazurenko, an agronomist from the Resettlement Administration who visited that year, concluded in the positive, yet others suggested that only barley could possibly be grown, given annual low temperatures. On 18 June 1911, for instance, the temperature at Karkara plummeted to zero and snow fell, decimating the experimental planting.Footnote 115 Sceptics such as the naturalist V. N. Shnitnikov doubted whether settler livelihoods could be sustained on such limited cultivation, and raised concerns that, were settlement to go ahead, the ‘entire mass of nomads would be deprived of the pasture on which they depend’, leading to the collapse of trade at ‘such an important’ economic centre.Footnote 116 Equally crucial was that if the valley’s meadows were expropriated for settlement and planted fields, vertical transhumance routes into the mountains would be rendered useless. Land dispossession had significant implications not only economically but also for mobility patterns and customary subsistence strategies.
Although it seems that no settler village was established at the fair site prior to 1914, the settler colonial project was most certainly encroaching. By the following year a significant plot of land had been formalized as a kazenno-obrochnaia stat’ia (a way to extract rent on a resource for the benefit of the treasury, essentially, converting common land into a legal and financial instrument of the state) and accompanying experimental field.Footnote 117 At the same time, the Ministry of Agriculture assumed administrative responsibility for the fair, and initiated a further intended reorganization of economic activities in the valley. New trading rows were planned, alongside a telegraph connection and a separation of the livestock market from the trading premises.Footnote 118 This was to be funded by income from a range of new levies on fair users. Among other small charges, dues were to be paid for the use of what was now state land, levied per square sazhen’ according to rank, from 2 rubles 50 kopecks for the largest traders down to 25 kopecks for circus performers and skittle alleys.Footnote 119 Animals pastured at the fair for more than three days were liable to a fee of 10 kopecks per head of cattle and 3 kopecks for smaller livestock.Footnote 120 A new oversight committee took charge of the day-to-day running of the fair, composed of a local veterinarian and customs inspector, forestry and agriculture officials, the head of the Narynkol’-Charyn area, and three representatives of the fair’s merchant community, at least one of whom had to be of Russian origin. Those who did not pay their dues were excluded from voting on these representatives.Footnote 121
Questions over the implications of this further integration of the fair into state structures were rendered moot a few months later in 1916, a year infamous in Central Asian history for its enormous anti-colonial ‘revolt’, in which an imperial conscription decree ignited months of mass violence. The burden of the conflict was highly asymmetric: some 2,000 settlers and state officials were killed in the summer and autumn of 1916 in the Governor Generalship of Turkestan, of which Semirech’e was now a part, compared to over 200,000 Central Asians, mostly Kazakh and Kyrgyz pastoralists, as Slavic settlers and the state retaliated.Footnote 122 The unrest was particularly intense in rural Semirech’e, and one small component was the destruction of the fair in August 1916. Auezov’s novel concluded with the dramatic incineration of the market by herders, a reprisal against the corruption of Karkara’s officials and the prior arrest of local men as violence had spread from towns into rural valleys east of Issyk-Kul from July to August. ‘For many years’, he wrote, ‘it [the fair] had insatiably swallowed and devoured everything around it and had become fat-bellied and arrogant as a merchant. Now it choked on black, stinking smoke, disappearing from the face of the earth.’Footnote 123 What exactly had driven Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to obliterate something that had been such a central part of life is open to debate. Officials within the Semirech’e provincial administration saw the fair as a potential flashpoint, given its proximity to the Qing border and thus to the ‘agitation’ of external ‘anarchists’, and also because it was a point of contact with settled ‘natives’ from regions of Turkestan that had been at the epicentre of earlier unrest in July (in other words, traders from Tashkent and Fergana).Footnote 124 Such disparaging conjectures, which explained herders’ actions only as being mindlessly imitative, almost certainly downplayed the role of local sentiment. Rather, the stark shift in the fair’s fortunes may be better understood as a product of that fact that – much as Auezov suggested – over time, Karkara had become a localized synecdoche for the iniquities of imperial rule.
As detailed above, in previous years the state had commandeered the fair as a site of intensifying regulation and surveillance, in addition to various financial impositions and mobility checks. As violence spread in the summer of 1916, tensions rose further in the valley. Towards the end of June, a number of local herders had been arrested for ‘the preparation of an uprising’ following a refusal to adhere to the conscription decree.Footnote 125 From the end of July until the middle of August, a military detachment under the command of Captain Kravchenko (the head of the Narynkol’-Charyn area) was stationed at the fair, partly to ‘quickly and energetically restore order’ in the region,Footnote 126 and partly to shepherd several thousand visiting traders down to the town of Przheval’sk (present-day Karakol).Footnote 127 Kravchenko, moreover, had amassed a considerable amount of cattle, camels, and horses that had been confiscated from herders in the western side of the valley during violent confrontations with troops in early August.Footnote 128 The June arrests, compounded by the violent confiscations and the presence of an entire infantry company and fifty Cossacks at the fair itself,Footnote 129 must have further intensified the connection between the market and the ever-more restrictive and now brutal exercise of imperial power. Thus the increasingly ‘volatile sociabilities’ at this marginal hub ignited to transform a site formerly characterized by exchange and interconnection into a place of extreme violence: in the middle of August, all of the stalls and public buildings were burnt to the ground. The fair fell into abeyance as a result of its physical destruction and the murder or flight of almost all local pastoralists. A year later, in the summer of 1917, reflecting on the previous year’s ‘disorder’, officials in Semirech’e’s capital Vernyi suggested that there was every reason to think that, in time, the fair would be revived, given the valley’s ‘extremely favourable conditions for the pasture of livestock’.Footnote 130 This would prove partially true. The fair was briefly resurrected under Soviet rule in the mid-1920s, but this marked a rapidly closing window in which pastoralists’ lives and land were comparatively free from the state’s impositions.Footnote 131
Although at first sight Karkara appears an elusive subject, piecing together this remarkable history underscores the importance of seemingly out-of-the-way rural sites in broader imperial and trans-imperial trade circuits; in the evolution of early twentieth-century global capitalism; and in the imbrications of imperial power and economic exchange. The Karkara valley was an instrumental part of a richly diverse and geographically vast commodity network that stretched into the northern steppes, Siberia, China, and beyond. While, on the one hand, iarmarki were in general decline in this period, they still have very much to reveal about modern economic practices as under-researched moments of convergence when overlapping circuits of mobility, commerce, capital, and political power intersected and became visible. Given this, they can help us to recover economic networks that spanned vast distances and were replete with profoundly place-specific values, practices, and social relations. More fundamentally, examining Karkara is one way – however incomplete – to write about pastoralist lifeways, and to reveal – however partially – the often invisible contributions that pastoralists made to the interdependencies that connected regions and empires in the modern world economy. Getting to grips with this history necessitates an understanding of the intimate relationships between the fair and its ecological–temporal architectures: consideration of animals, seasonality, geology, terrain, and climate which reveal multiple layers of human/non-human interdependency. Explored this way, the seeming ephemerality of the fair – and of local pastoralists – is turned on its head, becoming a marker not of transience, but of deep roots in time and place.
Delving into this history reveals more than the myriad complex interdependencies of the valley’s economy. As Tsing reminds us, encounters across difference at moments of socio-economic interaction were very often ‘awkward, unequal [and] unstable’,Footnote 132 and as pastoralists, traders, and officials mingled in the valley from the 1890s onwards, the presence of the imperial state began to shift the equilibrium at Karkara. Incrementally, officials attempted to rearrange social relations and to make economic exchange dependent on engagement with state structures via the payment of charges, the inspection of cattle, and checks on movement. This reflected both the priority of extending political power into rural borderlands of the Russian empire and the dictates of imperial capitalism in the age of the first globalization, chiefly the needs of metropolitan meat markets and of agricultural settlement from west to east. In turn, this powerfully illuminates how marginal hubs such as Karkara were also sites of scalar discord. Flexibility and diversity lay at the heart of pastoralist strategies to live with uncertainty in daily life,Footnote 133 yet officials’ activities served to reduce, compress, obstruct, and sometimes erase precisely these locally specific forms of exchange, mobility, and socio-ecological relations. The valley’s incorporation into the economic and political structures of empire was however partial at best. Long-standing trading relations, and the people and animals who composed them, were not entirely reconstituted, although they did fall prey to increasing regulation. It is arguably precisely at moments such as this, when dissonances are created between different scales of action but are not yet fully resolved, that we see the clearest evidence of how the frictions generated by transformations in human–nature relations could, as at Karkara, result in dramatic moments of volatility, confrontation, and conflict.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the European Research Council as part of the ‘Land Limits’ project (grant agreement no. 101117105). My thanks in particular to Alun Thomas and Katja Bruisch for their extremely informed reading of a previous draft of this article; to members of the Russian Ecospheres research network for their generous and enthusiastic engagement with this research; and to the three anonymous peer reviewers for their invaluable support and suggestions.
Financial support
This work was supported by the European Research Council as part of the ‘Land Limits’ project(grant agreement no. 101117105).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Jennifer Keating is Associate Professor of History at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is a historian of late imperial and early Soviet northern Eurasia, focusing in particular on the environmental history of the Russian empire in Central Asia. Her research interests lie in tracing the role that Eurasian ecologies played in the making and breaking of empire. Current projects include research into pastoral societies and economies in eastern Central Asia, and a broader project that explores the relationship between population increase and environmental change across the territory of the former Russian empire.
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