-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Devin DeWeese, Kwangmin Kim. Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1653–1654, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy245
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Borderland Capitalism, Kwangmin Kim’s study of Eastern Turkistan under Qing rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a mixed bag of interesting, original, and often insightful argumentation about economic developments in the region, based on newly sifted evidence from a wide range of Manchu and Chinese sources, and questionable claims and assumptions about the social dimensions of the region’s history that are perhaps in part sustainable, but are not here adequately sustained through the author’s use of other sources.
The book’s basic argument is that between the conquest of Eastern Turkistan in 1759 and the temporary collapse of Qing rule there in 1864, the Qing Empire ruled the region with the collaboration of local elites, known by the Turkic title beg, whose economic interests, focused on restructuring and controlling commercial agriculture and trade, were furthered by the Qing military presence in the region’s oasis towns and by the integration of the region’s economy into the wider world of Chinese, and indeed global, markets. The capitalistic development of the regional economy, fostered by this Qing-beg alliance, in turn generated increasing numbers of impoverished and landless “economic refugees” who fled into the mountains to the south, west, and north of the Tarim Basin. There, beyond the easy reach of Qing forces, they became at first troublesome and then deadly adversaries of Qing-beg rule, initially by engaging in brigandage targeted at merchant caravans, and more seriously by swelling the ranks of the followers of the khwājas (scions of the Sufi lineages that had wielded considerable influence in Eastern Turkistan down to the Qing conquest).
