Seeds of the Settler Colony
How Peasant and Kazakh Knowledge, Environment, and Bureaucracy Shaped Steppe Agronomy in the Late Russian Empire
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4026085 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John B Seitz (0000-0002-8470-9417, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 531-554 |
| Publication date | 2024-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Technology and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tech.2024.a926314 |
| PMID | 38766960 |
| OpenAlex | W4396781945 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
At the turn of the twentieth century, Russian imperial officials hoped to transform the Kazakh Steppe from a zone of pastoral nomadism into a zone of sedentary grain farms. They planned to accomplish this transformation by importing peasants from European Russia and settling them in the steppe along with advanced scientific agricultural practices, equipment, and infrastructure. It was a project that linked steppe settlement and the Russian Empire to a global story of settler colonialism, science, and technology in the first decades of the twentieth century. An examination of this project through the lens of the expansion of grain farming reveals that the changes it wrought were not solely due to European science and technology but were contingent, dependent on local knowledge, the vagaries of climate, and adaptation to the realities of the steppe environment
Agriculture · Archaeology · Bureaucracy · Business · Colonialism · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Geography · Kazakh · Peasant · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance) · Steppe · History · Law · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History
| Citations per year | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |