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This lecture discusses some preliminary observations on the early cultural relationship between China and Central Asia in the light of the most recent archaeological discoveries from Northwest China. It considers three main issues: the role of outside influences in the beginnings and early development of bronze metallurgy in China, the shift to the ‘Steppe Road’, and the two-way traffic of cultural influence along the prehistoric ‘Silk Road’. The lecture also tries to show that early cultural interaction between China and Central Asia was the crucial drive for the growth of civilisations in both regions.

Through a reading of nineteenth-century Persian natural histories and travel narratives about the Eurasian steppe from eastern Iran to western China, this chapter diverges from prevailing empire-centered analyses of conquest to examine frontier exchanges and interconnections between the pastoral and the imperial. In the late sixteenth century, the Oxus River changed course, leading to the expansion of the sandy steppes of the Qara Qum or “Black Sands” Desert—the arid desert between the Caspian Sea and the Oxus River. As the river changed course, no longer reaching the Caspian, Turkmen pastoralists found new possibilities in the expanding arid steppes of the Qara Qum, forging a powerful and wide-reaching equestrian network in the Eurasian steppe. In the desert, Turkmen pastoralists domesticated wild horses and the swift Akhal Tekke breed, and gained control of the oases. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Turkmen thus carved out a loose trading and raiding confederation built on the power and speed of horses capable of making seemingly impossible journeys through the steppes. This pastoral power and equestrianism of the Turkmen frontier determined the boundaries of early modern Eurasian empires.

The Stories of the Roman Empire and the Mayans are well known and have fascinated generations of scholars, artists, storytellers, and his­tory enthusiasts. Less familiar are the ways in which the changing climate contributed to the rise and fall of these civilizations, and of the Anasazi, among others in North America. This chapter examines the fates of differ­ent societies in three climatic periods: the warm Classical Optimum (300 B.C.E. to 350 C.E.), cooler conditions in the Dark Ages (500 C.E. to 800 C.E.), and drought in the Americas (950 C.E. to 1250 C.E.). Recent gains in the reach and resolution of paleoclimatology have enabled more detailed reconstruction of climate and health relationships. Beginning around 300 B.C.E., Europe and the Mediterranean experienced a prolonged period of warm and stable climate—often termed the Roman Warm. Historian John L. Brooke has labeled the ensuing “remarkable” 600 to 800 years of benevolent climate conditions the Classical Optimum, and he suggests that the effects were global. A positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) pushed warm winds west towards Scandinavia, glaciers retreated, and the Mediterranean settled into its characteristic pattern of dry summers and winter rainfall. In the wake of the spread of farming and rising fertil­ity rates, the estimated global population was approaching 200 million. Cities were becoming larger and grander, trade routes were extending, and armies and their iron weaponry were ranging further afield. So too were various infectious agents, many of them beneficiaries of the new and intensifying transcontinental contacts among China, Rome, South Asia, the Middle East, and North and East Africa. During this period, the Mediterranean sustained “the deepest land­scape transformation in antiquity.” Scattered populations increased and coalesced into forts and cities, supported by thousands of new farms. By around 300 C.E., however, the Classical Optimum began to wane. Ice- melt events cooled northern Europe, and by 500 C.E. the strong NAO reversed, bringing a deep cold. The shifting climatic con­ditions placed enormous pressure on the civilizations that had trans­formed their socio- ecological systems during conditions more favourable to agricultural productivity and human health.

This chapter examines the state of tsarist knowledge by the mid-1860s and compares it with administrative reform as actually practiced on the Kazak steppe. To this end, the chapter analyzes the intellectual world in which the Steppe Commission operated. The Steppe Commission was formed to collect as much information about the Kazak steppe as possible, to be used in the formulation of a new governing statute. The chapter also considers the role played by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO) in the Russian Empire's apparatus of knowledge production; the question of whether the Kazak steppe should permanently remain a borderland apart or could ultimately progress to grazhdanstvennost', or “civil order”; the knowledge potential reformers had with respect to Islam in the region; and the Provisional Statute of 1868.

This chapter discusses how Muscovite “imperialism” on the Pontic Steppe differed from the colonial empire building of the early modern west European states. First, Russian expansion and colonialism before 1800 in the south and east was largely inspired by the desire to neutralize or remove any perceived or real threat by managing it, absorbing it, or pushing it further away. Thus the locales of early Russian “imperialism” were always in an adjacent (not some distant maritime) theater, and any “colonies” acquired were in the immediate proximity of the “imperial metropolis.” Second, unlike the situation in the Americas and most cases elsewhere, all the rival claimants to power on the Pontic Steppe after 1480 had originally arrived from elsewhere. All therefore were “settler” (rather than “indigenous”) societies, and by that date all shared a history of more than two centuries of interaction. Lacking the military power to secure their extensive steppe frontiers, Moscow's rulers were forced to resort to the traditional modes of steppe diplomacy and elite interaction with its treaties and alliances, buttressed by sacred oaths, acts of gift giving, exchanges of hostages, and, on occasion, dynastic marriages. Thanks to these traditions and to the introduction of the pomestie form of landholding, Moscow gradually absorbed as vassals the elites of new lands acquired before 1680 and then integrated them into the Russian upper class or gentry.

This chapter examines the Russian empire’s expansion east and south into Siberia and the steppe in the eighteenth century. Regarding the conquest of Siberia, it explores the role of Cossacks, the violence of the conquest and continued treatment of native peoples, and the in-migration of East Slavs. It surveys Russian in-migration and increasing control over the native peoples of the Middle Volga and Bashkiria, focusing on the punitive Orenburg expeditions and the creation of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly as an institution for Moscow to interact with and control its Muslim subjects. The chapter details the gradual destruction of autonomies of previous “imperial intermediaries” from the mid-eighteenth century, with the political absorption, reform, or even destruction of such groups as the Ukrainian, Zaporozhian, Don, and Ural Cossacks.